[HECnet] Towards the Mouth of Madness....

[Gregg Levine]

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 4:34 PM, Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com> wrote:

On 12 Jul 2011, at 19:00, Sampsa Laine wrote:

So with my long, non-billing Sunday afternoons giving me ideas, I've started to ponder procuring a midrange IBM box, say an AS/400.

How much do these things cost (like say a 93 vintage), weigh and dissipate heat? Also, how do you hook them up?

Don't buy an AS400. Buy an RS/6000 - you can pick up a decent one for anywhere between 50GBP and 5000 GBP :D

My personal home use favourites   are the RS/6000 43P Model 150 (mini tower with PCI and a 640e Power PC), the 44P Model 170 (similar to 43P but POWER-III up to 450MHz) and the 7046-B50. All of them are workable in that they are quite, don't use MCA expansions and don't draw a fat lot of power. All of them will run AIX 5L too AFAIK which is relatively recent and well supported.

Nice thing about IBM too is the computer IS your OS license. Because no IBM RS/6000 (or any other system aside from x86 gear) is sold without an OS license, they don't bother printing them they just let anyone with hardware run the OS (support costs extra mind you). It's a nice touch and means AIX is very accessible as a Hobbyist. It's taken over my 'pet UNIX' slot from Solaris since Oracle castrated the free license.

Others mentioned DECNet will run on AIX, I suspect not on more modern versions but maybe 4.3.3 might run it?

--
Mark Benson

My Blog:
<http://markbenson.org/blog>
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"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."


Hello!
Mark those idiots at Oracle didn't kneecap the free license for
Solaris (also called SunOS, and a lot of nasty and disgusting words
which only a fellow use would understand,), they only threw more brick
walls to destroy to make use of it.

All that's needed besides a machine to operate it, is would you
believe, knowing the right people. It happens I have scads of those
copies staring at me right now.

I also have (she's currently asleep at the moment) a SPARC system
running Solaris 10 released in March of 2005.

Now what fool told you that? We can take that off list if you want.

Nice signature by the way, where did you find it?

And yes all of the above is indeed true. I spent most of my early
years arguing with systems like that. Also fighting with my ISP to get
better acceptance for non Windows systems other then the early efforts
of the Mac squad.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8 at gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."