Slightly OT: What to do with a DEC 3000/300?

From: Ken Seefried <ken_at_seefried.com>
Date: Sun Oct 14 23:47:08 2001

Sorry to be late to this topic. As it happens, I've got a DEC 3000/300X
(175MHz 21064, 64MB RAM, 2x2GB Disk, NetBSD 1.5.1 + fixes) in production.
I'm fond of it, but probably more for the fact that it comes in a rackmount
sled, which appears to be quite rare. It fits nice at the co-hosting
facility (it's www.thistle.com, but it doesn't talk to anyone but me right
now).

What I know:

Memory: No...you can't put just anything into it. It's got 8 72-pin SIMM
slots, but it will only accept 8MB, true parity, generic SIMMs (giving
64MB). And it's damn finicky about those. My 3000s spits on SIMMs that
everything else in the basement has no trouble with. It will also accept
Digital custom 32MB true parity SIMMs (giving 256MB). Nothing else that
I've found will work, but that could just be me. If anyone has any of these
SIMMs they don't want, do let me know...

Video: AFAIK, none of the free *nix systems support the built in TC frame
buffers. VMS and OSF/1, nee Tru64 do. The 3000 will run X clients and
display to another machine. Real men do serial consoles anyway.

Speed: Slow. Really slow. Not PC532 slow, but not something I'd trade one
of my PPro 200s for (other than the swanky rack-mount sled). Definately
useful for low volume web, mail, etc., but "make build" isn't pleasant. My
PC64-275 is way, way faster, but still not that fast.

There's lot's of good info out there, and I know there are people working to
support all that isn't currently supported. Drop me a note if anyone wants
to know anything else.

Ken
Received on Sun Oct 14 2001 - 23:47:08 BST