31 Jan
2021
31 Jan
'21
1:57 p.m.
"Ronald Natalie" <ron(a)ronnatalie.com> wrote:
Probably faster than the 3B1 was in real life.
Seems about as fast as I remember the hardware being, but that was
well over 25 years ago, so I don't know for sure.
Being an educational institution in NJ (Rutgers) we
had all sorts of
AT&T stuff donated to us, 3B2's, 3B5's, and 3B20's.
Yes, Georgia Tech got 3B2s and 3B20s. An instructor there referred to the
3B20s as white elephants, and explained it to me (since I didn't know):
A white elephant is something obviously rare and valuable, but what
exactly do you do with it? :-)
Ours had a bunch of the CDC 300 Meg washing machine disk drives. A huge
amount of storage for the time. We (the lab staff) wanted to port BSD
Unix to them, but that never went anywhere.
The 3B2 was the first machine that I came across I
think with a soft
power switch. Amusingly, the thing would not let you shut it down
unless you were root (apparently, you don't have power switch privs as a
normal user).
I remember occasionally just pulling the plug...
The 3B1 was a pleasure in comparison. Afforadable on a personal level
and eminently usable.
Arnold