UNIX hardware?

[AndyLandy]

One thing I've noticed a distinct lack of on AmiBay is retro UNIX hardware. I don't think I've ever seen anyone buying or selling any. Do any of you guys collect Sun hardware or SGI boxes or anything like that? Even better, if you have any nice pics of them, why not post them here? We all love a nice bit of hardware pr0n on AmiBay!

 

[MindWalker]

There is always Amiga Unix (Amix)

I had my first touch to Unix only recently (and naturally through Amix on real hardware). I have been toying with the idea of buying a real UNIX machine, some of those old Sparcstations look pretty nice. Haven't found anything particulary interesting yet (nor anything local to avoid shipping).

 

[salaxi54]

Albeit not much of retro hardware, and hopefully not projecting my sales thread: https://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?77645-SunFire-V210-complete-server

 

[RichyV]

Only ever used Sco UNIX myself - ran on x86 hardware, so nothing worth collecting...

 

[RobA1200]

I've worked for halfords for over 20 years and our old system, HALO, HALfords Online was DOS and unix based. I'm pretty sure we were quite unique in that other companies would buy in software packages. ours was toppled together with more and more piled onto.

we had the parts ordering system that would identify cars and parts required and generate order numbers and track local supplied orders. to our main warehouse system to deliver to individual stores approx 350 then. charge large labour and track MOTs and control wages and payroll. as we ran it all in house, system outages were common but not to bad. as sometimes only the single person who had written that piece of cobalt code knew how to rectify it.

however there were no delays, eery keypress was instant. we ran in 4 colours as far a i remember. PTS parts lookup was seen on topper when clarkson asked for a turbo for a bugatti, years before the veyron.

we backed up onto tape each night and ran varian start of day programs at store level, then end of day ones. we printed on to dot matrix far later than was common.

was great times.

i still remember all the logins and passwords.

there is said to be a bootable cd rom version flowing around but I've never seen one. we only dumped it as we ran it on outdated BOOTs servers and they were due to close - years after BOOTs had sold halfords....

 

[Rave]

I acquired a NeXT cube, which is technically UNIX, and Motorola 68040.

You can read about my exploits here:

http://nextstepcube.blogspot.co.uk/

 

[CraigsBar]

I acquired a NeXT cube, which is technically UNIX, and Motorola 68040.

You can read about my exploits here:

http://nextstepcube.blogspot.co.uk/

You lucky man! I'd sell anything for one of those

 

[sputnik]

Whilst Unix hardware is interesting and important in computing history, I think the lack of overall popularity (with notable exceptions) comes down to the old chestnut:

Not Many Games

I mean I've owned the same hardware used to create some of the CGI in T2 / Jurrassic Park, yet when I wanted to sell them a few years back, no-one was interested... even for free.

 

[AndyLandy]

Not Many Games

Quite! The thought did occur to me when I asked the question, that it's probably the lack of games that mean people aren't really interested in UNIX hardware to the same degree as other retro computers.

I think I'm still surprised at how unpopular they are though. There are a lot of people on AmiBay, I'd have thought there'd have been a little more interest. Apparently not!

 

[commodorejohn]

I think it has to do with the fact that these weren't things the average family had, so there isn't the childhood-nostalgia factor involved (for most.) Even over on Nekochan, most of the users are either industry old hands who used them at work or people who read about SGI boxen in the press back when computer graphics in movies were a hot new thing.

Anyway, I've owned a couple Sun Ultra and Ultra II workstations in the past, but I had to give them away to a good home when I moved. Since then, I've picked up a nicely-loaded Blade 2000 (2x1GHz UltraSPARC-III w/8GB RAM,) but I've been having a devil of a time getting it working (the video card's an XVR-1000, which apparently can only be used as a framebuffer console with the 13W3 port and not the DVI or VGA ports, so I can't figure out if my complete inability to get it to come up with a framebuffer console is down to an issue with the card, a dodgy 13W3-to-VGA adapter, or who knows what. On top of that, the hard drives I picked up were low-level formatted with the wrong sector size and I'm having a hell of a time figuring out how to re-format them to what Solaris expects when Solaris won't map them because they're the wrong sector size...oy.) I've also got an SGI O2 that I really need to use more.

