Re: 3B2 Disks

On 2009-01-16, Bill Gunshannon <billg999@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <slrngn0af1.298.dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"DoN. Nichols" <dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
On 2009-01-15, Bill Gunshannon <billg999@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <slrngmtmo2.40g.dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"DoN. Nichols" <dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

[ ... ]

ceilidh!uunet!username@FQDN


I keep trying to convince people that we really need to revive this email
system. It offers the best and quickest solution to the SPAM problem but
apparently I am the only one who can see that.

You know -- I think that would work! (Of course, it would bring
most uses of email to its knees given today's user base. :-)

Why? It could, thoretically reduce the amount of email traversing
the network by, easily, an order of magnitude as there is at least
that much junk. If anything, it would increase the performance.
The only shortcoming in the concept of UUCP based Email is eliminated
by the use of the INTERNET as the transport medium. Seriously, what
would you see as the shortcomings of this idea?

What I was suggesting is that the user base would have to be
totally re-educated -- and a lot of them would fight it tooth and nail.

Aside from that -- bang paths are vulnerable to a single machine
in the path going out of service between the receipt of the incoming
e-mail and the sending of the reply.

But it would sure make it easy to track down the originator of
spam -- or at least the compromised machine sending it out. :-)


And, the 3B2 had no TCPIP. Eventually
Woolongong did one but AT&T never did that I was aware of. That was
a Berkeley thing, not SYS V.

The 3B1 used the WillGoWrong TCP/IP package -- with certain
problems:

[ ... ]

Do you remember when it was also the TCPIP package on VMS?

I never ran VMS -- or even accessed a machine running it. I've
got a friend who has been collecting VAXen in all sizes, and does run
VMS at home on one or two of the smaller ones. Not enough power to spin
up the larger ones, let alone not enough room. :-)

I dumped all my big disks (RA-series and Fuji Eagles) but VAXen can
use smaller, more modern disks. I have a number of VAXStation-3100's
that use SCSI and sit on a desktop running VMS quite well.

Sure -- but he had multi-bay machines which he could never run
as well. :-)


Of course,
I think they were also the ones who gave us "Eunice". :-)

Oh yes -- the only experience with "Eunice" that I have is the
comment from Larry Wall's "configure" script "Oh good! You're not
running Eunice." which told me that it must be pretty bad. :-)

Probably the first attempt at what later became known as POSIX. :-)
Actually, it worked OK. It was near the resource hog the first Ada
compiler was!! :-)

Hmm ... I remember being shocked when I heard that DEC claimed
POSIX compliance for VMS. :-)

And, IIRC, the major problem with running unix-inspired things
on VMS was that process creation on unix was dirt cheap -- just a
"fork", However, on VMS, it was quite expensive, so a program which was
quite happy on even an old v7 unix machine would bring VMS to its knees.

[ ... ]

Remember where UUNET came from?

I really never knew -- though I did know that they were local,

There used to be a site called "seismo".

That name sounds familiar.

It grew gradually to become
the center of USENET and the non-AT&T UUCPNET. Then one day, someone
at the government realized that the machine, in a government site, run
by the government, consuming government resources was not doing government
business and ordered it to be shut down.

Hmm ... this reminds me of what happened to the system running
TOPS-20 -- a major repository of open source software. Ah yes -- I
remember the name now -- simtel20. Many's the time I telneted to that
from work -- and even some from home eventually.

This would have been rather
a disaster to USENET and a lot of people's email. So, sapce was rented
and a new machine set up to take over the job of being the hub of USENET
and UUCPNET and UUNET was born. It took on a life of its own and the
rest, as they say, is history. I think Rick Adams did nicely by that
particular venture. Too bad other people didn't have the same vision
he had or things might have developed much better than they have.

Indeed so.

and even once visited them (before they moved) to pick up an Exabyte
tape of the sources tree.

UUNET seems to be dead, but ftp.uu.net still is out there -- it
just hasn't been updated in years.

Domain belongs to Verizon. ;-(

Sigh! So does the copper that my T1 comes through. And they
keep trying to push me onto FIOS -- but won't offer me static IPS, and
especially a Class-C block of IPs.

[ ... ]

existed in NEPA. They could not see where anyone would be willing to
pay money for something like Email or News. :-(

Interesting. *I* certainly was willing to do so -- even while
working for an Army lab and getting access to Arpanet at the time.

Yeah, that was a great example of the shortsightedness of people around
here.

Where is "here"?

I had a similar experience with a local PC company who contracted
me to set them up in the ISP business. After many hours of work I showed
up one day, not too long before we would have gone live, to find the
servers I was building wiped and loaded with Windows. I was told they
decided not to pursue that line of business. They gave me a check for
what they thought my work was worth and told me goodbye. I could have
sued them for breach of contract in order to get the rest of my money
but decided it wasn't worth the headache. I have never done any contract
work around here since and never would.

