An IBM RS/6000 from 1997

[@Conmega1]

So there were two drive cage options for these RS/6000 machines. You are lucky enough to get a SCSI model and not an SSA model. SSA is closer to FC or SATA than SCSI it’s a serial bus. And the external connectors are tiny DE9 style connectors. Not many pins! If it was SSA those drive sleds you have wouldn’t even seat into the drive cage. If it’s an SSA model you can tell externally by finding those weird tiny DE9 connectors on the back side of the machine. But converting SCSI to SSA requires active electronics. Not a passive adapter. They are rare and expensive because most of SSAs life IBM actually manufactured custom drives with built in SSA controllers. I believe only in the very last gasp of SSA did converters get made to convert standard SCSI drives over.

[@clabretro]

Ahh yes that makes complete sense, I was misreading the documentation. Definitely lucky to have a SCSI model!

[@VK2FVAX]

@@clabretro SSA != SCA (SA80/SA160). SSA was a storage area fabric. It's a custom miniature 9 pin 'D' shell. Do a search for 25L5814's for photo's So think drives and entire SSA 19" shelves with 12-48 drives in a mesh with dozens of disk shelves. I adored SSA and still have the official IBM SSA screwdriver for the captive cable lugs. SSA is awesome, don't be afraid but you'll need a disk shelf. Cable them all up. Just accept SSA is awesome and you'll get a few videos of content out of them. SSA is not SCA. You get your wucken ferds puddled a bit there. The tape drive is just a standard 512block one. You can use a lot of others and they'll "just work". Very useful for the 'makesysb' utility where you can IPL in maint mode off a CD-ROM, then makesysb to a tape to save where you're upto for your install and then restore from it. Great for playing "wot-if.. yeah that wasn't a good idea, restore". :) I used it an aweful lot in the 90's with my first RS/6000's at home. Re: AUI.. use a db15 cable. The plastic around the outside should slide and lock the cable in. Not meant for transceiver direct. "Progress code" on the front panel is called "BIST" Built in self test. You can get BIST codes for the system. Opinion: AIX 5.x (maybe 5.3) there would be a good move. It's more modern and gets more of the PCI chipsets. Might not be seeing your disk because it can't talk to the I/O subsystem. Just a thought. :)

[@timballam3675]

​@@clabretro Those SCSI 2/3 to SCA adaptors work fine. Just remember to set the jumpers...

[@noth606]

Yep, was about to type this more or less. SSA was cool stuff, like 20+ yrs ago or so, but not what you'd want now I think, unless you like the orchestral howl of stacks of 9,1Gb drives running and heating your building up and don't care about storage much. I used to have a HACMP 'cluster' running, one box that was similar to this one, and then one RS/6000 m397 with a Power2SC CPU which was what beat Kasparov in chess way back when. Well, a cluster of 6 of them beat him. I don't remember what happened to the 397 at the moment, I *should* have it somewhere I think but the rest of the cluster is long gone due to size and weight. I had that stuff a marriage ago - literally, got married, had a son, got divorced, then early retirement due to heart attack followed by broken back, since I did anything with that stuff. Subbed to see what you do with it. Sitting thinking about those things I have to say a fair bit of it is a tad hazy in my memory but I think you may want AIX 4.3.3 for it rather than 4.3.2 if you can, since 4.3.3 is a "major support release" for the lack of a better way to say it, it is supported by everything under the SUN (couldn't resist). Minor difference really, but binaries for 4.3.3 will be much easier to find and get running without library symlink fiddlery and less of a headache overall I think. I haven't checked but finding disc images shouldn't be hard, they used to be available for download straight from IBM back when I messed with this stuff. Think I even have the original media plus a bunch of additional stuff on CDROM somewhere. Anyway, linked this to a buddy of mine who is also into "big iron" - he has a more or less running microVAX of some sort with VMS I think. By more or less I mean these machines have issues these days where storage and networking is concerned, plus PROM batteries potentially of course - I would strongly suggest to eliminate the battery or batteries of your system before they leak and corrode stuff. There are modern replacement things for them that won't eat your system board if they get cranky, but you'll have to look for what works for this exact model/scenario. Thanks for the memory lane trip.

[@Conmega1]

@@clabretro Also I forgot to mention it but the little connector on the caddies that you weren’t sure what they were should be for the ID select header on a drive. Presumably IBM has the IDs preselected on the backplane. So if you plug a drive into say slot 3 it’s ID 3, if you move it to another slot the ID changes to that slots ID. Nice concept that eliminates the hassle of dealing with ID selection on all your drives manually.

[@dragunzonline]

I work on IBM Z silicon, my team lead worked on the RS6000! There’s even a photo of him at the launch in our office. So cool to see this. Fun fact instead of the remote servers we use these days for chip development they used to have one of these RS6000 workstation at each desk. They’d often be loud, but useful as a space heater in the winter.

[@clabretro]

that's awesome!

