Ridge 32/330 up and running!
Josh Dersch
derschjo at gmail.com
Sun Mar 29 00:16:57 CDT 2015
Hey all --
Last summer I picked up a Ridge 32/330 that became available locally.
This is a fairly obscure early RISC machine intended to be a competitor
to the VAX, it uses a 32-bit CPU at 12.5Mhz built from discrete
components (spanning three large PCBs). Mine's outfitted with 8mb of
ECC memory, Pertec, SMD and SCSI QIC controllers, and Ethernet.
You can see some pictures of this beast at:
https://plus.google.com/117997069161125071032/posts/JtsR3BokUxp?pid=6063976811386454738&oid=117997069161125071032
I got it running late last year after rebuilding the QIC tape drive and
dealing with some intermittent failures due to a couple of low-quality
DIP sockets. I now have a set of dedicated 20A circuits installed in my
basement so I can run it for longer periods of time without worrying
about burning my house down, so I'll be running it for the next couple
of weeks just for fun to keep the basement warm and run up my electrical
bill :).
It's currently running RX/V 1.1 (Ridge's UNIX variant) and it's on the
Internet (indirectly, since exposing a 25-year old UNIX directly to the
'net seems like a bad idea). I thought maybe some people here might be
interested in checking it out since it's pretty obscure, if you want an
account to play around, drop me a line and I can hook you up. I don't
know of any other Ridge machines out there (running or not) -- if you
have one let me know, there's very little information out there on these
things.
I'll add that I'm looking for an external SMD cabinet and cabling so
that I can image the original SMD disk that was in the Ridge when I got
it; it looks like it contains a valid partition table, but it will not
boot. I didn't want to wipe it so the Ridge is currently running off of
a spare drive -- I'd like to hook it up externally to dump an image from
the running RX/V system. If anyone has one to loan (preferably within
driving distance of Seattle) let me know.
Once that's done, it's time to figure out how to get the Eagle that came
with it running again...
And a huge thanks to Al Kossow for archiving the OS media that's on
Bitsavers, without which this machine would be a very large boat anchor
taking up many cubic feet in my basement. (If anyone has any media or
docs for this that aren't on Bitsavers, let me know -- I'm in particular
looking for an ROS distribution on QIC media...)
- Josh
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