On January 16, Colin Eby wrote:
> 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.
Bummer. :-( It's cool that you get to hack on it, though!
> 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.
I've seen a few go on eBay. They get...expensive. Painfully
expensive.
> >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.
Yes but then I'd have to deal with a PeeCee. And Linux. Thanks for
the info though. :-)
As I mentioned in other mail, I have a P/390 here (PCI version) that I
haven't gotten running yet. The PeeCee hardware is doing what it does
best...being an inconsistent pile of monkey turds. I hate PeeCees. I
think I'm just gonna have to get an S/390 and deal with the electric
bill. Might as well do it right.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL "Less talk. More synthohol." --Lt. Worf
Received on Wed Jan 16 2002 - 18:12:45 GMT