[@dragunzonline]

@@clabretroalso you are correct about the games, many doom (maybe quake too?) tournaments were had after hours in the office on these machines.

[@rmcdudmk212]

​@@dragunzonlinenetworked doom was a blast back in the day. 😁

[@Conmega1]

You sit in Poughkeepsie? If so head on over to 416 cafeteria on a Wednesday and you can experience Quake II on an RS/6000 F50!

[@Neeko_110]

​@@dragunzonlineoh yea..... we had one that was a warm spare just running doom for lan access

[@gavinguy148]

Was admin on one of these in 1999. Running AIX it ran the banks SWIFT server and also ran a system36 emulator for our banking system that ran many time faster than real hardware.

[@sound-ur1bq]

Yes rs6000 was the first to use risc cpu, s38 and s36 was still cisc at this time, until as400 generation 2

[@michaelbauers8800]

Ah yes, I remember AIX back in the days of the UNIX wars. I worked on an RS/6000, probably running AIX.

[@GeorgeTsiros]

cobol?

[@gavinguy148]

@ yeah 👍

[@GeorgeTsiros]

@@gavinguy148 tried reading up on cobol. Made me want to poke my eyes out with an icepick.

[@alajibril]

as someone who has ADHD i must say i always enjoyed your videos the layout the way you speak always has me focused on what you showcasing i wish more people could explain things like you would make college easier

[@colinstu]

100% same. It all jives just right. I dreamed of a channel a over decade ago of someone setting up an entire NT4/Server 2000 network, using Cisco gear etc, and now we have Clabretro filling that need exactly.

[@1nico517]

This channel and Adrian's digital basement are the two most engaging people on KZbin for me. As you said, really easy to follow along with and focus on, while still being really in depth.

[@BestSpatula]

​@@1nico517I have ADHD and I really enjoy CathodeRayDude as well

[@6Diego1Diego9]

Shut up spaz

[@bennydreamly]

100% agree (I am ADHD too lol)

[@joedry1774]

I think the symbol on the drive backplane is just for any Highway (or "Motorway" as we say here in the UK) in Europe. That symbol is used here in the UK to mean motorway. Thats an absolute behemoth of a machine! Really liking your videos and the expansion of the retro rack and hope to see more SunRay content!

[@joe--cool]

Could also signify Autobahn. Maybe some in-joke for speed?

[@SenileOtaku]

@@joe--cool Kraftwerk used it as the cover design for an album (can you guess which one...)

[@stefanglasenhardt3959]

The Centronics label was probably only there to say "Connect the printer here!". Back in the day, all parallel port printers had a "Centronics Connector" on the printer side (See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1284). On the "PC"-side was always a DB25-connector. On the C64 there were multiple variants of User-Port-extensions which were commonly called "Centronics Interface" which all allowed to connect a normal printer to these machines.

[@clabretro]

I think you're completely right, I realized that later haha

[@Pyrrho_]

I was around then; rarely was it referred to as a Centronics port or connector. In my experience, "printer port" was far more common.

[@altebander2767]

The "Tablet" probably refers to a "digitizing tablet". Those were rather popular in CAD circles. Essentially you had a large surface (could be A0 or larger, but also just A3 on cheaper devices) as well as a little device with a ring attached to a small box with some buttons. The ring would have a coil and a cross-hair inside and transfer its absolute position to the computer. The idea was that you could get some sort of plan, put it onto the tablet, then enter it into the computer by transferring each individual point. This way you could vectorize plans fairly efficiently without having to scan them first. You could also transfer notes you made on a paper plan into the electronic one to plot it out again on paper.

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

Most packages supported using the digitizer as a tool selection tool including input of numbers. AutoCAD for example had different overlays to put on the tablet, doing building work use one (or multiple) overlay, doing mech cad ? another overlay.

[@timwilliscroft9615]

The tablets were absolute postitioning ,so draughting could be done quite directly, even when not digitizing paper plans.

[@TrolleyMC]

I've been WAITING for this video. The RS/6000 lineup is so cool and I'm glad there's no faults on that one (aside from the tape drive). I think you should totally try to get Windows NT running on it in the future, no one ever talks about the RISC ports of NT and I would love to see it on that machine. 34:13 the JANKIEST hard drive mount I've ever seen.

[@clabretro]

oh yeah definitely gonna try NT!

[@MrDamz]

I built a lot of RS/6000's from 95 until 2002. Worked for a company that rented them out to businesses. This video is a blast from the past.

[@winmanthewizard]

I'm glad it's getting used! If any of you are interested in more computer videos. I am working on some on my channel right now. I'm getting very close to a hundred subs so I'm very excited!

[@halitimes2]

I used the follow up model of this (the 43p) when I worked at Electrolux in the early 2000s. The tablet port was used with software like Dassault Catia (3D CAD). We also had something called a "space mouse" for zooming/moving and scrolling around the screen without using the keyboard, you had the space mouse in one hand and the regular mouse in the other. IBM marketing said it was based on the same technology used to control the space shuttle.

