NCR 3550 Digital Library Was Re: System Pro WAS RE: Compaq Smart Array 3200 Controller as a SCSI Controller
Chris Zach
cz at alembic.crystel.com
Tue Jul 21 12:00:56 CDT 2020
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
> >
>
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