And yeah, "not many games" is probably also a factor - though it depends on your requirements. I'm generally pretty happy with Quake, some emulators, and a decent selection of roguelikes, so that's not necessarily a barrier.

 

[crrn]

I tried to sell SGI Octane once here on Amibay. No response though, and I sold it trough polish auctioning portal.
Over last 5 years I collected 5 SGI machines, but sold 4 of them to get money for Amigas True story.
I had 2 Indis, 1 Fuel (beautiful machine inside and outside), 2 Octanes. Right now I only have Octane 2 which I love to fire up from time to time.

I still have come kind of test between, say A4000 and SGI from 1994. To see how they compare software (3d, 2d) wise. No time though.

Oh and I have games. Doom comes preinstalled on IRIX
Will try t post some images later today.

 

[storhemulen]

I got some old SGI boxes in my stash that a previous employer was about to throw in the dumpster. Storhemulen says no.
They were used as workstations for CAE stuff, such as FE analysis. Never ever crashed, which was not the case when we started using regular PCs.

SGIs rescued:

1 Octane
1 Indy
2 Indigo

 

[Drag0nFly]

Octane 2 (IP30), VPro (Odyssey V12 DCD), 6GB RAM

Octane 2 (IP30), VPro (Odyssey V12 DCD), 6GB RAM

I think the main issue with selling (or trading) SGIs is the shipping cost, as I am sure there would be Amibayers interested in this hardware (which coincidentally shares some of the characteristics with Amigas - i.e specialized graphics, i/o and not to mention great audio specs - to name a few)

Doesn't seem like many dared post any pictures of these, so I'll weigh in.

 

[KBQ]

I always found workstations really appealing, the idea of having some bigass 1280x1024 monitor in the late 80s... Cower puny mortals.

Even better the super old stuff like the ICL Perq! Giant monochrome displays and computer cases big as a desk height filing cabinet.

 

[Ed.D]

When I joined HP in 1994 there were a lot of HP9000/300 workstations being used to test the disk drives that we manufactured. There were various swap-outs of newer generations over the years until I left in 2008, my favorite was the C-Class (C110 I think) desktop workstation with a 21" CRT monitor, circa 2001-2002. I've seen these from time to time on the other bay and pondered buying one.

 

[slaz]

I had an O2 for a while - got it for peanuts - half in bits - with a coupla things missing - but managed to get the missing bits through comp.sys.sgi.hardware if I remember rightly.
It was an r5000 @180MHz I think. Lovely thing really - just futzed around with it TBH. It nearly got put to good use when some people I was working with came back from San Francisco having seem develepment of a real-time virtual puppetry system running on SGI. They'd developed a bunch of physical input devices e.g. modified joysticks, foot pedals etc. wacky stuff. My mates invested quite a bit in those peripherals - and we were getting ready to get going with it all (running on my O2) - when the California geeks just upped and disappeared :-/

 

[CStich]

I have an Apollo Domain DN3500 workstation - ex NASA / Johnson Space Center. Was used for the initial CAD drawings of what became the International Space Station (Freedom, then Alpha, then ISS).
Not quite UNIX, though. Runs Aegis 9.7 and Domain OS 10.4 - not at the same time, of course.

 

[AngryInca]

I have worked in UNIX my whole life - my first taste was the SGI lab at the University of Central Lancashire. It got me hooked, so I found Linux (and FreeBSD) and got Slackware with KDE working on my home PC in 1994.

Over the years I've had a number of UNIX workstations - for example a Sun Ultra 2 and an SGI Indy. I wasn't getting anything out of running retro UNIX hardware so I gave it up.

The thing with Amigas, Atari STs, Amstrad CPCs and C64s is - they do something unique that you can't do on a modern PC without an emulator. The UNIX boxes are just old versions of PCs running Linux, yes I appreciate they have different hardware architectures etc. but untimely they do the same thing, but slower and using more electricity. What I found was I'd set up the Ultra 2, patch it, then immediately start working on getting modern software that I want compiled on it, at that point I was basically running on crippled hardware as compared to using a classic Amiga 1200 with an high end accelerator which is the peak of the architecture for Amiga games and applications.