On 2007-11-26, Jon Elson wrote:
DoN. Nichols wrote:
Jon ELson wrote:
My VAX just died this year, after 20 years of operation, and a
number of upgrades. It is also mighty far out of date, 0.9
MIPS, 4 MB of memory.
I have a friend who might have been able to sell you the parts
to get it running again. But he strips machines and sells parts to
dealers, so the prices would probably not be too friendly. :-)
Either the hard drive or the 3rd party controller has died, or
the drive cables got a bad connection. This was a 1 GB 8" hard
drive I literally pulled out of the dumpster and was astounded
it worked for 5+ years.
Was this a genuine DEC drive, or a third-party drive? I used to
work with 1GB 8" drives with SMD format cables from the controller cards
on Solbourne rack-mount systems running variants of SunOs 4.1.X at the
time. They shut down computer making about the time of the move to
Solaris, though I still have a couple of Solbourne desktop machines,
which were faster than the SS-2s of the same period. They are now
retired, as newer machines are so *much* faster. :-) Unfortunately, the
1GB SMB 8" drives moved into the classified area and were thus
"contaminated" with classified data, so they could never be thrown out
and put to private use. Instead, if they ever get fully retired, they
need to be slagged or otherwise destroyed.
My first v7 unix system wound up running on Fujitsu M2312K
drives, 8", and 84 MB with the SMD interface. Of course, that system is
also fully retired by now -- but I learned a lot from it. :-)
I just haven't had the need to get into
it to try to get it running again. I was in the process of
pulling the files off it. Some are for historical interest,
some are daily environmental data that is only of a little use.
I have much of the data on mag tapes, but don't have a tape
drive hooked to the PC. I have a Pertec formatter to SCSI
adaptor that might work for that. Again, haven't gotten around
to fooling with it.
So the 8" drive was SCSI, not SMD?
Out of curiosity -- were you running VMS or a unix on the VAX?
VMS. I was a card-carrying Unix hater for years. I tried out
Unix-derived systems starting in 1976, and was supremely
unimpressed, time after time.
While I took to unix very happily -- through the OS-9 path.
I've never used VMS, but the flavor of the commands which I have seen
(and the ftp format needed to get things from the original Simtel-20,
which was a DecSystem 20, IIRC) kept me convinced that I would not like
it. :-)
I cloned a National Semi 32016
system that I talked a department at work to buy, running Genix,
and used it for a while.
Hmm ... I've got a couple of Tektronix 6130s -- 32016 based,
with a BSD 4.2 flavor of unix.
(My clone had slow memory on it that
made it quite a bit worse than the bought machine.) It was
spectacularly slow, but it worked for some of the stuff I was
doing. I ran it for a year, I guess, back in the mid 80's. I
tried to write a printer driver for it for my salvaged Versatec
electrostatic printers, and it worked OK in character mode, but
it was WAY too slow in graphics (raster) mode, and took 10
minutes or something per page. I just didn't have the knowledge
to hack a driver properly, I think it was allocating and freeing
storage one byte at a time for the print FIFO.
Hmm ... SunOs 4.1.x came with a Versatec driver as one of the
standard ones. I just never had the printer to use with it. :-) (And I
did write to a Versatec from a CDC 6600 long ago, writing some 3D view
graphics files -- and I was not impressed with the quality -- just the
length of plot which could come out of it. :-)
Then, finally, Linux came along, and while it still had the
taint of C and unix commands, which grew like topsy in typical
hacker form, a lot of improvements have been made.
I've never really seen a linux that I like. I have been really
happy with both the old SunOs 4.1.x (BSD flavored) and the later
versions of Solaris -- especially Solaris 10, which you can download for
free from Sun's site. I also like OpenBSD for systems which are going
to be exposed to the outside net, though less so for workstations. They
make great firewalls, however -- and on just about any platform you have
around. :-)
This is the
first Unix-derived system I used that ran X, maybe that is the
difference.
Well ... most of my earlier unix machines had no GUI, or in the
case of the AT&T Unix-PC/7300/3B1, there was a GUI, but a rather klugey
one. The first X11 that I used was on the Sun 2/120, and on from there
continuing.
Or, maybe it is the first system that I made the
move to write in C, rather than trying to use historical
programming languages like FORTRAN and Pascal with poorly-done
translators or hobby-level compilers.
My first serious work in C was on OS-9, which did have a real C
compiler, unlike the Tiny C variants on the DOS-68 systems. By the time
I got my v7 unix box I was quite at home with C.
(Metalworking content:
The way I got dragged into Linux was through the EMC project
and I got on board as the second outside user (outside NIST,
that is) in 1997. I had it running my Bridgeport in 1998.
Maybe it was having a real, complete, running project on Linux
that got me inside, and learning how to compile, use make,
emacs, Tk/Tcl, and etc.) Linux has come a long way in 10 years,
too!
O.K. You got into EMC rather early allright. Are you using the
Servo-to-go card and servos, or are you using steppers?
Enjoy,
DoN.
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