The collected works of smj - Page 6

I think the inclusion of BASIC in consumer-focused computers had as much to do with what was available in the '77-'82 timeframe, and the fact that they were creating a new market segment from scratch. You had to include BASIC or something similar because a lot of people expected that $1,200-$600-$300 box to be able to do something when you unpacked it. And looking at buying software, you had to have something useful/interesting available , then not mind paying another $20-100 per title after buying the machine, peripherals, power strip, etc.

I just mean to point out that there were several factors involved in the decision to include a programming language in that era, many of them altruistic and education-oriented I grant you, but it wasn't an intrinsic quality of computers. Non-consumer vendors (DEC, IBM, etc) had very different goals for very different markets and would happily charge you hundreds or thousands for an interpreter, sometimes even when building a machine that others would view as very well suited for the consumer space.

As to unnecessary layers, I'd say that was just the limit of what was possible and a hell-for-leather rush to market. You could certainly look at dBASE or UCSD Pascal and see that if you had the resources, you could still be insulated from the machine.

I think it's great that they've released it, and kudos to zizban for all his hard work!

Uhm, can't actually say I'm all that eager to use it... Every SPARCstation 20 or Ultra {1,2} on my desk got FVWM on it as quickly as possible, back in the day. And I've embraced it once again for use on virtualized machines. But as josehill points out the GNOMEfolk seem to be determined to eliminate themselves from the realm of possible options. And I definitely am grateful to see another option emerging.

[REDACTED]

Wasn't paying attention - you meant 4Dwm itself. "Oh... Nevermind."

Oh, so I guess this is what Shropshire lads were messing about with in the 90s rather than the poetry racket...

That photo is more likely showing the VT525, which used a very similar case as the Multia (if not the same), but was still a terminal. Similar to how the VX51 (?) was an Pentium-based PC in the same case as the VX4 N (?) Alpha. DEC loved to put different products in the same case, look at the Rainbow, Professional 3x0, and DECmate II.

In terms of built-in limitations, one might view the Multia as a worthy successor to the VAXstation 4000/VLC and the VAXstation 2000. Kidding aside, all of these were designed to meet particular niches and price-points, and as a result made fine hobbyist machines as they started to leave service. I've got a MicroVAX 2000 that I'll be hanging onto for as long as possible, just because it really is a marvelous bit of packaging for it's time.

What a strange world you live in. VPN endpoint support as criteria for whether it's a workstation?!? That might determine whether it meets your needs, certainly, but workstation vs. <whatever> is usually determined by the performance envelope versus the current technology limits, not connectivity...

Exactly, the low end of DEC's lineup is the point I'm making. I used a computer lab of VS2000's running ULTRIX and X10 for a class in 1988, so I'm not just looking at the performance from today's perspective, or in comparison to any 16-bit PCs.

I'm grouping these machines together because I believe they were each designed to be low-cost systems using DEC's then-current platforms. Do you not think this was the design brief for these models? Or, what makes you think that the Multia was not intended to be useful as a standalone machine? Certainly it was more useful on a network, but I think that's just as true for the other models.

If you just meant to point out that it was foolish to only officially offer WinNT on the Multia I certainly won't argue!

With just the two machines, you'll probably want to put static entries in /etc/fstab. Assuming the Windows 7 PC will always be available, then yes, you could have it mounted at boot time by the Octane. If you aren't sure about that, include the entry in /etc/fstab with the "noauto" option and you can at least just run "mount /windows" when you want it. You could get fancy with the automounter, but for such a simple setup it probably doesn't make sense.

Check the man page for fstab(5?).
You may also want to read Chapter 7 of the IRIX Admin: Disks and Filesystems guide. When you do, remember to think kind thoughts about SGI in return for them keeping these manuals online for free.

(flapping my arms about wildly) Danger Will Robinson, Danger!!

Oh, I guess he won't get that reference...

So by analyzing the crash dump or checking your crontabs, or whatever passes for a scheduler for your anti-virus and other overnight jobs on XP, what runs just after 2AM every night? (I understand it *can* go a week, but you've implied that sometimes it doesn't make it a week, hence my thinking it must run every night - maybe with a varying workload, like sometimes there are no new virus definitions to scan the disk for...)

Ah yes, that brief window between 1994 and 1996 when being a geek was a liability. Thank goodness that dark period came and went so quickly...

That R. PEDERSEN guy is wildly lucky he took over from R. Norby when he did, or he might've missed out on presenting this new development to prospects in his Eastern sales territory!

Actually, kind of neat. Thanks for sharing.

ESDI and SMD controllers, even the KDA50 (RA-series drives) were all commonly used, but today they might as well be MFM...

However the SCSI cards do pop up from time to time. A quantity of them became available a couple years ago in a group buy (~US$250), and they continue to pop up on eBay ranging from "ouch" to professional reseller prices. Right now there's a Viking card offered for $150 with the necessary bits to turn it into a disk+tape controller (often models were sold that only did one or the other). Genuine DEC KZQSA's are still being offered for $105, but OS support may be limited.

Good point - remember to mind the airflow, and if necessary run it vertically so the hot air will exhaust properly.

I might be thinking of a caution that applied more to the R5k machines, sorry.

Welcome kchris.

I realize this is a long thread, but I'm pretty sure there's a link somewhere in here to the NekoWiki page Using DINA For Network Installation Of IRIX . I think most of what's been discussed here is covered. There's even a link to a thread about running DINA under Hyper-V .