[@clabretro]

oh very cool

[@AureliusR]

That mouse was called the Spaceball or SpaceOrb, created by Spaceball Technologies out of Massachusetts (they later renamed to SpaceTec IMC). It was later even integrated into a game controlled called the SpaceOrb 360, which LGR covered a few years ago. And yes, the Spaceball really was used to control the Mars rover (not the Space Shuttle, if you're thinking of the Canadarm that was controlled by joysticks), I believe Pathfinder, the first rover at least. I wish I could link a picture because there's a picture of the one IBM manufactured and I bet it's the exact same model you used!

[@sprint955st]

Electrolux Dunstable?

[@halitimes2]

@ Sweden, working on mobile home fridges.

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

Elux Mariestad or Elux på Essingen ?

[@andrewdscott02]

So, story time. As a teenager in the mid 1990s, I worked at a large grocery chain as a bagger and checker. Part of that job is gathering all the trash. That aspect granted access to the manager's office. At this chain, there was one of these behemoths under the manager's desk. They ran all the registers. As a nerd, I was very interested in this IBM RS/6000 thing, since at that point all I'd ever seen from IBM was a PS/2 model 30 in the school computer lab. Fast forward a decade and a half, and I'm working with AIX at a large company, and through that I get connected to the user community, which included said major grocery chain. What I learned was the basic architecture of how they ran their registers hadn't changed. What changed was instead of an RS/6000 in every store, all the registers connect back to a VM in a datacenter over the WAN. Those VMs still run AIX. They just got the $100,000+ "server" out of the store and replaced it with a VM that cost maybe $10K and can be much more easily managed and maintained. The registers are not dumb terminals. They have to be more than that to run the bar code scanners, the scale, and the cash drawer. Yet, they communicate everything they do back to the store's VM in near real time. So, the reason you don't see these things out in the wild anymore is they've been concentrated back in the datacenter. They all still exist, just not onsite.

[@shinkle627]

Wow, this was an incredible trip down memory lane! I love seeing how systems like the IBM RS/6000 were built with such precision and attention to detail back in 97. Makes you appreciate how far we’ve come in computing, yet how solid these machines were for their time. The engineering is just brilliant. Thanks for taking the time to share this in-depth look!

[@JoseGustavoAbreuMurta]

I worked for many years at IBM BRAZIL, providing maintenance on RISC equipment. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

[@clabretro]

Awesome, thank you! We'll see how stuck I get in part two getting AIX on there.

[@renatofp]

It's great to see another fellow Brazilian here on the channel. I started learning AIX in 2004, when I was 21, because I started providing support for a company that used Checkpoint (firewall-1) on top of AIX. At that time, Checkpoint was widely used, but it started doing what Cisco did years later (and recently, Broadcom after acquiring VMware): charging a lot, prices sky high, charging for everything, and so many migrated. The machine was forgotten and I couldn't buy it or receive it as a donation because the company was government-owned. I found out years later that it was forgotten and the CMOS battery leaked, destroying the tracks and the machine was sold by the kilo to a scrapyard to recycle the metals. 2 months ago I did a disk expansion for a company that stills using aix, because the legacy software used wasn't ported to ??{l(food de

[@theserialport]

Nice shirt! ;) The RS/6000 is pretty cool, too.

[@zigforjustice]

@@theserialport Those shirts you got there are really creative

[@resneptacle]

That Autobahn symbol really came in unexpected, haha! Also, that base plate design which is supposed to have wheels is interesting, as it seems to be designed to stack horizontally with other RS/6000 machines neatly, I love little design elements that aren't technically necessary but very nice to have on such older machines!

[@IBM_Museum]

IBM had markings on the RAID backplanes from the contract teams - an evolution as better connection latching mechanisms were implemented ('SCA' even stands for '"Single Connector Attachment"). There's also "The Delivery Brothers" with a stork holding a parcel.

[@DanielRodriguez-ff5cs]

wow! how lucky to have one of those! when I was a kid I had the opportunity to play with one of them .. later I was able to develop in it! I miss those powerpc processors so much

[@clabretro]

that's awesome! and thank you!

[@Ziraya0]

for CAD and similar purposes at the time, the huge drive array makes sense as you could not put enough RAM in any individual computer at the time so the software was constantly unloading assets to make room for other assets and computation, and there was probably heavy reliance on a paging file for virtual memory. All of that is bottlenecked by drive IOPS and bandwidth. CAD files are often "not that large" in hard drive scales so it's acceptable to give up quite a lot of capacity for performance when you're paying the engineer waiting on it 6 figures

[@clabretro]

Ah that makes sense

[@jeffj2495]

Very nice vid. I was the release architect for AIX in 1996, onsite at the IBM location on Burnet Rd in Austin, TX. ...So long ago. Good memories. We did all releases on CD back then. So we had to be completely done before AIX went to production, as it shipped on CDs only at that point.

