[geeks] good old AT&T 3B systems

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Friday, February 8, 2002 at 20:56:59 (EST), dave at cca.org wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] Has Sun Learned from SGI's Mistakes?
>
> woods at weird.com writes:
> > 
> > Hmmmm.... 3B2s, maybe, but not all 3Bs.  I don't think there was full
> > demand-paged virtual memory support in UNIX System V Release 2.0, which
> > was what ran on 3B5S and 3B15s (and VAXen) in the early days.  As you

Ah, I finally found the details.  It seems the first 3B of any kind to
have demand paged virtual memory would have been any one with a WE32101
memory management unit, and the first OS with such support would have
been AT&T UNIX System V Release 2.1.  Release 2.0 on the WE32000 and
WE32100 based systems did not support demand paged virtual memory.

This is according to the January 1987 issue of AT&T's "Computer Systems"
catalog, part of a boxed set of "Information Systems" catalogs I have.

> I've *never* actually seen one of the bigger 3B*s. When was that line
> introduced, with which machine?

I don't know when they were first introduced, but it was probably around
1984 or so (Steve Friedl says he used an early 3B5 in 1984).

	http://www.unixwiz.net/3b2/index.html
	http://cua6.csuohio.edu/~bob/3b2faq.html

The 1987 catalog has the full range from the little 3B2/300 right up to
the dual processor (bit-slice multi-board) 3B20A that occupied a full
four cabinets (and supported upwards of 100 simultaneous users).  The
3B2/300 and the 3B5/101 at that time still used the older and much
slower WE32000 CPU (less than 1 MIP @ 8Mhz, and not enough cache or RAM
expansion support to go very far in terms of throughput).  The 3B5/101
was upgradable with a board swap.  You could also replace the
motherboard in a /300 to get the equivalent of a /310 which was a
WE32100 @ 10MHz, but without the MAU installed by default, so about the
same raw integer power as a /400, but not nearly so expandable.

If anyone has a copy of SysVr4 for the 3B2, I'll fire up my /500 and put
it online again!  ;-)  (I do have 3.2 with WIN/TCP, but I don't know
that I want to put that on my network.)  It should really fly with a
half decent modern SCSI disk or two!  ;-)

Did I tell y'all that Steve sent me a 3B2 a while ago?  I nearly fell
off my chair laughing when I received it in the mail!  It was an RCA
high-voltage rectifier tube!  ;-)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods at weird.com>