[rescue] DECstation 5000

[Kurt Mosiejczuk]

On 15 Jul 2002, Steve Pacenka wrote:

> So what can these things run if not ultrix?  I have a couple of 5000
> /200's and a 3100 awaiting rehab, and have been letting them gather dust
> lacking any media or docs.  If it is possible to get a NetBSD or Linux
> working on them perhaps they are worth the time to fool with.

I haven't looked in a while, but from what I understand NetBSD has
supported them for quite some time.  There is a Linux port, but
from what I understand, it's not mature.

http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/pmax/

> And what are they comparable to in the Sun-3 and Sparc sequence? (or
> 680x0 sequence).

They seem to be like the sun3x machines, in that while they are
good machines, they were kindof the bastard child between processor
architectures.

Oomph-wise, I don't know.  Most are R3000 based, although later
5000s (/240, and I think /150) are R4000, I think.

I was impressed with them... once had a machine that was doing
mail duties for 200+ people, DNS, Hesiod (ugh) and serving about
200,000 hits/day via Apache.  And it's load average was only
about 0.1.  That help?

--Kurt