DINA's a godsend but it's quirky, even persnickety. It gets easily confused about what address it has assigned to a machine, sometimes requiring the user to edit some files before you can netboot again. I suspect that when I rebuild the NanoBSD build environment for my Soekris box, it'll be a reasonably quick job to update/migrate DINA onto a current release and clean up that sort of thing. No idea when I'll collect enough round tuits, though...

Nice one, kjaer!


Please leave that self-proclaimed and proud Luddite out of this. There's some very nice Stephenson there too - much better choice...

Are these PS/2 or USB peripherals?

Isn't this part of the push behind Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG)? Not going to do so much for photos per se , but for other graphical elements... (If it isn't obvious, I've not touched SVG yet.)

I dunno - if you were in Europe, that picture of Sebastian Vettel you're using for a forum avatar might do pretty well...

Welcome! I remember getting paid to install and configure Checkpoint Firewall-1 on an AS2100 in late '95 or early '96. Funny, I remember thinking it was enormous but the one on your blog doesn't seem very much bigger than an AS1000... Probably a mental thing, comparing them to the DEC 3000 series.

Reading over your blog... 3.5" floppy drives use their own 34 (?) pin connectors, not the larger IDE cables. Close inspection of the slots on the backplane would probably show if there were enough corrosion or foreign matter to bridge a connection from side to side. I've seen reference to using fine sandpaper wrapped around a credit card to try to clean contacts, but your board looks pretty clean in the photos. I wouldn't worry about it unless you ever noticed corrosion on the card edge fingers of boards when you were cleaning them.

Has anybody in #vms mentioned TOD batteries or NVRAM batteries? I don't recall whether or not such are even part of the AS2100, but worth checking - many machines will misbehave if such batteries are flat.

That's exactly the spirit I was feeling as I flipped through an old MSDN at work looking for NT/Alpha CDs the other week... Though in my case I've had a PWS500 with the ARC / non-SRM BIOS and a broken installation of NT/Alpha, and I seem to be unable to write a floppy to get the BIOS updated...

And creating a Supportfolio account is free!

Cool, and hopefully it will be fine. But if it's New Old Stock (NOS), or a used pull, the built-in battery might be near death or dead. Even if it's relatively new and in good condition, eventually that battery will fail, so you might consider taking a shot at modifying the old part according to this thread and others it links to (or can be found via search) to use an external coin cell battery.

I would agree it's an embarrassment of riches if I hadn't spent $$$ collecting the things over the years. I have a number I'll hang onto, and I just want to show that this one functions properly before trying to find it a new home.

The Mazda RX-8 had a 1.3L rotary in it, produced from 2003 to 2012.

I would gently explain to the wife that she can get her own car if she doesn't like a manual transmission. But then, there may be a reason I'm single...

I prefer owning the car outright to owing money on it, but buying used cars has it's annoyances. Like the repair bills, which can be several grand in a year - easily, depending on the car and the problems. But as Audi won't offer half of what they do export to the US with a manual transmission, I keep paying those repair bills. And getting irritated that I can go to audi.co.uk and configure the A4 Avant with 2.0L TDI, quattro and 6-spd as much as I want, and they still won't offer it here...

+1

JJ has produced great guides for this work. The canonical reference for Sun is the Sun NVRAM/hostid FAQ - but it lacks JJ's excellent illustrations. There's a YouTube video here that Firefox refuses to play for me, hopefully a good supplement.

This particular reply is interesting, as an explanation of why some replacement parts might not work in some machines. As JJ said, "Datasheets and google are your friends."

Whenever I run across the "reader feedback" cards in the back of DEC, Sun, or HP documentation I have a strong urge to fill them out and send them in, just to see what (if anything) happens...

Excellent news on all accounts! Hope you enjoy the VT510.

Niktec (IIRC) makes a PCI card to convert DVI to OpenLDI, and will also retrofit it into your 1600SW, or sell you one with that job already done. Or they did as recently as two years ago, at least...

Well, thank you - I assume you've promoted me from basement dwelling Morlock to server admin...

BTW, I'm reading this rather pointless thread on a machine running PC-BSD. Installation was no worse than a recent Ubuntu - no, it was better, because it was easy to avoid GNOME 3. And guess what - PC-BSD seems to be using my nVIDIA GTX550 Ti just fine, and the controllers on my MSI 990FX motherboard seem well-supported...

And the important files are being served from a nice rackmount machine in another room - above ground - using FreeBSD and ZFS. A combination that makes efficient use of my drives and actively detects and reports any problems long before any data is at risk. And that all depends on good hardware support for the controllers interfacing those drives, so it's got that and "ZFS / containers / jails / VM / clustering whatever crap." All of which have been important features driving the use of Linux and (what's left of) commercial Unix for the past 10 years...


Those vendors got to choose a very small list of "video cards and other hardware" that they would support. And they were paid a lot of money to support that hardware and software, or to pay subcontractors/OEMs to do it. So yes, they supported the hardware they chose to ship reasonably well...

BSD worked as well as the underlying hardware would allow. If you had put BSD on a mid-range Alpha in the 90s, you got mid-range performance. If you put BSD on x86 hardware with shitty IDE controllers and lousy network interfaces in the 90s, you got shitty PC performance - same as Linux did, same as Solaris/x86 did. If you spent more on x86 hardware that didn't suck, you got a good system.

I can't speak to what window manager BSDi shipped, but I would hardly consider it a negative if it did not include CDE...

Uhm, didn't BSDi want $500-995 for a retail license for one machine? Granted we might've wound up with BSDi doing paid-support BSD on par with RedHat doing paid-support Linux, but would it have tempted DEC or IBM to embrace BSD instead of Linux - and thereby lend the significant credibility they did to Linux in the 90s?