HP/DEC/Compaq

Picked up a 712/60 cheap off ebay and it's pretty cool (and very very quiet). Maximum ram is 128MB so I might try to swap 2x16MB sticks to 2x32MB ones in the future but I haven't loaded anything on it yet. It does have the video ram installed which is awesome but I don't know how much it expands the capabilities.

Anyway I took 2 internal shots and have some external ones from the auction

Cool! It looks to be in good shape, too. From the pictures it looks like it didn't come with a hard drive. Are you going to put a drive in it and install HP-UX?

I have a soft spot in my heart for HP 715 and 712 PA-RISC workstations. I spent a lot of time in graduate school on a 715/100 named 'kilovolt' and when I couldn't get that machine I was on a 712/80 named 'penstock.'

I was actually shopping for a 715-series workstation out of nostalgia but after some research I decided to get an Indigo2 instead, even though I never used SGIs that much in school. Wife Acceptance Factor and kids limit how many boxes I can keep around, so I went for something a bit more exotic to represent Unix in our household.

I only have HP-UX 11.11 which would be really slow so I think I'll put NextStep on it instead

My favourite UNIX machine! Its compact and quiet and is quite nice to use when it has the right OS.
Make sure the drive you choose doesn't get too hot, as the 712 is basically passively cooled.
11i runs, but is a bit much for these. I've found 11.00 and 10.20 run nicely on it, so its worth getting a copy.
NeXTSTEP is also really good on this machine. If you are feeling brave then an experimental release of Mach/mklinux
may also run on it.

Before upgrading the 712/60, bear in mind that if you just get a 712/100 instead, then as well as the faster CPU, it can have as much as 192Mb RAM installed. I've also got the quite rare 2nd Ethernet and VGA card in mine

And I just picked up a 735 Apollo and a 735/125. Haven't had a chance to poke around and see what's in them yet.

Those look pretty cool, I found a site with nice pictures, looks like it has HIL which kind of sucks haha. Also this page has some nice pictures of other systems.

Yes, 735 and 755 (same machine in tower case) can only use HP-HIL input devices. And of course serial console if you don't have any.

You also need to check the power supply as many of those found in the old desktop models (720, 730, 735) tend to die of old age and too much dust.

I got new ram sticks so it's at the maximum 128MB and I found a 2GB drive randomly so I was able to install NextStep 3.3 on it.

wow, very cool! I assume you've got the update #3 for the RISCs installed for NS 3.3? I don't know if there was a RISC compiled version of Doom for NS... the version I have is m68k/i486....

One day I've got to spend some 'quality' time with NS 3.3 and port some fun games....

I haven't put any updates on it yet

The 'big' thing fixpack 3 has is all the y2k updates...

I've only installed NS once on my m68k and it's been going fine for years, I've installed it on the x86 stuff a billion times (well ok maybe a few hundred over the years) and I don't recall it being unstable or with any 'major' issues or anything...

It's OK, you just have to make sure to get 100% HCL'd hardware. If you get something "mostly compatible" you'll have trouble.

I wound up going the SPARCstation route because of the trouble, though I suppose if you looked globally/nationally rather than locally it would be easier.