RS/6000 FAQ?

From: Mzthompson_at_aol.com <(Mzthompson_at_aol.com)>
Date: Mon Feb 18 10:26:13 2002

On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, Kris Kirby wrote:

> With all this talk of RS/6000s, I've become a little interested in what
> these machines can do / are capable of.

A company I used to work for used them as the foundation of their Network
Management applications. Their software would among other things, manage
the events (alarms & other messages) coming from the network devices and
manage the configuration of the network. Later versions of their software
would graphically display the configuration and status of the network
in the form of a network map. One such instance was a state wide (& state
owned) fiber network carrying voice, data, & video.

Unfortunately, the company went under in the mid 90's. As the bankruptcy
dust settled, I found out that the bank had repo'd several machines.
I contacted the bank and the loan officer said something like "Duh, I doubt
what I can resell these Unix boxes in this podunk town". With that I
made an offer on one of the RS/6000 boxes which he accepted.

So for less than 1% of its original cost, I hauled home a model 320H.
It was complete with 80mb of memory, two SCSI hard drives, an external
tape drive, network card, and 16" color monitor. It has AIX (IBM's Unix)
3.2.5 on it as well as IBM's version of X-Windows. Nobody bothered to
'clean' the disks, so it was still loaded with the company's software
as well as a then current version of Oracle DBMS.

Also at the time, I manage to scrounge a few manuals for the RS/6000
series. One has specs and setup info (drive SCSI select, etc).
If anyone needs some info, I might be able to help.

Mike
Received on Mon Feb 18 2002 - 10:26:13 GMT