IBM

Just to resume the original topic (owned machines)

7011-220 rs/6000
7011-250 rs/6000
7046-B50 rs/6000
7043-140 rs/6000(several)
7043-150 rs/6000
9114-275 pSeries (several)
9111-520 pSeries (2)
9406-520 iSeries
9406-600 as/400
9406-S10 as/400
9406-820 iSeries
9406-310 as/400
9401-150 as/400
9406-170 iSeries
7044-270 rs/6000
7025-F50 rs/6000
7006-410 rs/6000
7025-F80 rs/6000
7026-H80 rs/6000
7060-H30 S/390
7060-H30 S/390
3006-88 S/390
9076-SP2 sp2 system
9401-p03 as/400
7009-C10 rs/6000
9347-01 reel tape
9331-01 8" floppy unit
3173-63R ctrl.unit
9348-001 reel tape
3494-AX0 vtl

bunches of storage / laptops / xseries / laptops / switches / routers

IBM hardware.. I've an original ibm safety helmet, sysadmin work is so dangerous sometime (on unix obviously)

Hrm, only recently got in to "collecting" IBMs, and have a few not working ones I need to get rid of, anyway...

PC/AT in not-fully-known condition. (It only had an EGA card when I put it into storage. I didn't have an EGA monitor, nor an ISA VGA card, so I couldn't really test it. Now that I have an ISA VGA card, I need to dig it out.)
PS/2 model 77 - DX2/66, 24 MB RAM, triple-booting PC-DOS 6+Windows 3.1, OS/2 2.0 and OS/2 2.1
PS/2 model 25 - broken, first time I powered it on after getting it, something went *POW* in the power switch area.
PS/2 model 77 - Gets a nasty error code on boot, but this puppy's fully loaded! Original IBM caddy CD-ROM drive, 5.25" floppy drive, two hard drives, 32 MB RAM, network card.
PS/2 model 90 - Gets a nasty error code on boot
PS/ValuePoint 486 - DX4/100 upgrade, 16 MB RAM, bad hard drive.
PC300PL
PC350
One more Pentium-era desktop I'm forgetting

And two of the crown jewels of my collection:
ThinkPad 820 - only 16 MB RAM, bad CD-ROM drive, no battery, presently running NT 4.0 until I get around to getting AIX on it. With official PCMCIA IBM CreditCard Network card that works in Windows NT 4.0. The 16-bit Windows 3.1 version of IE 5 works just fine in NT 4.0/PPC.
IBM PC Power Series 850 - 32 (or is it 64?) MB RAM, one of the funky "all in the tray" CD-ROM drives, bad floppy drive, network card. It had been running NT 4.0, but I tried to load OS/2 PPC on it, and messed up the boot loader. Haven't gotten around to reloading the boot loader.

And a "Think" Pad. (very small wirebound paper notebook handed out at a tradeshow many years ago that said "THINK" on the cover. Not quite up to the fancy leather-bound notebooks of old, but funny nonetheless.)

IBM hardware.. I've an original ibm safety helmet, sysadmin work is so dangerous sometime (on unix obviously)

Ha ha, awesome! Looks like you're sporting a genuine IBM lanyard too. Can't speak to the provenance of the HW in the background
but a good bit of it looks like it could be Big Blue...

I've got a PS/2 50z and a couple of NetVistas lying around here, and a PC/XT that runs DOS 2.11 off a 5.25 floppy...

eMGee wrote: Oh sure, at a gazillion gigahertz, with tons of cache memories and slurping power, elegant like a super-charged old-timer. (In other words: Let's just not compare instructions per watt, that would be rather painful.)

I find claims such as the above similar to what x86/-64 freaks love to boast, about their ‘bigger, better’ Linux ‘super computers.’

I'm not sure where you're going here or what prejudice you base this on. Clock speed and cache size are major contributors to execution speed. These processors also have 12 functional units, including a vector unit, for very wide superscalar execution. They've dialed up everything that makes up a CPU to the max. What else do you want? Oracle's recent 30 million tpcM submission to the TPC required a cluster with 108 CPU packages. IBM's 10 million tpcM entry had only 24 in a single frame. Your power usage claim is baseless.

