Re: Sharpen your LARTs, n00b alert.
On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 03:17:15PM +0100, Teh Currymonstah wrote:
> Possibly not.. Though I have a few spare hard disks, so may give it a go for
> the craic.
Well if you have the time to play with it, might as well.
> There used to be an x37something emulator in Debian. The font is still
> there, and I can probably get it from one of the archives and build against
> a more modern distro. The physical connection, on the other hand, may be
> problematic. I don't have passwords for the machine, so need to do an IPL
> from an operations console to get whatever system is there up to start with.
> It does make lots of loading-stuff-from-disk noises, and the occasional
> wheeze like the water recycling pumps on an old triple phase steam engine in
> a certain sea-going paddle steamer. So promising. My understanding is that
> it was replaced (with a non-IBM Windows<spit> "server"!!) because IBM
> refused to provide ongoing support, and, until I was mentioned, was heading
> for the dump.
Understandable. :)
> >As far as I can tell they removed that model from sale 12 years ago.
> Yep, that will be the one. One of my much more modern machines then. :-D
Well I guess it might be newer than my Alphas.
> >So even if you have all the needed software and if it works, it will be
> >quite slow (a 262MHz early powerpc design is not going to be fast).
> It will be faster than the Vax. (though only about 50x faster, nothing to
> write home about..)
Well that's not saying much.
> >But if you have all the needed software and licenses for the machine,
> Errm.. The software is on the disk. IBM are considering a "hobbyist
> licence".)
Very nice.
> >and you want to say "I did it", then it seems like it ought to be at
> >least theoretically possible as a toy project.
> That's the one, exactly. Oh, and as a bootp/tftp/installer for the OpenMOSIX
> rack. (just so it pays rent on the floor space..)
Well if you make any progress I would love to hear about it.
--
Len Sorensen
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