Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

Hi.

A friend of mine has just gotten an offer on some Unisys machines. I don't know the specifics but among them are one "CS7402 single domain" and one "dorado 180 dual domain".

So, he and I wonder if these machines can run something useful. He will probably get them without any disks. Can one install linux or any BSD, or does one need SCO Unix with licenses or some such?

/P

oh, and in the deal there is one of these:

http://www.sunstarco.com/Tape%20Drives/ ... 209310.htm

Needless to say, not even I will attempt that, but if you feel like owning the biggest backup on the street, I might be able to hook you up

You could mod it into a sauna cabin

Looks like mips based mainframe. You might be able to run mips arch linux on it, but I have a feeling it wont be worth the trouble...

I've got an old UNISYS PC. It currently runs Slackware 3.0.

Where did you find that information? Our searches tell that they are x86 Xeon machines.

Some random article was like "They are releasing the MIPS based CS7402 mainframe later this year...", it was on google. Could be totally wrong.

There's some traces of 'Xeon' talk here:

http://www.itjungle.com/breaking/bn051903-story02.html

The CS7402 is definitely running on proprietary processors, and your chance of getting Linux on it is pretty much zero. On the other hand, if you got a copy of OS2200 you would have one of the more unique hardware/software environments around. Both these systems support mixed Xeon and Unisys processors, but here's the catch: the Xeons can only run Windows, and the Unisys chips can only run OS2200. No mixing and matching; you're basically getting two computers, a Unisys mainframe and a large Xeon server. You can supposedly do some cool virtualization crap with this, but I don't own one so I can't comment in detail.

The Unisys chips are supposed to be obscenely fast at single-threaded business workloads - these systems would definitely be interesting to have.

Sounds rather like IBM's AS/400s where they added PC network integration by including an internal i386, except for the "obscenely fast" reference.

And the PC cards for almost every early minicomputer, and so on

I've never seen a Unisys mainframe system - could be a rare bit of fun.

Is this what you are talking about...?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_1100/2200_series

its 36bit, and definately not MIPS

Must be a pig when 99.9% of code assumes 8bits per byte.

Does OpenSSL work on 9/18/36 bits?

About the only natural alignment that comes to mind is 512byte sectors, but then they aren't, because that's 512x8/9=455.111....

You mean the 9bit ASCII thing in the wikipedia entry..?

Yeah, but something that originated so long ago is probably running stuff written in some weird Algol or BCPL dialect and it probably doesn't matter.

I found the article where I had read MIPS, I think I can safely call that one a mistake.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/THREE+NEW ... a085406874

I've "touched" only two types of Unisys boxes in my life so far and the first model was a large 19" rack-sized box with what was two i286 processors (or was that MC68020?). Not even worth hauling, so I never got away hauling it.
The second system was more of a cube-shaped deskside machine which ran some odd type of OS that I can't even remember what it was. Someone told me that "thing" had 10's of i386-processors in it, but I never got the chance to take a glimpse inside it to check it out until I switched jobs and the thing was decommishioned.
By that time I had a RS/6000 570F system, so my needs were fulfilled by that time.

You might have some luck with the Dorado 180 according to:
http://developer.novell.com/yes/79394.htm

Googling suggests that the newer ClearPath systems are built around the ES7000 platform which would make Linux support more likely.

-tgc

So I've gotten some more information from the admin who has the machines now. It is a Unisys processor system (later versions had Intel CPU's) descended from UNIVAC 1100/2200 series. It is two machines with multiple CPU's configured in three racks(!) and a metric ton (literally) of disk. The disk will be wiped.

So, given the size, the oddity and lack of licenses for OS2200 (which is the only thing it will run), we will probably skip these machines. I will however try to get a tour and maybe nab a CPU-board for the coolness factor.

Of interest.. is there any m68k cpu's in it? Unisys did the dogey and for quite a while was producing a lot of machines, mostly under the series "Unisys 5000" and some 6000's .. which were Arete (with the little dongle over the second 'e') machines badge engineered (tm) to be Unisys's. They were 1-24x m68k boxes that could be run as big-SMP or lock-stepped in various configurations and ran a pretty vanilla SysVr[3,3.5,4] derivative called ARIX .. again by Arete till Unisys acquired them whole-lot and they were moved into the fold. For the era.. very nicely designed machines. They even had level 2 cache. My old 5000-series 5085 was dual 25Mhz mc68020's with 33mhz m68882's, proper butterfly and m68851 MMU's, 16+16+8mb RAM, and cache I remember oo'ing over being 25ns cycle time and there being 128kb per processor board. Also they were VME backplanes afair. A friend of mine back in perth used to be in posession of a bigger machine that was 8-way 030, but it had a strange series number (I never did keep up on the whole Unisys/Sperry stuff).

Regards,
Al