[@clabretro]

Amazing, and thank you! I did some release engineering at Adobe a lifetime ago right as they transitioned away from physical media. The same "Golden Master" build release process was still followed at that time, a holdover from the CD and DVD releases. Very different times!

[@jeffj2495]

@@clabretro Indeed those were the old days. As I recall we had 200-400 people in the AIX group at the time (not an exact count). Big project were very much the waterfall software method. Since AIX was tied to hardware, there was a large amount of coordination and testing. I coordinated a supplement CD to go with AIX, and it had Netscape browser and server on it, plus trial versions of different IBM products.

[@Pizzarrhoea]

It might be uninteresting to most folks, but I'm excited to see that VAIO peeking over there!

[@clabretro]

eventually!

[@danteaubert3645]

Having worked in an IBM datacenter - when these things were around, they were among the smallest things in the computer room. To hear you talk about how large they are makes me smile. Love your channel.

[@DawsonMakes]

Back in the late 1990s we used these at an Australian supermarket chain to run Oracle to run store financials and checkouts :)

[@johnpurcell7728]

I was the lead integration engineer on the 7025-F50, and the architect of the I/O planar therein. A peer team was developing the F40 around the same time. Both products of the IBM Austin Lab. This video brings back memories.

[@clabretro]

That's amazing! Multiple people have said the F50 was "the one" to have of the Type 7025 line.

[@johnpurcell7728]

The I/O planar was fully 64-bit. In my performance testing it scaled linearly with addition of adapters. Ran out of slots before it ran out of bandwidth. Yeah, it was fast.

[@remains1027]

Fun project setup a 1990's style "BBS" with peer to peer dial up and 52k modem. Very enjoyable ASCII art project. Fill the BBS with textfiles and freeware games from the 90's you can still get the CD's with a ton of shareware from the day.

[@elbiggus]

I worked in a university computer lab in the 90s and we had a couple of these running AIX connected to a mix of VT220s and PS/2s. Happy days!

[@HansOvervoorde]

From back in 1995, I remember that at the university building there was a room full of seemingly early to mid 80s desktops that had no hard drive and any floppy drive(s) had been removed. These bootet from MAU into a text based AIX client. From the AIX prompt, we started a Pine-like email program to read and send email. The room seemed to be in use for computer lab purposes (too). As I was a mere user with a healthy interest but no expertise in this field, does this make sense? Thank you 🙂

[@IainShepherd1]

This was fun! interesting to see a "small" system design that isn't a PC. So many parts, so many interfaces!

[@clabretro]

Thank you! Glad you enjoyed!

[@charles-y2z6c]

RISC made sense if your goal was specific to general. I worked for a Telecom in 2019 that was still using AIX software originally written on RISC/6000

[@IBM_Museum]

On the IBM PC Server systems, the 'autobahn' RAID backplanes were denoted as "Type III" (the third iteration) - You can look at the IBM FRU P/N to give an Internet search term; We need to chart the different trays and backplanes (Tim Clarke in the UK passed away a couple of years ago, and he was the expert).

[@clabretro]

Ah interesting!

[@poweredbyWatts]

And I love the spudger as a pointing element throughout these videos…

[@poweredbyWatts]

Hahaha. Drove to Kansas? Say hello to Burlington for me!

[@nasasts51]

That little cable on the hard drive caddie sets the scsi ID. normally there would be a jumper to set the hard drive scsi ID.

[@micsky99]

Exactly. On sca it’s negotiated by the controller however on scsi 2 it’s set by jumpers. This is why the drive is not being recognised

[@GeoffSeeley]

That RS/6000 is WAY bigger than the desktop version I used in the early 90's. I was building computer based training systems that ran on X-Windows, Mac and Windows at the time but I fondly remember that RS/6000 as I ran a web server off of it and built one of first wave of web sites at the birth of the "internet". Fun times!

[@wigrysystems]

Wonderful video. I have fond memories with this machine. I was a junior IT engineer back in 1997 when the company bought also the F40 to run Oracle on it. I was admiring it from the distance as I was never allowed anywhere close to this machine. Thats also where I learned about CDE which looked gorgeous in this machine. So it was considered way above NT at the time - a true workhorse.

[@seshpenguin]

You're right, I can't think of a better way to describe this machine besides glorious

[@LB4FH]

As always really nice to see these old enterprise-level machines I never had the chance to get my hands on before. Thanks for the great videos

[@Xzorton]

What a beast of a PC. I can totally see this being used in an AutoCAD situation with the tablet option.

[@williama29]

i do enjoy the videos that Clabretro makes as the videos he makes are entertaining and cool and fun to enjoy on weekdays and weekends

[@23jodys]

WOOHOO! Looking forward to more videos on this machine! The first machine I administered was a similar generation J30 that ran the POS and inventory system (Square One?) for a bookstore (Tattered Cover). It had a bunch of serial ports attached to serve up 50-60 serial terminals across two sites. The sites were linked with a T1 and a bunch of serial mux/demuxers that placed the terminal traffic directly on the T1 channels. I'm really enjoying seeing the inside of this one!

