This is the only picture I can find of this machine, but I think this was the singular machine that got me interested in UNIX/Linux back in the 90s.
I had a summer job at a place called List Services in Trowbridge CT, and amongst other things they did direct mail processing.
Their main gig was an IBM ES/9000 mainframe, but they had one of these in the back corner serving one of their back office departments on another floor.
It could take up to 4 Pentium 166 processors (this is back in 99) … and it has 6 hot swap removable hard drive bays (on the bottom section of the case) … It ran SCO OpenServer - which doesn’t exist anymore. I’m not sure how much RAM it had, but I do know the one I saw only had 1 processor in it, but it had 8 gigs of HDD space in RAID (no idea what raid level) …
in 1999 this was drool worthy for me - Pentiums weren’t really widely used yet, and holy crap, 8 gigs of hard drive space… it was unthinkable for me.
So ever since then I’ve always had a soft spot for these obscure beasts.
No wonder they only used one of the processor slots… SMP on SCO OpenServer was prohibitively expensive… It’s almost like they pushed customers to go Windows NT - because Windows NT Server, out of the box, supported SMP (up to 2 CPU - or was it 4?).
It was at least another $1000 or more I think, if you wanted a 2nd CPU and SMP on SCO OpenServer. Almost every feature you wanted to add to OpenServer cost $$$ and it was enforced, you had to use a license activation key. Because so many shops ran SCO (e.g. big spare parts warehouses and outlets, Pizza Hut and others like that) they thought they had their customers by the short and curlies.
1999? I was working on Pentium II and III systems running SCO OpenServer. I only remember one instance where they had 2 Xeon (yeah - they even used that name back then!) CPU - essentially then a “Xeon” was just Pentium II or III with extra cache (that was back in the day of Slot 2 Intel CPU on a riser card). But I remember talking to a former colleague at my previous place of work, and they’d got a HP Pentium Pro server with dual CPU for SCO OpenServer, for a new system, and realised they had to pay like $1000 (or more?) extra to use SMP. In all cases, these SCO systems were for running Progress RDBMS. **
When SCO tried to sue IBM for alleged use of UNIX copyright and IP in Linux (why IBM?) - I had a whole collection of photocopied SCO OpenServer license keys and activation codes, and was tempted to release them to warez groups - anyone remember “warez”?
** I remember another shitty UNIX vendor - Data General with DG-UX (I preferred their UNIX to SCO OpenServer though!) would let you install it and run it without a license. So I was doing a project to migrate stuff off some single CPU 20 Mhz (you read that right) DG AViiON systems, onto a dual 88K (Motorola RISC CPU at a whopping 40 Mhz!) with 128 MB of RAM. Testing went flawlessly - everything worked (mostly just copying binaries and databases). Sweet! Come the morning to cutover? User number 3 tried to login and got refused access - turns out “out of the box” DG-UX would limit users to TWO! Took a couple of hours (Data General was already end of life - that was 2000) but we tracked down a former staff member who told us where there was a cabinet that had license documents in a folder! Phew!
Zenith also had some weird ass architecture, if I remember correctly. something about daughter boards being the way you do “expansion” … I love the stabilizer feet thingies on the case too. It’s like making a statement about how massive it is with those. lol
Oh and that machine was as noisy as a server as well. Had 3 big fans, and you could heat the room up with the exhaust from that thing. Needed to be in an air conditioned room.
That LED readout was a nice touch too.
I just remember seeing that machine, and seeing the # prompt, and being like “I gotta check this out” … so I went home and installed Red Hat Linux on a drive that I had a removable caddy for. It all went downhill from there. I didn’t understand the concept of a server back then, so I remember wondering why no one ever came down and messed with it directly. I think I wished I could play Quake on it or something…
I just remember being really impressed with that machine, and being really disappointed when they ultimately did away with it in favor of Windows Server machines. Probably because of the expense of the license, like you say.
