Dave --
I appreciate you're coveting... but the system's not
mine to give. It belongs to CSC, and was left-over
from our Y2K group. They had just stuck it in a closet
and forgotten it. As the resident UNIX guru at the
time it was on my inventory. When I moved out into the
field I claimed it as a workstation. Since nobody knew
it existed, and since it was way past the 3-year
depreciation cycle, there weren't any objections.
Unforunately CSC doesn't allow for any internal
purchasing because of liability issues. So I couldn't
buy it off them.
I too would like to get a hold of a board. The system
here at the office is the 591. That's the earlier
board design. There are three different versions. I'd
love to get a hold of an MCA board like this one
because I have equivalent RS6000 hardware in my
private collection. I could easily host such a thing.
The later boards are, I believe, PCI, and in two
differnt versions. I've never seen the board appear on
auction sites -- and I'm worried that anyone who did
have one, might not know it, since it just sits in
otherwise ordinary gear. The best I can tell you is
watch out for specific models of hardware and hassle
the seller to see if they omitted the board. The
models are the PC330 and PC500 intel systems. And in
RS6000 they've used F50, 591 and a few 390 systems.
>From what I've learned so far -- you won't hear much
about these systems in the open systems community. If
you go trolling through vendor and support
organization sites, stick to the mainframe folks. I'm
afraid that's as much of a brain dump as I've got on
sourcing these boards. If you do find a source, please
pass the information on. I'd love to add one to my
collection. Until then I'll have to deal with
Hercules. Not that this is a bad thing. Hercules on a
decent piece of hardware is considerably faster then a
P390 board. The one I've got is all of 72mHz clock
speed and 128MB RAM. You could build a much more
substantial LINUX based system to host a mainframe
operating system.
Best wishes,
Colin Eby
Senior Consultant
CSC Consulting
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Received on Wed Jan 16 2002 - 13:38:31 GMT