That was it: MP-RAS. It was neat, kind of good, but to be honest Windows
NT 3.51 and 4.0 ran very well on it.
Just weighed a literal ton. For all I know it's still in the basement of
their Dupont Center office (now long closed)
C
On 7/21/2020 11:50 AM, Kevin Bowling wrote:
Wow, would love to have a machine like that. The “weird unix” was
probably MP-RAS which was NCR’s SysVr4. NCR was selling massive x86 MCA
systems for Terradata setups in the early ‘90s.
On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 8:54 AM Chris Zach via cctalk
<cctalk@classiccmp.org <mailto:cctalk@classiccmp.org>> wrote:
Now in terms of the most MANLY system I worked on, that would be the
NCR3550 we had at the IEEE Computer Society. When I arrived in 1993 it
had been donated, but was doing nothing with 4 486 CPUs in it and a
weird copy of AT&T unix. I took one look at the 256 bit interleaved
memory architecture the 3 levels of cache with affinity, the infinite
amount of space for disks, and the dual micro-channel busses and
fell in
*love*
We talked to NCR, upgraded it to 512mb memory, 8 Pentium Pro/200 CPUs,
and dual Microchannel busses with FDDI and Ethernet interfaces. Loaded
it with disks, installed Windows NT 4.0 on it, and turned it into
TALOS,
the main server for the IEEE Computer Society's Digital Library
(which I
built).
Partnered with Anderson and Netscape to multi-thread commerce server
(SSL), built an E-account system in Lotus Domino/Notes, and loaded up
all of our SGML with an SGML to HTML converter (Dynaweb) and a custom
tool that could convert Tek math to GIFs on the fly. That process could
take advantage of all 8 CPUs and render complex math articles in
real time.
Also did e-commerce for awhile with online credit card processing for
memberships and conferences (SuperComputing/95 was the first conference
to do on-line credit cards, I built that too because I was sick and
tired of keying in the cards myself. Laziness is next to godliness)
It served for years as the CS Digital Library core server with
30,000-40,000 accounts in active use. Man that thing was a truck, I
wish
I knew what had happened to it.
And to think, it all started with the computer room ceiling collapsing
from all the RS232 cables from the Vax and crushing our Sun Sparc 20
web
server that kicked off this whole thing.
I should write a book or an article about that. We did so much that was
so... new... and all of that could be forgotten like tears in the
rain....
CZ
On 7/16/2020 11:40 AM, Ali via cctalk wrote:
>>> Had a full compliment of memory,
>>> max internal disk on the ATA controller,
>>
>> ATA? That long ago?
>>
>> Possible but unusual in a server, I would have thought.
>
> Funny story about that - I just setup a Systempro XL at home to
play with. It is fully decked out w/ dual processor 50MHZ 486s (not
DX2), 512MB of memory, a 4GB SCSI Boot Drive and six 2GB SCSI drives
in RAID 5. The Compaq systems came standard with what Compaq called
the IDA (Intelligent Drive Array). It was IDE based but did not use
standard IDE drives. I think it could do RAID 0, 1, and 3 (or the
equivalents there of). Compaq even had a few iterations of the
controller and cached ones. Interestingly the Systempro XL had a
SCSI 2 controller on the MB mainly used for the tape dive or CD
while the base config came with an IDA 2 controller and could have
up to eight drives. In addition you could install extra IDA
controllers for even more drives or to drive external boxes. Or you
could upgrade to a SCSI array - which is what I have running in my
Systempro XL.
>
>
>>
>> What OS, just out of interest?
>
> Target OS was WinNT 3.1 initially and then 4.0. 2K was also
supported but the machine really was not meant for 2k. You could
also run OS/2, Novell Netware, Compaq DOS, and supposedly there was
even a version of MS LanMan (the full server OS not the client) for
the Systempro that allowed SMP.
>
> -Ali
>