And yeah, I was into warez when I used to dial up to BBSes back before the internet was a thing. lol … I got so much free shit. lol
No - SCO actually licensed Microsoft Xenix in the 1980’s - that’s what got Santa Cruz Operation off the ground - I think their first UNIX was just call SCO Xenix (and the splash screens of SCO OpenServer boot displayed stuff about Xenix and Microsoft)… So it was the reverse of your suggestion… I just remember what a steaming pile of crap OpenServer was - e.g. 8 character limit for hostname? Have to reboot when changing IP address or adding a new IP address onto a multiple-NIC machine.
Then Novell sold SCO UnixWare and they became the worldwide owner of the name “UNIX”…
I never even tried UNIXWare - ever… It was SystemV not SRV4 I believe.
I mostly accessed warez via IRC with 0 day FTP sources for stuff… sometimes on usenet… But my main internet was through Uni - and dial up was 300 baud modem pool - so I’d telnet to my shell on one of the UNIX servers (I think it was Solaris or maybe AIX) and grab FTP downloads from warez to my shell - then - drive or ride (my motorcycle) into the campus to take advantage of the sneakernet (i.e. copying to floppies when onsite)…
I didn’t have proper dial up internet at home until 1997 (33.6 k/baud) - but had access to it from work from 1995 (including a not-quote-kosher coaxial “hack” I’d jack into a University WAN in my building) - before that it was only when I was on-campus, or the 300 baud modem pool…
One of my favourite things about warez was things like getting the “gold” floppy images for Windows 95 in June 1995! The plebs had to wait till August 1995 - and some sad f–kers actually camped outside some computer shops here where I live to get their copy the day it came out… I also got a copy of Windows XP “final” about 6 weeks before it went into the shops (by then I had ADSL).
By 1993 I also had access to Compuserve through work - which had lots of “Gateways” to the internet… but no direct internet access…
1994 - got retrenched from that job - so had to use Uni’s internet again - and yeah - probably via AIX (but it could have been Solaris - don’t remember exactly)… But in 1994 I also was a member of a BBS (subscribed) - which allowed me a WHOPPING TWO HOURS online and - a MASSIVE 2 Megabytes of downloads : DAILY! When I used up my daily quota - I’d go scanning all the BBS in my metro area…
Most BBS had some kinda tentative link to the internet, even if they just got some kinda “daily digest”…
When I was in college, we had a 300 baud acoustic coupler available to checkout from the dorm office and did Pascal on cards (for the first semester). It’s amazing anyone stuck with it. It was pretty painful really.
I had forgotten all about Compuserve. I was never a customer. I used AOL 10 years after college when they finally had 9600 available in my area. The bad old days.
I remember FidoNet being something like that. There was a thing called FrontDoor that sat in front of the BBS and every night around 2am (when long distance rates were low) it would pass around daily “digests” of early email.
I can remember using a crt screen with a 1200 baud modem.
One of the merits of vi was that it would work over a modem
connection, because it was designed to work over a serial line.
Using the work computer from home with that gave me a 4Mhz cpu with BSD and a graphics editor. I thought it was hi-tech at the time.
It was horrible to use vi over serial to a Sun console! I’d start editing a file - then try to scroll down and be unable to see what I’d just edited or typed - and have to exit (q!)… Then ype “export term=vt100” or something and then “stty erase ^H” and re-type out what I’d previously attempted… I mostly tried to avoid having to do anything like that in the first place…
It was a vast improvenent over using a line editor on a teletype.
I had a crt screen with a scrollback button… it kept about 200 lines in a hardware buffer. That helped.
I remember that recovery procedure you described… serial lines and gettys did give people access but dropouts were a fact of life. It did not really improve until ethernet arrived.
Same here - and on MS DOS 4.x too… Thank god DOS 5 and 6.x came with a proper text editor… People who whine about vi had obviously never use edlin…
I remember one time when my CRT monitor died, and I needed to get a Uni assignment off my HDD onto a floppy - I “blindly” had to type some DOS (3.3 or 4 I think?) command to echo ALL output to lpt1 (printer - it was dot matrix) and used my computer like a teletype to get the files onto a floppy… Might have been just as easy to do that blindly too - but I couldn’t remember which DIR the files were in - so needed to echo the output of the dir command a few times (to my dot matrix printer).
- anyone remember “warez”?