NCR 3550 Digital Library Was Re: System Pro WAS RE: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller

[Patrick Finnegan]

I (via Purdue surplus) had some NCR Worldmark 5500's (5 refrigerator sized
cabinets each with two MCA bus mulit-processor Pentium Pro systems, and a
total of 4TB of storage, back when that was about 1000 disks). I still have
the mutli-cpu Pentium box that was the management system for that, but it
hasn't been powered up in a long time.

On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 1:01 PM Chris Zach via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

> That was it: MP-RAS. It was neat, kind of good, but to be honest Windows
> NT 3.51 and 4.0 ran very well on it.
>
> Just weighed a literal ton. For all I know it's still in the basement of
> their Dupont Center office (now long closed)
>
> C
>
> On 7/21/2020 11:50 AM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
> > Wow, would love to have a machine like that.  The “weird unix” was
> > probably MP-RAS which was NCR’s SysVr4.  NCR was selling massive x86 MCA
> > systems for Terradata setups in the early ‘90s.
> >
> > On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 8:54 AM Chris Zach via cctalk
> > <cctalk at classiccmp.org <mailto:cctalk at classiccmp.org>> wrote:
> >
> >     Now in terms of the most MANLY system I worked on, that would be the
> >     NCR3550 we had at the IEEE Computer Society. When I arrived in 1993
> it
> >     had been donated, but was doing nothing with 4 486 CPUs in it and a
> >     weird copy of AT&T unix. I took one look at the 256 bit interleaved
> >     memory architecture the 3 levels of cache with affinity, the infinite
> >     amount of space for disks, and the dual micro-channel busses and
> >     fell in
> >     *love*
> >
> >     We talked to NCR, upgraded it to 512mb memory, 8 Pentium Pro/200
> CPUs,
> >     and dual Microchannel busses with FDDI and Ethernet interfaces.
> Loaded
> >     it with disks, installed Windows NT 4.0 on it, and turned it into
> >     TALOS,
> >     the main server for the IEEE Computer Society's Digital Library
> >     (which I
> >     built).
> >
> >     Partnered with Anderson and Netscape to multi-thread commerce server
> >     (SSL), built an E-account system in Lotus Domino/Notes, and loaded up
> >     all of our SGML with an SGML to HTML converter (Dynaweb) and a custom
> >     tool that could convert Tek math to GIFs on the fly. That process
> could
> >     take advantage of all 8 CPUs and render complex math articles in
> >     real time.
> >
> >     Also did e-commerce for awhile with online credit card processing for
> >     memberships and conferences (SuperComputing/95 was the first
> conference
> >     to do on-line credit cards, I built that too because I was sick and
> >     tired of keying in the cards myself. Laziness is next to godliness)
> >
> >     It served for years as the CS Digital Library core server with
> >     30,000-40,000 accounts in active use. Man that thing was a truck, I
> >     wish
> >     I knew what had happened to it.
> >
> >     And to think, it all started with the computer room ceiling
> collapsing
> >     from all the RS232 cables from the Vax and crushing our Sun Sparc 20
> >     web
> >     server that kicked off this whole thing.
> >
> >     I should write a book or an article about that. We did so much that
> was
> >     so... new... and all of that could be forgotten like tears in the
> >     rain....
> >
> >     CZ
> >
> >     On 7/16/2020 11:40 AM, Ali via cctalk wrote:
> >      >>>   Had a full compliment of memory,
> >      >>> max internal disk on the ATA controller,
> >      >>
> >      >> ATA? That long ago?
> >      >>
> >      >> Possible but unusual in a server, I would have thought.
> >      >
> >      > Funny story about that - I just setup a Systempro XL at home to
> >     play with. It is fully decked out w/ dual processor 50MHZ 486s (not
> >     DX2), 512MB of memory, a 4GB SCSI Boot Drive and six 2GB SCSI drives
> >     in RAID 5. The Compaq systems came standard with what Compaq called
> >     the IDA (Intelligent Drive Array). It was IDE based but did not use
> >     standard IDE drives. I think it could do RAID 0, 1, and 3 (or the
> >     equivalents there of). Compaq even had a few iterations of the
> >     controller and cached ones. Interestingly the Systempro XL had a
> >     SCSI 2 controller on the MB mainly used for the tape dive or CD
> >     while the base config came with an IDA 2 controller and could have
> >     up to eight drives. In addition you could install extra IDA
> >     controllers for even more drives or to drive external boxes. Or you
> >     could upgrade to a SCSI array - which is what I have running in my
> >     Systempro XL.
> >      >
> >      >
> >      >>
> >      >> What OS, just out of interest?
> >      >
> >      > Target OS was WinNT 3.1 initially and then 4.0. 2K was also
> >     supported but the machine really was not meant for 2k. You could
> >     also run OS/2, Novell Netware, Compaq DOS, and supposedly there was
> >     even a version of MS LanMan (the full server OS not the client) for
> >     the Systempro that allowed SMP.
> >      >
> >      > -Ali
> >      >
> >
>
>