[rescue] Wanted: RS/6000 7012 Accessories

[James Lockwood]

On 7 Jan 2003, Tom 'spot' Callaway wrote:

> Yeah, it is. Unfortunately, its been years since I've seen a PCjr, much
> less the serial pigtail. Anyone have one of these?

I've got a few at the bottom of a box somewhere, I'll check.  Otherwise,
check Ebay or look online for the pinouts, a regular header (10-pin?) will
fit the connector.

> AIX more than likely. If I get bored, I might poke it with Linux, but
> thats unlikely.

Very.  Linux doesn't run on this hardware, nor is it ever likely to.  AIX
is pretty much the only option for non-PowerPC RS/6000.

> The machine definitely doesn't have a CDROM, nor does it appear to have
> space for one to be added internally. I could always chain one off the
> external SCSI port, but having 0 experience with this hardware, I wasn't
> sure if that would work or not.

Sure.  Be warned though, that:

(1) To boot the older (RIOS based) RS/6000's, you'll need a CDROM drive
that defaults to 512 bytes per sector (same as old Sun systems).  The SCSI
CDROM spec wasn't finalized at the time that these systems were built, so
some may work and some may not (I've had good luck with Plextors).

(2) Diagnosing boot problems on these machines can be a pain.  You don't
get any serial output until the OS boot has proceeded for a while, all you
get during IPL is a set of changing numbers on the front-panel LED
display.  There's a list of front-panel codes available on the IBM
website.

With the maintenance diskettes, you can boot off of all sorts of
interesting media including the network (depending on a few firmware
revisions, though).  IBM did a terrific job of device abstraction, to the
point where you can use a terminal on a remote terminal server at the
other end of a LAN as your console connection.  I wouldn't recommend it
for a first time boot, though.

> This one has an ethernet card, it just needs a transceiver, which I have
> a few of already.

PC MCA 16/4 Token Ring cards will also work, if you have a need.  MCA
sound cards are about the only other commodity cards that will work
without special drivers.

Internal vs external SCSI ports, there is no difference, it's a single
chain.

AIX 4 should run tolerably with enough memory if you don't expect too
much.  The 320 is slow, between SS2 and SS5 performance depending on what
you do (but generally closer to the SS2).  They had remarkable FP
performance for the day.

-James