Read up on the design of POWER4 though POWER7. It's a LOT more than raw clock speed. Frank Soltis's ("father" of the AS/400) book "Fortress Rochester" has some good insight on the move to POWER4, which unified the Integer RS64 with the Floating Point POWER3. Both of these were "brainiac" processors with many functional units, short pipelines, and low clock speeds. The POWER4 was their first clock speedy processor at the expense of a longer pipeline but these are easier to design and every other CPU maker had been and still is building these so they are easier to market.

Calling POWER7 a "super-charged old timer" is silly. POWER has significantly influenced or introduced: RISC, superscalar architecture, SMT/"hyperthreading", multpackage, multicore, hardware virtualization, eDRAM. IBM wins because they are a tier-1 silicon manufacturer and the techniques used in their design have consistently been borrowed by other manufactures and the lower end.

To each their own.

Ha ha, awesome! Looks like you're sporting a genuine IBM lanyard too. Can't speak to the provenance of the HW in the background but a good bit of it looks like it could be Big Blue...

Hahah you saw good, IBM Total Storage lanyard, and in the backgroud an InfoWindow keyboard

I've got:
AS/400 9402-E02 (os400 v2r3)
iSeries 9401-250 (os400 v5r2)
pSeries 9114-275 (fiber channel boot AIX 5.3/6.1/7.1)

Thinpad X60s, X60 Tablet, X61s with UltraBase

A couple of InfoWindow 5250 terminal, Netvista desktop, Netfinity server, ThinkVision monitor, tape, media..

XenT wrote: Hahah you saw good, IBM Total Storage lanyard, and in the backgroud an InfoWindow keyboard

The Big Blue hardhat definitely wins the prize though! You've gotta crop that into a headshot and put it in as your avatar...

I stuck a maxtor LXT-200 234 megabyte drive into my PS/2 50z in October 2001, I shudder to think about what I must have paid for it:

I also upgraded the RAM to 4 meg. I shudder to think what that expenditure must have been too...

I think I still have the original teensy hard disk it came with, if anyone wants it give me a holler, I think it sports a DOS 6.22
installation...

Oh and the original IBM keyboard is indestructible, it's plugged into my 200 MHz Pentium Pro, running Slackware 13.0, doing duty as the firewall between the Internet and my LAN. Numerous NMB keyboards have bit the dust over the period of time that this keyboard has been performing flawlessly. It's built like a Sherman Tank, from the era before the keyboard industry became comoditized...

vishnu wrote: Oh and the original IBM keyboard is indestructible, it's plugged into my 200 MHz Pentium Pro, running Slackware 13.0, doing duty as the firewall between the Internet and my LAN. Numerous NMB keyboards have bit the dust over the period of time that this keyboard has been performing flawlessly. It's built like a Sherman Tank, from the era before the keyboard industry became comoditized...

Must be a Model M. Quite possibly the best keyboard ever made.

I have an IBM XT (8088) with a 20 MB MFM hard disk and 640 KB of RAM. I plan to test PC/IX in this machine.

I also have an IBM PS/1 with a 486SX @ 20 MHz, 32 MB RAM and 500 MB hard disk. I plan to run Xenix in this machine.

AS/400 9404-E20 V3R2
AS/400 9401-P03 V3R1
AS/400 9401-150 V4R4
AS/400 9406-720 V5R1?
PS/2 55SX (both dead, floppy drive faults)
IBM Thinkpads

I have happily collected several AS/400s, have not powered the 720 yet due to the special power cabling requirements (15A mains), and one of the 150s is sick (showing a SRC 00000003 - short in PSU?), the others work well, managed to get Token Ring network between the E20 and the P03.

A friend has a IBM 3430 tape drive off a System/38 and I understand that adding a SPD 2644 to the E20 and some suitable bus/tag/terminator cables between them and it might work.

https://picasaweb.google.com/1182472902 ... directlink

If anyone has spare bus/tag cables and terminators that are surplus to their needs would be interested in discussing shipping options.

ilukeberry wrote: I have to disagree with you... There is a lot of opensource software being compiled and packaged in .rpms for AIX.. and it's fairly up2date http://www.perzl.org/aix/
Also my 9111-285 is build like a tank and it works very well.. currently the fastest RISC box i own.

