30 Jun
2018
30 Jun
'18
12:48 a.m.
On Fri, 29 Jun 2018 09:16:12 -0400 <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
The recent reference to the Dennis's comments on
ATT chip
production had me feeling nostalgic to the 3B line of computers.
In the late 80's I was in charge of all the UNIX systems (among
other things) at the state university system in New Jersey. As a
result we got a lot of this hardware gifted to us. The 3B5 and
3B2s were pretty doggy compared with the stuff on the market
then. The best thing I could say about the 3B5 is that it stood
up well to having many gallons of water dumped on it (that's
another story, Rutgers had the computer center under a seven story
building and it still had a leaky roof).
We had huge numbers of 3B2s at Columbia that were gifted to us by
AT&T. They didn't know what to do with the things, so the undergrads
were subjected to using them for their labs for a few classes like
computer graphics. The blits attached to them were neat, though. If
only the same could have been said for the overall system.
The 3B20 was another
thing. It was a work of telephone company art. You knew this
when it came to power it down where you turned a knob inside the
rack and held a button down until it clicked off.
We had one of those donated, too. It was put into an extra machine
room and not used for very much, I think because the version of the
OS it came with didn't really do networking at a point where
everything else at the Columbia CS department did.
At one point we considered reusing its disk pack drives for some of
the Vaxes but unfortunately the cabling was incompatible.
Perry
--
Perry E. Metzger perry(a)piermont.com