[@jonathanadams6763]

I have worked with IBM systems since 1998, and remember the RS6000 (604 & 604E) (and of course the iconic SP2). At that time we ran AIX 4.1 (micro channel). I am now working on Power 10 servers running AIX 7.2 and AIX 7.3.The boot / install screens have remained pretty much the same. The IBM systems should detect a drive in any slot, if the server is working correctly. I cannot remember if the SSA device drivers were loaded by default in AIX 4.2. Maybe try the install on a SCSI drive?

[@jamescronin7742]

The 68 pin and 80 pin SCSI connectors are both from.the same generations of SCSI, Its just a different physical format, and both can run upto U320 SCSI. The 80 pin connection just includes the power within the main connector, and were designed for swappable bays, whilst the 68 pin connectors + molex power were for drives 'internal' to a machine. The reason the 80 pin ones are much cheaper that the 68pin ones on ebay is purely due to the numbers of 80 pin ones surviving due to being used a lot more as they were used in mass in data centres.

[@samsthomas]

Yup. The reason 68 pin drives are so rare is that real-world performance of ATA drives was catching up, so builders were starting to drop SCSI even in workstation class machines. My last machine with SCSI was an ultra-3 and I ended up dropping the SCSI hard drive because I could get much higher capacity ATA drives with similar performance for much less $$$.

[@jfbeam]

@@samsthomas Note: they didn't "drop SCSI", ATAPI and SATA both use the SCSI protocol, just with different layer-1 interfaces. 68 pin drives became rare once everything standardized on the SCA connector. Most of the 68 pin drives I've used were just plugged into some stupid vendor specific hotswap caddy.

[@colinstu]

the S in TS is apparently for "slimline" according to their old product/spec brochure. They must knew of scenarios where it has to be thinner.

[@RorySlegtenhorst]

It's been a long time since I saw this machine for the last time. Back then I did not have the understanding to operate the machine and ended up scrapping most of it. I still have the CPU, 4 sticks of RAM, 4 original 7.8G SCSI drives, the DAT3 tape unit and several LCD units. I recall that the front-panel actually had it's own 80186 CPU (which I also still have). Mine came with a gigantic harddrive bay as large as the RS6000 unit with storage for 36 drives. Awesome to see yours come alive!

[@clabretro]

The 36 drive bay sounds wild. Responded to your email!

[@LeeZhiWei8219]

Ooh hello! Another clabretro video, well done again haha! Really awesome, and brightens up my day! Great job on this video.

[@clabretro]

thank you!

[@ActionRetro]

That thing is glorious

[@PhilTheProf]

I worked in IT with an assurance company and the RS6000 and AIX were my introduction to servers and their operating systems. Was 'fun' learning command line with the differences to msdos. AIX was extremely powerful for data manipulation/searching and number crunching.

[@mrtnsnp]

That is quite a throwback. Brings back memories to my first account on a unix system at university. 1992/1993, two RS/6000 systems for the students - called Volta and Ampere. Each system hosting 8 grayscale X11-terminals (large screens for the time), with 4 MB shared for those 8 terminals. The terminals were connected via thin ethernet (coax). If one of student started Emacs the rest of the students working on that system started yelling. These were of course a predecessor of the PowerPC CPUs, I believe these CPU's were split over multiple packages. Not slow for the time, but this one is a lot faster.

[@lupercal78]

It would have been a PowerPC 601, probably 60 or 80mhz. My college had a similar setup when I was a CS major in the 90's.

[@mrtnsnp]

@@lupercal78 More likely a POWER1 or POWER1+ based set of systems (there was a separate file-server, and a system for staff, in addition to the two for the students). The first prototype chips of the 601 became available in October 1992, which doesn't align with the installation of these systems, as far as I can tell.

[@rmcdudmk212]

I want one of these cases. Love the old school esthetics. Would be great for a modern sleeper build with all that room inside. 😁

[@carlchristenisnes6763]

Fun to see the old 'boys' still working :)

[@LightTheUnicorn]

What a thing! Appreciate the real deep dive, lots of little interesting quirks hidden in there. Look forwward to seeing you getting it up and running into AIX!

[@danthompsett2894]

what a beast of history, hope you get her running one day.

[@TeslaTales59]

Cool machine. Lots of metal in the chasis. Heavy beast. Rock solid and cool.

[@DECcomputers]

Yes, that is the symbol for the German autobahn, did not expect to find it on a PCB in an IBM machine :)

[@hotrodhunk7389]

Ah you have a perfect voice for a sick lazy morning with the family. Thank you.

