HP/DEC/Compaq

Picked up a C8000 for a nice price which arrived yesterday. Dual-core 1.1GHz PA-8900, DVD, FireGL-UX graphics and a gig of RAM. Case required little restoration, just some cleaning and a bit of touch-up paint. Beautiful, included the pedestal even. Stuck it under the desk next to my daily-driver quad G5 and my Mac OS 9 MDD G4.

Only trouble is, it doesn't like my USB KVM and the HP-UX install on the hard disk had pieces moved to an NFS server that, of course, no longer exists. So I need to get a mechanical switchbox and then sit down with my stack of 11i v1 MCOE CDs sometime (I have the GTCE also, so that should get something close enough to the TCOE for it to work). I'm not getting rid of the KVM, because it wasn't cheap and it's the only one I own that makes Mac OS 9 happy with a USB scroll wheel.

I have a soft spot for PA-RISC, because I liked the instruction set and I had root to a HP 9000/K250 and a Visualize C3750 back in the day when I was a full-time programmer/DBA. It should go nicely with the HP 9000/350 I already have and recently restored, and works delightfully well.

I don't have a FireGL, but for Visualize-FX pretty much everything you need is on the MCOE.

Are you sure it's a FireGL-UX? That seems odd for the C8000. With the 1.1GHz CPU model, I'd expect it to be a FireGL T2 or X3 (according to this link ). The FireGL X1 was also used on earlier C8000s with slower CPUs, so you might have one of those. Those are all AGP (Pro) cards. The FireGL-UX is a generation older (at least) and 64bit/66MHz PCI instead, and would seem unlikely (if it's even supported) in a C8000.

Not that it really matters.... But you might have much newer/better graphics than you think!

It said just FireGL-UX on the PROM monitor, but you got me thinking -- it certainly should be an AGP card (the card is in the AGP slot) and I don't know why that didn't dawn on me. So I pulled out the card and lo and behold you are correct; it is a FireGL T2. Nice!

I also managed to coax it to boot up to CDE off the b0rk3d HP-UX install, just to see what's on there, and it comes up in 1920x1080 and the KVM *does* work with the mouse. It just wants a console keyboard all to itself, but I have a mechanical solution to that on the way. I'll browse the filesystem this weekend.

FireGL support I'm pretty sure is only on TCOE/MTOE, not basic MCOE (it will work, but it will complain about "unoptimized graphics" or some such). But the GTCE has those drivers.

I have the same T2 card in the same C8000, and it works just fine with MCOE. Just make sure you install the Graphical bundles.

I didn't think the Graphical bundles were in MCOE. What release did you install? Does graphinfo properly identify the card?

I'm not familiar with these workstations, what were they primarily used for, pro/E, catia and similar? or more generally, development work?

The C3750 I used to administer was used by the biology department for (what else?) scientific visualization, I think X-ray crystallography if memory serves.

They were also used in CAD sectors -- for a period of time someone on eBay had an inventory dump of rather thrashed C8000s from General Motors. They even had Cadillac emblems stuck on them.

But HP was ultimately unable to displace the usual suspects (IBM, Sun, SGI, Apple) from their traditional market segments and shut down the line when the classic Un*x workstation market in general faded.

They didn't spend the time building up the backend that SGI did - the Visualize-FX hardware was OK, but HP didn't spend the money and time putting the support stuff in HP-UX that SGI put in IRIX.

So I reset the root password on it and went through the filesystem. It has a more up-to-date version of HP-UX than my 11i v1 2005 CDs, and a CAD/CAM package I haven't figured out yet. It is TCOE with all the fixins', apparently. After I forcibly removed it from NIS, disabled the NFS mounts, fixed the missing parts of /usr and added a new LV for /home, it is now nearly perfect. I'm going to get gcc and Firefox on it next.

The only thing it's missing is an updated tztab. This is ostensibly PHCO 34668, but I can't download this. Does anyone have an updated tztab with the 2007 DST changes?

Following up to myself, managed to make the needed changes to tztab manually.

Solved the KVM problem by inserting a mechanical USB switch between the keyboard and, on A), the keyboard port of the KVM and on B), the USB port of the C8000. CDE is just fine with the mouse on the KVM. So, I switch the keyboard to B) and the KVM to the C8000, boot the C8000 and wait for it to get into CDE. Once it's there, I can "disconnect" the keyboard when I want to switch to another computer by switching to A), and then switching the KVM. The C8000 seems to recognize the keyboard when I go back to it (press B and switch the KVM), just as long as it was the same keyboard in the same port, even if it was "transiently disconnected;" it only needs it to be there continuously for the PROM and boot sequence, which don't support hotplugging. For this the HP-UX 11i USB hotplugging patch was required, which of course it had.

Now to figure out how to get CATIA to start. Anyone messed with this?