The collected works of ClassicHasClass - Page 1

After some time enjoying the Nekochan Wiki, I suppose it's time I actually made a forum account. I'm mostly a PowerPC nerd (recovering AIX ex-sysadmin running my home server off a POWER6, still using a quad G5, typing this post in my internal build of TenFourFox 15), but I have a serious soft spot for the Indy because I remember lusting after it in college and got to actually use one as my desk workstation as an undergraduate at the Salk Institute one summer. Naturally, I took my picture with an IndyCam (still on my personal home page) and played a lot of DOOM and screwed around with this Internet thing and at times actually used it for visualization and real work, even though we didn't have the stereo glasses. However, they were primarily an Xterm and OSF/1 shop in those days, if anyone here remembers that. I also particularly collect weird workstations: I have a Solbourne S3000 (and the case), a BeBox/133, and just finished restoring an HP 9000/350. And tons of beige Mac and 8-bit Commodore gear around here as well.

I picked up a low-end Indy (I mean low: original 100MHz R4K, 8-bit XL, 32MB RAM) from a fellow collector. It came with the Indy, IRIX 6.5 and .20 overlay, keyboard (sadly busted), mousepad, the Indy zippered duffel case, and an Indy Presenter (but no cable! ARGH!). It boots great and works well, but my monitor doesn't know how to ignore SoG even though I have a real SGI 13w3->VGA converter (so I get that aggravating tint), and it's a bit pokey, so I'm waiting for an R4600SC and 24-bit XL and more RAM I got at a very nice price, plus an external sync separator so I can enjoy 24-bit colour without having to have the green gamma cranked down. Getting back into IRIX makes me realize how much I missed it and now I'm seriously tempted to pick up an O2 or an Octane so the Indy has some company.

I should post pictures of the office and the home server room for yuks.

Anyway, nice to join the board and if anyone has any leads on a Presenter cable, I'd sure love to get it working.

The suspicion is that Software Update has been disabled for all versions of OS X prior to 10.4; 10.2 doesn't work either anymore, but 10.4 still does at least for now. You can still fetch the updates manually, but given that Apple has expunged much of their pre-OS X software, who knows for how long. I've started making image dumps of my 10.4 systems so that I don't have to rely on Software Update anymore if they need to be rebuilt.

Er, yes. Good thing it's actually getting a R4 4 00SC.



Yes indeed. I'll probably look at getting some of the excellent Nekoware stuff on it next. Although my daily driver will still be the Power Macs, it'll be good to have another decent workstation, and I'll probably start saving my pennies for an Octane.

On my AIX 6.1 system, there is no /usr/dt/palettes, just appconfig/. What version of AIX is this? I have a 4.1 system around here also, but it isn't usually powered up.

I already have them all downloaded anyway. The problem is applying them in order, and it's a slow process, so I'd rather just blast a disk image back.

Sadly, I don't think "kids today" (get off my lawn) are as interested in programming as my generation was. My first computer was a Tomy Tutor, and the first thing I did with it was learn BASIC. My second computer was a C64, and the first thing I did with it was learn BASIC. I then went on to learn assembly language, crack software (um, for archival purposes), write my own games, ...

I still have a C128DCR on my desk, next to my Power Mac G5. Works great, schleps floppy images to and from the Mac with a ZoomFloppy USB-IEC board.

Nowadays computers are engineered for consumption and people are content to think of them as black boxes, and the industry encourages it, and that's sad.

I like CDE a lot, but that's mostly from working on commercial Unix so long. Glad to see it finally become an option other places.

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.

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

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.

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?

I have to say, as a Power Mac aficionado, the iMac G5 was not my favourite. It was more reliable than the water-cooled G5s (the quad notwithstanding) but it gets hot and low end iMac G5s aren't as much faster than the upper end (and much more interesting) Luxo G4s.

If I had to have a G5, it would either be a fast air-cooled (like the dual 2.3), or the quad (which I have and use daily).

If I had to have an iMac, I'd want a G4 (which this message is being typed on).

I don't hate the iMac G5, but it's not one I consider particularly a good iMac or a good G5, and it's not interesting enough to be collectable.

My HP 9000/350 is sad to see m68k-hp-hpux dropped. Actually, no, it's laughing maniacally because VI FOREVER.

#scnr

So why an LC (Performa) 630, particularly?

I have to confess that it is not one of my especially favourite Macs (there are worse ones, but there are many better ones).

