Hmm. Odd. Sent from MSN
________________________________________ From: Lennart Sorensen <lsore...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> Sent: April 20, 2016 8:01:19 AM To: Teh Currymonstah Cc: debian-powerpc@lists.debian.org Subject: Re: Sharpen your LARTs, n00b alert. On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 03:17:15PM +0100, Teh Currymonstah wrote: > Possibly not.. Though I have a few spare hard disks, so may give it a go for > the craic. Well if you have the time to play with it, might as well. > There used to be an x37something emulator in Debian. The font is still > there, and I can probably get it from one of the archives and build against > a more modern distro. The physical connection, on the other hand, may be > problematic. I don't have passwords for the machine, so need to do an IPL > from an operations console to get whatever system is there up to start with. > It does make lots of loading-stuff-from-disk noises, and the occasional > wheeze like the water recycling pumps on an old triple phase steam engine in > a certain sea-going paddle steamer. So promising. My understanding is that > it was replaced (with a non-IBM Windows<spit> "server"!!) because IBM > refused to provide ongoing support, and, until I was mentioned, was heading > for the dump. Understandable. :) > >As far as I can tell they removed that model from sale 12 years ago. > Yep, that will be the one. One of my much more modern machines then. :-D Well I guess it might be newer than my Alphas. > >So even if you have all the needed software and if it works, it will be > >quite slow (a 262MHz early powerpc design is not going to be fast). > It will be faster than the Vax. (though only about 50x faster, nothing to > write home about..) Well that's not saying much. > >But if you have all the needed software and licenses for the machine, > Errm.. The software is on the disk. IBM are considering a "hobbyist > licence".) Very nice. > >and you want to say "I did it", then it seems like it ought to be at > >least theoretically possible as a toy project. > That's the one, exactly. Oh, and as a bootp/tftp/installer for the OpenMOSIX > rack. (just so it pays rent on the floor space..) Well if you make any progress I would love to hear about it. -- Len Sorensen