[@Tigwelder360]

We had one of these machines as a CWS ( Control Workstation) for a 3 frame, 9 wide node IBM SP/2 system that I was part of a 2 man admin team on in '98. It ran AIX and CDE ( which was a horrible desktop environment ). It was connected to the SP nodes as a serial way to manage the nodes and also run parallel commands. At the time the drives were mostly 9Gb IBM SCSI drives and I'm guessing those drives in the RS6000 were also able to be dismounted and IDd by LED and hot swapped like the larger drive systems, then rebuilding. I realized the circuit boards on those drives were known to fail and I recovered data from our desktop systems by taking the boards off replacement drives and swapping them out. I never looked inside our RS6000. It lived behind a desk. We had no issues with it. In the grand scheme it was a tool for the more fun toys. At the time, at night I "tested" the RC5 56 bit encryption challenge with 56 x PPC 604e 233 SP/2 which was going then :) I'll email you some IBM stuff from the day.

[@SenileOtaku]

We were using them for Control Workstations for Power4 rackmount and the full 24" frame RS/6000 servers. But CDE wasn't really that bad. I've dabbled with NsCDE a bit lately (it's a customization & add-in for FVWM to create a CDE environment). I've gotten so pissed off at the GNOME project wilfully breaking GTK+ for everyone else, and I'm trying to move to NsCDE.

[@iansmith5601]

Fantastic. I remember building IBM SPs with winterhawk nodes in 1999!!

[@SenileOtaku]

I came into the IBM switch group towards the end of the SP3 and (possibly) Winterhawk systems (or they were something in between Winterhawk and Regatta)

[@drdrums1]

1997… the year I graduated from my undergrad with a CS degree. That brings back memories. I didn’t use AIX much - our department tended towards Solaris and Linux, with a hefty dose of NeXTstep (now known as macOS) - but I did work with every now and again, in a distributed computing AIX cluster.

[@nazgulsenpai]

Great video, awesome channel, and you definitely deserve to hit 50k (or hell 500k+) subs! Maybe its some unconscious nostalgia bias but even that beige AC unit look just looks so damn good to me. The design language of all of the mid-90s thru early 2000s IBM machines, even when it was proprietary and extremely user-unfriendly, is just a thing of beauty. The peak for me was actually the few years before and after the Lenovo sale, with the dark gray/black chassis with the blue/red color highlights. The monitors, mice and keyboards shared the same aesthetic. Even simple things like the tower ThinkCentre machines having a carrying handle made my life so much easier and also just looked so cool. It was like the 80s idea of what the future would look like. To their credit, although I certainly prefer the old look, Lenovo has done a mostly good job of modernizing that aesthetic without changing it too drastically over the years.

[@clabretro]

thank you! and I totally agree

[@succuvamp_anna]

You've became one of my favorite retro server youtubers, if you was closer i would give you a few of my older servers. (I'm in WV) Got an HP ProLiant Dl370 G6 for example that I've retired.

[@clabretro]

I appreciate that!

[@cannfoddr]

I was working for IBM in London at the start of my career and we all got invited to a London theatre for a meeting that turned out to be the RISC System/6000 announcement. Was quite impressive didn’t get to play with them until a few years later when I got to attend AIX training

[@louislectric]

The foot-piece design was likely the minimum margin for placing them side-by-side.

[@captainchaos3667]

Re. the CD-ROM drive: you only have to use the bottom two tabs to hold the CD in. The upper two tabs are for if it is mounted in the other direction.

[@GrandpaWarbucks]

My favorite type of ASMR, thank you clabretro :)

[@jimcarhart]

Worked on the predecessor (1993) for that at Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC with the Theoretical Physics group ... across the Potomac from Alexandria, VA. Most RISC workstations were used for complex mathematical modelling, but the one you have there is the workstation model that was typically used with positional tablet input for CAD and or AVS graphical statistics modelling.

[@dsagman]

We had an older model at IBM Kingston, NY in 1990. We ran Interleaf desktop publishing on it. I wrote the manual for AIX tn3270 terminal emulator that it used. We didn’t like it because they used Interleaf for their manuals and corporate standard was GML/ Bookmaster, the forerunner of SGML/HTML/XML.

[@cbrunnkvist]

24:49 Ooooh the left and right sides of the Giant Foot of adjacent units will fit together like puzzle pieces while maintaining clearing on both sides! Now you've gotta get one or two more!!!

[@alexandervonreu418]

I worked in IBM‘s AIX support team in Germany. The 7025 was my deskside performance test and system dump analysis system in early 2000s. Had it equipped with 18 SCSI hdd. Loved this system. I know that a large local telecommunications provider had his full CRM system on a HACMP controlled pair of 7025. Fun fact: The list price for the floppy disk ribbon cable in a 7025 was 435$. It was exactly the same as in my self-built PC but ~430$ more expensive.

[@swrzesinski]

Ive bought that SCSI converters and I must say they work like charm. They have jumpers to configure SCSI ID and other SCSI things. Got 2 HP Braded SCA SCSI HDDs into my Compaq ML330 G2 installed this way.