Since this thread got dusted off, I'll throw in:

2x HP C8000, HP-UX 11i v1 (though one is mostly spare parts for the other, which is the one I actually use)
HP 9000/350 with 670H hard disk, 9.0 (I think), in the big metal tower enclosure with the hernia megapixel monitor

Toying with getting a small DEC Alpha server to run VMS. Recommendations solicited. Small is the key word.

Yes, I like the LC475/Q605 a lot. I ran NetBSD on one for many years, with a full '040, of course.

Now that's hardcore beige Mac action. I'm "just" on a quad G5 most of the time (though I'm typing this on a Luxo G4, and my laptop is the last of the iBooken).

Though, with a 6500 logic board, a L2-slot G3 should be a nice upgrade for that. My TAM in my bedroom has a 500MHz G3.

Right now the last of my 68K "UniMacs" is thule, a long-lived Macintosh IIci, which has run NetBSD since 1999 almost continuously. It is still in operation and does internal DNS and AppleTalk filesharing. It works fine and I have no reason to scrap it, so it just stays humming along in the server room in my house.

Though I recently got a Q800 and chipped it to 40MHz, which makes it really nice in A/UX ...

I appreciate it, but I went for the VAXstation someone here was offering. Not an Alpha, but still a nice system to run VMS on.

She just loves / my big ten inch / record of her favourite blues!~~ - Aerosmith

I'm done with the Apple treadmill. My Galaxy Nexus does what I need.

10.4.11. I need Photoshop and Final Cut, so Linux is out, and I still use some Classic apps and I hate the colour and gamma changes in 10.5. So Tiger forever.

The terminal state of a market is that someone "wins" (and, understandably, then tries to keep on winning). Anti-trust regulation is not what it used to be.

Apple has not been kind to their pro users, no, but I use FCX HD, so I'm not quite that advanced.

Looks like Myst? Not sure.

Yep.

I have a filmmaker buddy who is concerned about Apple as a pro company. He doesn't like 10.8 (or, for that matter, 10.7), doesn't like what they're doing to Final Cut, and worries about the future of the Mac Pro. I see him jumping to a Linux farm in the next two or three years if Apple doesn't come through with a better professional roadmap.

10.6 is the last version of OS X I think I'll ever use. I'm just not happy with Apple anymore.

... to do what? I'm typing this on an iBook G4 running TenFourFox. It does what I need it to, and they're cheap to maintain and replace. There are some Linux distros that run very well on them if you don't want OS X.

That said, I would certainly like a more modern non-x86 laptop, but it suffices.

Don't look at me: I bought my quad G5 new, which is a much more practical RISC workstation than, say, the G5 or POWER4-based IntelliStations (though largely because AIX 5L and up aren't good workstation OSes). Someone on 68KMLA pointed out the G5 was woefully undercached compared to the POWER4s it was descended from, and I certainly think that's true, but I did my part. Short of buying a Tezro, of course ...

The main reason I didn't go SPARC was my large investment in Apple software, and I didn't dig Solaris. I dig it even less now that they're Snoracle.

@berg on ADN found a page showing some of the boards. Ceramic surface mount, gold contacts, ... !

http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/milboards.html

Odd. The ASMI in my POWER6 stays plugged in all the time, but I only ever access it over SSL.

I speak from experience that IBM will not talk to single end users: they want to sell you contracts, not products. I went around and around with a salesdroid about getting (at that time) AIX 6 and 7 media for my private POWER6. Eventually I gave up and bought AIX 6 off eBay. I'll upgrade it to 7 later.

Amusingly, now that I work for a large governmental agency with an IBM contract, I was in the (at that time) CIO's office and the IBM salesdroid was there, who responded with flawlessly synthesized faux horror to my story and gave me his card and said to call him anytime I needed parts (and made sure that the CIO heard every word). And I intend to hold him to that!

That aside, this is probably the best server I've ever owned (it ought to be, given how much I paid for it). So it's worth the headache to get good hardware. Just be prepared to do a lot of your own legwork.

Sawtooths (I hope that isn't a Yikes!) are pretty solid machines. My fileserver is a Sawtooth with an FW800 card connected to a RAID. It also has a ZIP drive for the once a decade I encounter a ZIP disk I want to investigate.

Yeah, the Yikes! are not too good (they earn their name from the video architecture, but that heatsink sounds absolutely primitive). However, it sure sounds like you might have a problem on the logic board as well.