Ouch! You should have used machines which would not support
Windows -- then they couldn't do that. :-)


[ ... ]

It *did* make it easier to break into a system which you had
lost the password for. Log in as guest (by default no password), send
yourself some e-mail, then click on the mail icon when it popped up, and
bang out of the mail program to a root shell. :-)

Yeah, I remember that. Kind of like iPhones that all over the world have
the same root password. ;-)

Ouch! I don't have one. Do they even give you access to change
the password?

Sure. it's just a linux box in your pocket. Has an sshd available.

Yes -- but through what path? Does it have an ethernet jack?
Or are you stuck having to expose it to connections over the air?

Do they warn you that it should be changed.

It can't be changed. If you change it, the phone don't work anymore.

That is terrible.

Luckily, there is no daemon accepting incoming connections by default,
but many people turn on ssh. And, one never knows what gets done when
you visit one of those whiz-bang web sites. :-)

:-)

I had a really neat demonstration of using a hacked iPhone as a bug.
Demonstrator passed an iPhone around the room and while it was making
the rounds he turned on the microphone and recorded all the conversations
on his PC. Afterwards, he played it all back. There was no way we could
tell from looking at the iPhone that he was doing this. It's as scary
as OnStar!!

:-)


[ ... ]

Yeah, I have a couple of QBUS M68K cards that would make great OS9-68K
machines. And, it's ROMable!!

I actually have such as set of Qbus cards too.

Integrated Solutions?

I don't know. The cards are out in /dev/barn01, with a lot of
stuff which I would need to move to reach them, and I don't have the
cage to plug them into.

You want one? :-) of course, you'll need more QBUS modules if you
actually want to use it.

Which -- the backplane? Yes, I would like one. There was a
suite of about four or five boards with it. IIRC, there is a ribbon
cable bus on the outside edge of the cards to supplement the Q-bus.

Now that I think of it -- it had apparently run Sys-III, and
I've still got a box of the OS manuals out in /dev/barn02 on top of a
rack full of stuff.


Right now -- even if I had lights in that building -- I would
not go out. It is bloody cold out there right now,

Not as cold as here. I had pipes wrapped with an electric heat-tape
and insulation that were frozen this morning. Got to move south!!

Ouch! Where is "here"? I'm in Northern VA, FWIW.

and I doubt that I
could touch anything without launching a static zap. Ask me in the
summertime when the head and humidity will just about kill me before I
dig that far back. :-)

If so, which PROMs? They had two. One booted a
version of Unix (which I have not been able to find) and the other was
MIKBUG (I think). Mine have the Unix boot PROMs. :-(

How do I tell? Especially without a card cage to run them in.

Well, you can read the label on the PROM if it's still there, otherwise,
you have to fire ut up and see what you get for a prompt.

Depends on whether the PROMs just had a label stuck on (which
may have faded or blown away) or whether they were metal-capped PROMs or
something with a MelInk stamped identifier. Hmm ... not EPROMs, but
bipolar single use ones?

And with the 68K's address space, you could put the whole OS
including device drivers and device descriptors in ROM (except for
something which you were developing) and have plenty of address space
left for your applications.

Even on a SWTP 6809, with 56 K of RAM, and a lot of OS-9 in 4K
of EPROM there was enough room so my wife and I could use it as the same
time, as long as I avoided running a big Pascal compile, or used the
work processor (Stylo, IIRC.)

OS-9 was rather amazing that way. Imagine the looks on people's faces
when I demoed three people logged into a Tandy Color Computer with 1 floppy
and two serial ports (one bit banger and one UART based) and, of course,
the console. And, I hears it was possible to modify the RS232 PAK so
that with a MultiPAK interface you could even have two more serial
ports and support users on all of them. All with a 6809 and 64K of
memory.

Yep! And the later CoCos actually had 128K of RAM, and ran
Level-2 OS-9.

Yeah, I got that, too. :-)

I never did pick up one of the expanded ones. About that time,
I was digging into multiple unix boxen, starting with the COSMOS
CMS16/UNX.

[ ... ]

Try what one friend encountered when bringing a big military
surplus transmitter home in the trunk of a car. He and his friend could
*barely* lift it -- but the car kept following it up, so getting it clear
of the trunk was a major problem. :-)

T-368? :-)

Probably. I don't remember the model, as I never saw it. I
only heard about it years later.

I used to be a radio teletype operator int he Army and remember that
one well. I know a number of them have ended out in surplus and went
to ham operators. There's a group that meets on 80M that runs AM and
I know at least one of these guys is using one. Draws more power than
my biggest old iron computer!!

Hmm ... how much power did it put into the final?


[ ... ]


Speaking of SUN 3's..... Know anybody who might be interested in a pair
of Deskside pedestal model 3's?

Which ones? The three slot 3/140, or the 12 slot 3/[12]60?
I've got examples of both. And I can't find anyone who wants them.

Don't know, have to go look. I may roll them up here later today.

If they roll, it is the 12-slot ones. You could carry the
three-slot one, and had to put it in a stand to keep it vertical if you
did not want to lay it down.

The
only part I really want is the 9-track.