[@Steve_Larson]

If I remember correctly, the MIPS, PowerPC and Alpha installation files are on the NT 4.0 installation disk. I have an original CD floating around here somewhere, as well as NT 4.0 server.

[@petergathercole4565]

That Ethernet AUI port was really meant for a drop cable to go to a 10base5 'Thick wire' Ethernet cable. The MAU as you called it could be fitted to provide either 10base2 'Thinwire' Ethernet or 10baseT twisted pair, but would normally have a short cable rather than being directly attached.

[@yns000]

please make more videos of "obscure" operating systems and how they work this is amazing content

[@juanstdio]

15 Seconds of video and you already have my like!!

[@CollinBaillie]

64-bit PCI, otheewise known as PCI-X. Caused confusion for many when PCI Express came out, until they learned PCI-e (PCIe) vs PCI-X.

[@timun4493]

it is even more confusing, PCI-X is 3.3V only and supports bus speeds of 66MHz and more, 64-bit PCI is not necessarily PCI-X while in theory there can also be 32-bit slot that are PCI-X

[@alecjahn]

Woo! One of those random dream machines of mine. My father used one for drafting/engineering way back in the day, eventually having a later black one (coolest looking monolith I'd ever seen) before CATIA V5 allowed them to switch to PC. EDIT: He did use a Magellan Spacemouse at some point, but I wouldn't know how it was attached. I know a while later we found one of them at a yard sale that was just a serial connection (as opposed to that filled-out mini-DIN) which was fun to play with on our home PC.

[@firestorm.v1]

Neat! I've always loved the look of the older IBM Big Iron servers. They were always stylized in a sort of brutalist architecture kind of way. The small jumper in the drive sled is connected to where you set the SCSI ID on the drive. It's so that when you slot the drive (with the caddy), the backplane sets the drive's SCSI ID automatically. If you swap a drive, there's no need to change the SCSI ID on the drive as the caddy/backplane set it automatically. It's possible that the SCSI drive with the adapter plate didn't work because with no jumpers attached, the drive got a SCSI ID of 0 and that might have been assigned to the controller (although usually the controller takes SCSI ID 7 if memory serves). I'm not sure how the adapter jumpers the SCSI ID, it might be worth jumpering the adapter for ID 3 and seeing if the BIOS sees the drive at that ID.

[@bobtetstall2681]

Ah loved these beasts back in my IBM days. In Greenock they used a Cad package called Catia that would have used the tablet connector. AIX was and still is is the bomb of Unix.

[@FrustratedApe]

I used to support C10 and F50's (I think they were dual 604e 332Mhz) for a supermarket chain. Absolutely solid. Attended a few calls after power outages where the staff had turned the key on the front which stopped the RAN box outputting to all the terminals 🤣

[@cferrarini]

I remember that earlier AST PCs were amazingly built, most of thing were not made of plastic, it was epoxi painted steel. and the power supply was stainless steel, the pcbs of this time like Orchid Tech were so beautifully made.

[@wacholder5690]

15:20 The color scheme started with the PS/2. Similar trays were used in the PC Server 300 / 320 / 500 / 520. Short lived they had been replaced by those with the black surround and the blue knob in a flip-up latch as on the 3519 Expansion unit.

[@pianoman4Jesus]

Yes, similar era indeed to PC Server 330. I worked on two of those back in the day, with the IBM ServeRAID board. So @clabretro, the ServeRAID board will treat everything as RAID. On-board SCSI should be standard Adaptec SCSI likely, given the era. The slot on the ServeRAID board was for a battery backup option, to prevent data loss if the machine got powered off without the DASD fully writing to disk. Very nice rescue.

[@wacholder5690]

@@pianoman4Jesus It would not surprise me if I find a battery backup option for ServeRaid in my stash. The battery might be expired however ... 🙂

[@theodoredurst6931]

There should be a way to boot from the tape drive on that system. I worked at an engineering firm that had a bunch of them running for 18 years doing network stuff and the boot from tape was the kind of a secret that only the very old IBM techs knew about. We did because, the principles of our firm had been programming them when they first came out. You might look for someone else's AIX backup, esp. if your CD install fails.

[@treyscarborough1901]

It's probably not seeing the drive because it needs to have the scsi ID set. That's what that other little cable coming off the sled is for. It sets the scsi ID based on the slot its in.

[@clabretro]

yeah that would make sense!

[@denniseldridge2936]

Just a note on the Centronics label; Centronics was indeed a manufacturer of printers, but it became the generic name for the interface that IBM chose for the original PC. I just found out that the company was originally a Wang company, which surprises me as I lived in Lowell, MA, in the 80s, which is around the Wang campus. I'm also a bit of a historian of computer technology. So the actual printer likely would not have been a Centronics branded unit, but likely either a fancy (for it's time) laser printer, or one of those monster line printers.

