[SunRescue] Cheap big iron

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Thursday, April 5, 2001 at 17:36:02 (-0400), Joshua D. Boyd wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: [SunRescue] Cheap big iron
>
> I don't think anything but Dynix will run on it.  Looking around, G++ runs
> on it.  The seller said two harddrives.  Based on when these machines were
> out, I'm guessing that they would be .5g or 1g drives.  Oracle runs on the
> thing.  Some conteporaries seem to be the Sparc2s and SGI 4D machines, so
> I'm guessing that it might be 40mhz processors, but don't really know.
> And as the MIPS R8k demostrated, mhz says extremely little about speed.
> It might be equiv to a Sun1000 with 5 SM31(??) modules (the 40mhz ones
> that original come witht the mazhine).  

The S-81's CPUs are i386 (not sure what speed but I'd guess 33MHzDX2)
with a pair of Weitek FPUs also on each board (as opposed to an i387).

Fully loaded it's well over 60 MIPS with more I/O capability than even a
mainframe of its day (well, it is more or less a mainframe!).  Pure raw
power!

I seem to remember it blew the doors off even a big Pyramid for doing
things like compiling.

It was one of the few big multi-processing machines that did general
purpose unix computing really really well.  (UUNET was founded with its
older brother running the show -- just one big machine doing *everything*)

The S-81 is/was a VERY nice machine!

> Dynix is based on BSD4.2

Plain "DYNIX" is based on 4BSD (and it was a really really really ugly
horrible broken port too!), but DYNIX/ptx *is* AT&T System Release 4.

I suspect _only_ DYNIX/ptx would run on an S-81.  Google seems to agree
given the very few items that it pops up.

It's almost worth the drive!  :-)

However I think you'd need a pair of them, and a surface-mount solder
rework station, and lots of brains and luck, to keep one running
though.....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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