Looking to getting back into UNIX workstations and the 285 caught my eye .. and maybe learn AIX as well PCs and Macs are so boring ...

Its down to trying to get a HP c8000 or a IBM 9111-285. How does HP-UX and AIX compare?

Also, how fast the 285 for general use .. eg. using Firefox 3.5/3.6? If you don't mind, trying running this javascript benchmark on your machine:

http://www.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0. ... river.html

Thanks!

thunng8 wrote: Looking to getting back into UNIX workstations and the 285 caught my eye .. and maybe learn AIX as well PCs and Macs are so boring ...

From a hardware standpoint yes, they're all based around the same commodity ASICs, but from a software standpoint they do have some interesting tricks. Definitely common, but that's not always bad.

Its down to trying to get a HP c8000 or a IBM 9111-285. How does HP-UX and AIX compare?

Given the choice of the two I'd go AIX, no questions. HP-UX is pretty plain SysV+Veritas, while AIX still has some neat tricks in it that other systems don't necessarily add (going off of what I've skimmed, as my systems are all old MCA-based so I've not played with 5.3, 6.1 or 7). If you know of a specific reason for you to go HP-UX that may swing things, but otherwise it's not too interesting.

It also doesn't hurt that POWERs are still being produced whereas PA-RISC has been on the dump pile for a few years. If you do go HP-UX I'd recommend looking for a Itanium so you're at least at the current version on current hardware. On the additional bump note there you can try out OpenVMS as well, and get the feel for another OS with some very innovative/well implemented features that may sadly be dying.

SAQ wrote:
Given the choice of the two I'd go AIX, no questions. HP-UX is pretty plain SysV+Veritas, while AIX still has some neat tricks in it that other systems don't necessarily add (going off of what I've skimmed, as my systems are all old MCA-based so I've not played with 5.3, 6.1 or 7). If you know of a specific reason for you to go HP-UX that may swing things, but otherwise it's not too interesting.

It also doesn't hurt that POWERs are still being produced whereas PA-RISC has been on the dump pile for a few years. If you do go HP-UX I'd recommend looking for a Itanium so you're at least at the current version on current hardware. On the additional bump note there you can try out OpenVMS as well, and get the feel for another OS with some very innovative/well implemented features that may sadly be dying.

I ended up getting a c8000. I wanted a IBM 285, but none were listed in Australia and shipping from overseas would've costed a fortune. I'll definitely keep an eye out for a 285 and maybe also get back in SGI as well

You were saying about the 285...?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixel_maso ... 863218653/

I has one !!

Just in case anyone didn't see this on the sun-rescue list today:
there's a whole bunch of brand-new in-box 2-way IntelliStation 285s on eBay UK right now for GBP 150!

Amazing price, I wish I could get one in the US for that much

43p-150 375MHz, 512mb, 2x9gb
630 6c4 2way 1.45ghz, 16gb, 2x36
Moto Powerstack 167mhz, 128mb, 2gb

So I never posted here. My AIX boxen are a 2-way POWER6 Power 520, which is my main server, and an Apple Network Server, running AIX 6.1TLmumble and 4.1.5 respectively. I've thought about getting an old RS/6000 workstation with 3.2.5 to relive the glory days, since I administered a passle of 3.2.5 machines in my previous career.

Other than that, my other real honest-to-Watson hardware is a beat-up old Aptiva which I don't know why I've kept all these years, and a couple of PCjrs which were the only PCs I actually liked because the Peanut was an appealing little machine. I even have the hard case for it.

bluecode wrote:

kev009 wrote: Hardware member, though I do wish I kept the P/390 to throw in an RS/6000.

Curioser and curiouser...what did you mean by this? Can you put an RS/6000 board in a P/390? And what can you do with it?

I believe it is the other way around; you put the 390 board into an RS/6000.

ClassicHasClass wrote: I've thought about getting an old RS/6000 workstation with 3.2.5 to relive the glory days, since I administered a passle of 3.2.5 machines in my previous career.

The glory days? Looks like you've never had to put an AIX 3 machine in an YP network...

No, we weren't a YP/NIS shop. And thank goodness.