> I stopped by the local recyclers today and they had an AT&T
> 7300 for $40
> Does anyone here know anything about this machine?
It was a nice mid-1980s 68010-based Unix box. AT&T System V release 2
with some Berkeley extensions. 512K RAM on the motherboard, more can
be added via the three expansion slots. Max 4M total, though to get
that on a 7300 you'll either have to modify some expansion boards or
upgrade the motherboard to 2M by replacing all of the soldered-in chips.
Uses a custom MMU design for demand-paged virtual memory. Maximum
per-process VM is 4M, so you can't run really big modern stuff.
I think the only hard drive sizes AT&T shipped on the 7300 were 10 and
20 megabytes. The 3B1 is a similar machine with 2M RAM on the motherboard
and a modified case that can hold a full-height 5.25 inch drive. Those
shipped with 40 or 67M drives. It's possible to upgrade to most any MFM
drive that will physically fit, but to access more than 1024 cylinders
(e.g., a Maxtor XT2190 drive with 1124 cylinders for 150 megabytes), you
need to replace the WD1010 HDC chip with a WD2010.
The C compiler is K&R (non-ANSI), but there is a port of GCC.
There's no X. I tried to build Xlib some years back, so that I'd
be able to run X clients (NOT an X server), but I ran into trouble
and gave up.
The native window system is similar to AT&T's "FACE" environment
(Framed Access Computing Environment or some such). There's also a port
of the MGR window system.
The definitive web site is:
http://unixpc.taronga.com/
Received on Sat Oct 28 2000 - 13:12:29 BST