[rescue] RS/6000 Model 390 and PowerStation 560... Comments?

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Fri, 6 Jun 2003, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> On Fri, 6 Jun 2003 vance at neurotica.com wrote:
>
> > They make really nice NFS disk servers or terminal servers.  They can hold
> > about 2048 serial ports (yes, over two thousand).
>
> Eight MCA slots?

I think the 560 had those slots on a single bus, I think the 580 and up
had 2 MCA buses... for better bandwidth. The deskside RS's also offer a
lot of space for internal storage vs. the tabletops which are quite
limited (although the 390 has space for 5.25 openface devices like CDroms
and stuff, which the earlier 3xx did not)

I used to have a 520, it was fun reloading AIX from 8mm tape.

Also beware, IBM likes to do things their way. I.e. there is no prom (as
in prom monitor) so you have to check the sequence of numbers for boot
status, and you really need those damn flopies sometimes. It was also fun
because the 520 I had, had non standard serial ports.... And of course we
have AIX at least 3.x was an interesting piece of software.

Overall RS's are a lot of fun, at least for me, because they are quite
different... although a 25MHz POWER was not exactly a fast processor, I
assume a 50MHz POWER is not that blazingly fast nowadays. So for anything
non computationally bound it will be fine, the system has a decent
bandwidth overall (which was the main strength of the early RS systems vs.
the competition)