[SunRescue] Tape drive

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Sun, 20 May 2001 dave at cca.org wrote:

> jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu writes:
> 
> >On Sun, 20 May 2001 dave at cca.org wrote:
> 
> >> Define "weird things". :-)
> 
> >Ever hear of the Alpha Micro? 
> 
> If you're not refering to DEC's Alpha, then no, that doesn't
> ring any bells.

See http://www.alphamicro.com/frames/default.asp.  And more to the point,
http://www.amos-online.com/mainframe.asp.

The latest is the AM7000 model, which features a 68060 CPU running at
75mhz.  The version I used was the AM4000 (in AM2000 clothes).  The AM4000
used a 68040.  The Machine I used had 2gigs of HDs, 32megs of ram, a tape
drice that might have been 8mm (don't remeber) and a 9track reel to reel
tape drive.  The machine I was on servered about 50 users.  Some had
serial connections others used the fairly new then (3 years ago) TCP/IP
ethernet connection.  All the serial users had 3 virtual terminals to
allow them to run 3 programs at once.  That feature never worked correctly
with the TCP/IP users.

These machines are still very terminal oriented.  To my knowledge, no one
has ever written client server software for these things.  

Actually, there is a web server that runs on it.  The company advertised
it as being a secure and superior platform.  However, from what I saw,
these machines are only secure if all users are trusted (even simple users
could crack the machine thanks to the brilliant idea of using ROT13 for
password encrypting).  I hope no one actually used these things as web
servers.

The OS had no memory protection.  Just bitslicing a string in Basic
incorrectly was enough to crash the machine (as I learned the hardway
after several crashes).  Bleh.  Why those machines refuse to curl up and
die I'll never understand.  If ever there was a machine that deserved
to...

Actually, the idea of running netbsd on one has appeal.  The OS is so lean
that figuring out how to cram a new OS on should be easy.  And if you put
a unix on it, then you have a machine with a LOT of serial ports (even new
machines have large numbers of serial ports).


--
Joshua Boyd