[@John-jl3ky]

Awesome, love this stuff!

[@renep702]

oh cool, i still own that same RS6000 but with some other branded Frontcover, yes the HDD-Tray/Caddy was also available with direct SCA cable to the Disks from the IBM Backplane

[@clabretro]

cool!

[@doozowings4672]

We used these mostly to run a base wide CRONOS system. It worked great.

[@HansOvervoorde]

May have been a Wacom type of drawing tablet. But I have also seen more specialized engineering tablets with SGI workstations. The variety of top end hardware accessible at German universities in those days was insanely awesome!

[@StirlingBanfield]

in the early 2000s worked for an aerospace company. the Risc 6000 and later RS/6000 machine was the interface of our Epic Data branded barcode readers all through the plant and the mainframe

[@WooShell]

23:00 These MAUs aren't supposed to go in there like that.. the plastic tabs are actually grip tabs used to move the locking frame on the AUI port up or down to lock/unlock a plugged in AUI extension cable. AUI uses those weird rivet-like screws to lock the connectors, instead of the boring old screw mounts.

[@pedroseoane]

Love it, "my" hospital still works on HP Unix & AS400 🫣 long live legacy systems

[@sound-ur1bq]

They was systems solid as a rock,especially os400

[@jfbeam]

That's a RAID card that the "BIOS" doesn't understand. (no name in the system list) So you'll not be able to boot directly from it. Looking on the MB, there are two SCSI controller chips (symbios), and the system list shows both of them - one going to the CD (and tape before removing it), the other may be external and the unpopulated connector. A word on memory... if it's like several of the other RS/6000's I've known, that's an odd multi-bit ECC memory. (40bit ECC SIMM - I have no clue where to get stuff like that, but I have Micron SIMMs with the pads for the necessary additional chip - no one cannot just solder one on there, the SPD PROM would need to be adjusted.)

[@DJDocsVideos]

Worked on many RS/6000 and AS/400 Systems back in the day. They don't build 'em like that anymore 😞

[@IBM_Museum]

@26:04 - The "Rattler" and "Viper" ASICs are on PC Server planars like the 330; Probably associated with the PCI bus interface.

[@michaelbauers8800]

I worked at IBM Rochester...Minnesota back in the 1980s. And worked with an RS/6000. That location made the AS/400. I also worked with the Andrew system (from Carnegie Melon.) working on some other workstation whose name I forget. Anyway, was cool to see one again. I think these were used along with custom hardware for the Deep Blue chess computer? I was trying to remember the other workstation, the one running some sort of UNIX along with the Andrew system built on top of XWindows I presume. And maybe it was the IBM RT?

[@marcosmota1094]

Good narration!

[@MetaversaicCat]

I want this as a case+expansion board for a Raspberry PI 4.

[@alevasseur14]

I'm willing to bet the reason that base is shaped that way is so that when you put systems side by side, they line up and sort of 'lock in'. That's impressive. Clearly, you have to find another RS/6000 now.

[@clabretro]

I think you're right, and clearly I do

[@OtakuXP2]

Had an RS/6000 running pick by light at a pharmaceutical manufacturing company in Havant - the rest of the business ran on good old AS/400's

[@guildpilotone]

210TS is 210T Slim. The asymmetrical base is so that multiple workstations can snuggle up together but not be easy to separate.

[@mattelder1971]

Back in the 90s at least, "centronics" was pretty much used as a generic term for any parallel port.

[@jfbeam]

In the "PC" world. In the rest of the computing world, there were many types of centronic connector for equally many uses. (SCSI, HPIB/GPIB, industrial control, etc.) And on the PC side, it was almost always a DB25.

[@mattelder1971]

@@jfbeam Well, at that time, a DB25 was also used on the computer end of some SCSI connectors, so it's possible that they put that label on it to make sure someone didn't think it was SCSI. Yes, I know that there were multiple different kinds of "centronics" connectors.

[@jfbeam]

@@mattelder1971 Yeap, serial, SCSI, printer (which was the symbol on the label), even a floppy...

[@mattelder1971]

@@jfbeam And there were both serial and SCSI printers, so they probably labeled it "centronics" to eliminate confusion for whoever ended up using the system. Likely put on there by someone in the IT department for the company it was used at.

[@josephravu5039]

That's a good looking case!

[@mateuszsp8ebc691]

This Autobahn logo is quite widespread in Europe to mark a motorway. It has local design variations, but it looks kinda-sorta like that. What it actually reminds me is a cover of an album "Autobahn" by German electronic, kraut-rock, early-techno band Kraftwerk :)

[@SimbaSeven.]

I've got a pair of IBM pSeries p520's and p52A's. I'm trying to hunt down some rack rails for them. Any ideas?

[@clabretro]

I haven't looked much for the p5 stuff yet but probably ebay. it's hard to find rail kits for this stuff at a reasonable price :(