Hmm ... I've got one here -- and nothing running the full VME
bus still up, so I can't load the interface card for it.

But I also have a SCSI-Interfaced HP one -- front loading self
threading machine. Not as much fun to watch as two spinning reels, but
it works rather well -- or did when I last used it.

I definitely don't want the
Fuji eagle. I would hate to see them go to the skip, but if I can't
find a home for them, they will.

Indeed. I passed mine on to a regular from
alt.folklore.computers (I think it was -- maybe comp.sys.sun.hardware
instead) who moved to the area and started showing up on
rec.crafts.metalworking. :-)

Still have my Fujitsu M2312Ks (84 MB) which I used on the first
unix box here.

Though I did find someone who wanted the two spare 2/120s and the two
sidecars with two 8" 168MB SMB drives in each. His car (a rental which
was headed back up to the Boston area) was really riding low when he
pulled away. :-)

I just checked and the Physics department
still has their but need to get rid of them real soon now before the move
to the new Science Building.

Hmm ... You know that they could be upgraded to SPARC based
systems with the 4/??? cards -- still use most of the existing cards,
except for the CPU card itself. And you could replace a lot of big RAM
boards with a single one full of 4Mx9 SIMMs.

Of course, I think that they could not run anything past perhaps
Solaris 2.6 -- if that far up the tree. :-)

This place has abandoned all of that. We used to have a bunch of Sparc
here but I just took the last one (an UltraSparc) home. All the rest
were either given away or trashed. :-(

Ouch! Which Ultra was it that you got? I've got Ultra-1
Ultra-5, Ultra-10, Ultra-60, the SF-280R, several SB-1000s and one
SB-2000 at present.


Mine I was running SunOs 4.1.4 for a few years after the other
boxes started to get Solaris 2.x in them.

I never liked Solaris. I think they should have stayed with SunOS.

Well ... there was a tradeoff. On the older machines, I
preferred SunOs 4.1.4 (or SunOs 4.1.1_U1 for the Sun-3 machines), but
for the Ultras, Solaris 10 is quite nice -- especially with zfs in there
giving me a very nice RAID-5 or two on a couple of systems.

The Ultra-5 and Ultra-10 machines are running OpenBSD, so they
feel more like SunOs 4.1.x, except that you can have 15 partitions
(exclusive of the whole disk) instead of only seven.

But Solaris 10 seems to be faster on the newer Ultras, and
OpenBSD has just barely begun to support more than one CPU on the
UltraSPARC machines.

Oh yes -- I just remembered another couple of machines which I
forgot to mention in the list. Solbourne S4000 and S4000DX. Soulbourne
was runing mult-processor on their SPARC systems back when Sun was
claiming that they had to move to Solaris so they *could* run
multi-processor. And for quite a while, I was running a SparcStation 10
with two ROSS double CPU cards in it. Four CPUs -- and to use them I
had to run SunOs 4.1.4 -- Solaris would not touch them because they did
not have on-card cache. :-)

[ ... ]

Well, for one thing, MS would likely have never got the stranglehold on
the industry they have.

Exactly. They didn't know where to steal an OS for the 68K. :-)

Actually, they already had M68K based desktop systems. Ran Unix.

And they could not imagine that a user would want unix, I guess. :-)

No, had nothing to do with what they could run on it. Had to do with
politics and control. Nothing technical in the decision at all.

O.K. Well ... that figures. :-)

Or -- they couldn't make it into a closed system the way they
have with Windows. :-)

Actually, PC's, with the exception of the the PS/2 and MCA, were never
closed.

Right -- the early ones you could get all the data about the
system you wanted.

In those days IBM could sell based solely on their name and
didn't really worry about cloning. (Aside: I know a local company that
paid 3 times as much for SIMMS for their PS/2 from IBM over what it
would have cost to get it from Kingston because they insisted it say
IBM on the box. The memory they got was Kingston Memory rebadged and
shipped in an IBM box.)

But -- later versions of Windows keeps everything possible
hidden -- especially how to run things like the WinModems (which remind
me of the floppy drives used in the Apple-II. :-)

Now, if the PC had started with the 6809 and OS-9 it would have
been a *much* more attractive machine to me. :-)

6809 was already deadend technology by that point.

It was more powerful than the 8088 which the PC started with.
And it had as much a claim to being a 16-bit processor as the 8088 did. :-)

But suffered fromt he same problem that IBM found with their idea to use
the M68K. :-)

Political?

A most interesting conversation. I wonder if anyone else is reading and
enjoying the reminisce? The most traffic this group has seen in a long
time.

I think that some are.

I was away for a couple of days so I could catch up on other
active newsgroups. "comp.sys.3b1" comes early in the reading sequence,
and with all the typing I've been doing there, I would get to the other
newsgroups about time to go to bed. :-)

Enjoy,
DoN.

--
Email: <dnichols@xxxxxxxxxxx> | Voice (all times): (703) 938-4564
(too) near Washington D.C. | http://www.d-and-d.com/dnichols/DoN.html
--- Black Holes are where God is dividing by zero ---
.

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