[HECnet] Personal DECstation 5000/25

[Cory Smelosky]

From: "Ian McLaughlin" <ian at platinum.net>
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Sent: Thursday, 28 February, 2013 3:26:38 AM
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Personal DECstation 5000/25

Mark,

This is great!   Do you happen to have the Y2K patches?   From what I have read, 4.4 and 4.5 were issued Y2K patches.
Do the patches just patch `date` or do they patch subsystems?   You can work around `date` not supporting y2k if you drop the year from the command.


I spent a bit of time with the machine this evening, and it's not as dead as I thought it was.   I was actually able to boot the hard drive in to single user mode (it was complaining about a drive at SCSI ID 1 that is missing).   It comes up as:

ULTRIX V4.2A (Rev. 47) System #1: Wed Jun 10 12:25:55 PDT 1992
real mem = 12582912
avail mem = 8585216
using 307 buffers containing 1257472 bytes of memory
DECsystem 5000 Model 25 - system rev 48
64Kb Instruction Cache, 64Kb Data Cache
cpu0 ( version 3.0, implementation 2 )
fpu0 ( version 4.0, implementation 3 )
asc0 at ibus3
rz0 at asc0 slave 0 (RZ25)
ln0 at ibus3
ln0: DEC LANCE Ethernet Interface, hardware address: 08:00:2b:30:13:34  
scc0 at ibus3
fd0 at ibus3
dti0 at ibus3
lost battery backup on clock
WARNING: lost battery backup clock -- CHECK AND RESET THE DATE!
Sun Dec 31 16:26:16 PST 1995
Automatic reboot in progress...
/dev/rz0a: 1035 files, 13145 used, 2198 free (38 frags, 270 blocks, 0.2% fragmentation)
/dev/rz1c: couldn't open character device for /dev/rrz1c

/dev/rz1c: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY.
/dev/rrz0g: umounted cleanly
Automatic reboot failed.   Unable to insure
file system integrity.   Run the fsck
command manually.
erase ^?, kill ^U, intr ^C
#  

I was able to see the file system and poke around.   The newest timestamps on files are 1994, so it looks like this machine was last booted 19 years ago :)   I even found a couple of unread test email messages.   Version 4.4 is certainly newer that 4.2A.

Mark, are the disks you have original DEC disks?   If so, are you able to capture the data on the label also, so I can add the images to my collection?

thanks for locating them!

Ian


On 2013-02-28, at 12:12 AM, Mark Wickens <mark at wickensonline.co.uk> wrote:
I'm uploading 4.4 now (not been able to locate 4.5). I do have the layer products disks for this as well however!
I'll pass on details when it's available.

Regards, Mark.


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Cory Smelosky 
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