Big Old HP Server from 1996!
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
- I've previously checked out big, old servers -- but this one is quite different.
HP 9000 K-class service manual (PDF): ftp.parisc-linu...
Sources:
HP9000 K-class CPU board photo: commons.wikime...
HP PowerTrust UPS: www.hpmuseum.ne...
HP ThinLAN AUI transceiver photo: 4gte.com/produ...
Modem Distribution Panel photo: www.ebay.com/p...
HP 9000 Workstation with graphics display photo: commons.wikime...
HP-UX CD photo: archive.org/de...
IBM RS/6000 server photo: en.wikipedia.o...
IBM POWER CPU card photo: commons.wikime...
Sun SPARC CPU photo: commons.wikime...
Sun E450 photo: imgur.com/gall...
HP 9000 series workstation running Debian Linux photo: commons.wikime...
HP 9000 series workstation running NeXTSTEP photo: commons.wikime...
HP press release from early 1997 with list prices: engineering.pu...
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Free Geek's eBay auction for this system ended at $455.
Hopefully local. I would hate to ship it.
Yea with $1,000 - $2,000 shipping I'd guess. Quite possibly even more $.
@@AnthonyGoodley remove a zero from that. If you strap it to a pallet and ship it via ground it's not ridiculous.
@@joeofloath Sure, but would you really want to ship a 25 year old card laden box clad in brittle plastics on a pallet via ground? Survey says pay for the next tier up if you want it to live.
It was local pickup only, which is probably why it didn’t sell for more
We used the audio ports (missing in your model) for condition alerts over loudspeaker in the server/PBX room(s).
Could they have also been used with those weird modems where you put the handset up to a speaker and it listens for the data as a series of tones? Like as a backup of a backup of a backup or for backwards compatibility with really old stuff that used that?
@@forgottencameras those modems with "acoustic couplers" (where you put the handset up to a speaker) also used the standard RS-232 ports, on this server it would have been plugged into the "external modem" connector.
In older HP-UX releases, you could even link audio to /dev/null which created some funny noise in the datacenter ;)
Oh wow, we used to use HP 9000’s in Mission Control in Houston to support mission operations of the Shuttle back in the day. Cool.
(By the way, fingers crossed for Artemis I 😄🤞)
Seeing how they've "restored" the Apollo Mission Control (it's mostly show, real consoles with modern hardware inside, like LCDs instead of CRTs) makes you wonder why they won't stick to this or at least part of it for historic reasons. Especially when they spent ages figuring out the correct type of carpet the room originally had...
I mean, sure you can emulate the entire Apollo era complex at Houston on a desktop these days but that's not as cool as the real deal imho.
Did they dial in with the spaceshuttle?
@@thorsteinj I saw some video of this, the LCD's stand out like a sore thumb, they've ruined 'em.
@@EdwinNoorlander No, that was left to ET
perspective, a 1996 system in operation until 2008, that is 12 years. My home server is an i7-970. made in late 2010/early 2011 and is still running today and likely for some more time, also about 12 years old. No one would flinch about a i7-970. I recall working in the 2007~2012 range and losing my mind whenever I saw a min/late 90s server running something like NT and making it my mission to get rid of these relics. Today we have server 2012 boxes that are starting to be replaced and I feel like 2012 was just yesterday and I'm getting old.
The difference is the OS. A server from 96 isn't going to run an OS from 2008 very well, or if at all. Never mind the many hardware changes in those 12 years. Compared to now where an i7-970 will run pretty much whatever you want and if you need something hardware wise its board doesn't support, you can hop on over to ebay or where ever and most likely find exactly what you need.
@@osrr6422 at my Workplace there are Servers still running Xeon X5650 which are from the same generation.
Have to remember that hardware was improving at a much faster rate back then compared to today. A 10 year old 486DX in 2000 was no where near as capable as a second generation core i series workstation from 2010 is today. My main desktop is still a dual dual core Xeon 5150 with 32gb ram from 2006 with hardly any upgrades. I could certainly use an upgrade but it is handling Windows 10 and kubuntu with no issues so no big incentive to upgrade yet.
@@kathrynradonich3982 I agree and I wasnt trying to imply that these 90s systems were actually still good in late 2ks but more to reflect on how much has changed and accelerated since the 90s.
The main thing is single user Vs. 1000s. Just like my 1993 386 was still tolerable for games in 96, the i7 is still ok. But for a lot of users a desktop grade system lasts one generation, while servers need to be good for 2-3 even IF you start replacing after 3yrs. And what always pissed me off in the past: people never upgraded Ram at all, ignored broken raid bbus / never properly enabled caching and then they throw out systems that never ran well... Like Xeon 5500 series that could easily fit 96GB and they run one as their SBS server with like 8GB Ram.
I worked for HP back in the '90s doing software dev on the 9000 series with HP-UX. PA-RISC was a very unique architecture at the time.
I really hated having to deal with HP-UX. I especially hated dealing with HP's pre-boot environments, because it was always a fight to get them to pick up and use the boot media I wanted them to use.
Sold and supported the same. I came from the MPE side with HP3000’s. These were the smallest server system we made at the time. I did have a HP 712 desktop “workstation” on my desk and I really learned HP-UX that way…
I remember there was some compatibility with Power/PPC architectures as they started as a joint effort, am I correct?
@@tomsaltner3011 Completely different.
My first Sys Admin Job had one of these and a bunch of HP LC2000 Net Servers. Brings back memories / nightmares, lol.
Thank god you never had to work on VaxVMS machines lol
Omg..I still have a lc2000 netserver in my garage. I need to get rid of it. Funny to hear it mentioned
Pssst, it doesn't have a motherboard, it has a backplane. 😉
Yeah, there's a ton of misinformation and misunderstanding in this video that it hurts. Particularly as he rants about the power supply...
Not knowing the difference between DCE and DTE is frankly a big red flag...
Man, this brings back memories... When I started working, I had access to this beast, along Sun Solaris servers, Compaq TruUnix servers, Digital Unix, Red Hat 6 clients... Being at work looked like being on a spaceship 20 years ago :D
Lol redhat - I had Suns and SGIs
Same! My first job out of high-school back in 1999 was working for a company called DCG Inc and they specialized in Alpha Linux clusters. I built a lot of Alpha systems, the biggest one being like a 20 server cluster for Bloomberg! I even had my own Alpha workstation that I got to use at work for things like AIM and Email. Those were the days!
This was the golden age of computing - those days were fun!
i miss the 90's@@markymark2648
Being a massive HPPA fan, I still have PA-RISC systems here at home and work still running. My oldest is a G40 :) Build date is 1989. I've worked on and setup K-Class's back in the day. (And T's and D's and C's and snakes, and the instruments)... don't get me started.
I also had a few, have one demonstrating at my channel, the line I never quite understood is the E series, single cpu server not that much powerful than a workstation and I think at the time undercompetitive in performance vs. a Pentium or Alpha cpu, I had an E25 fully loaded and it was silly to run 11i on it, it was so slow for a mid 90's server.
When I worked at Sprint, we would indeed put them in a rack on a shelf. Floor space was at a really high premium in our switch houses.
I'm a field server engineer and I've worked on these twice. They are so foreign compared modern servers. I still have a couple customers that still use them for legacy data.
This video resonates so hard with me. I worked as a digital analyst for a large financial services company for about 4 years. We had applications running code written in the 70s running on old IBM mainframes, and we used to joke that we probably had at least one random computer stuffed in a closet somewhere running a critical process.
100 years from now someone is gonna read these comments and think to themselves "All these people are dead now..."
this took ... sad turn
If TH-cam is around by then.
You have a better outlook on the human race then I would expect...
The worst part is than maybe are our newer generations XD
Damn
The CDE login screen on the "graphical interface" is so nostalgic for me. CDE was also the default window manager for Suns Solaris OS and I used that in college. Well, I didn't USE it because I hated it. I always switched to KDE. Yes people KDE existed in the the late 90s and it was so much more familiar and configurable then CDE.
Also fun fact, XFCE one of the least resource intensive desktop environments currently for Linux. Started as a CDE clone. Then they got their act together and made it much better. ;)
For those of you interested in what CDE was like:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Desktop_Environment
CDE is Open Source these days and you can run it on Linux.
Of course, what we really need is een Open Source version of 4dwm ;-).
KDE was bloated and buggy back then and is still bloated and buggy today. Worst DE ever.
@@ps5hasnogames55 maybe up to 5 or 6 years ago but not so much these days, GNOME in my experience is waay more resource intensive and far less usable, a nice minimal KDE-Plasma install is closer to xfce and mate in resource use, and is by far the most consistent in look, feel and configurabiliy.
Kmail does still suck though
@@mrmysteryguest Warning... long rant. "Minimal" KDE just doesn't exist. All of it ties into these useless bloat framworks and Qt is semi-proprietary trash. At least it looks nice and works somewhat like how a normal person expects a computer to work. Too bad KDE crashes on you if you blink at it wrong, and KWin is still a horrible window manager that doesn't work with mutliple monitors. Steam Deck customers are going to be in for a world of pain when they connect their shiny new hardware to an external monitor only for KWin to outright crash on them, or for their panels to go missing when they disconnect the external monitor.
GNOME's idea of a "desktop" is some abstract bullshit that's unusable for an average user. You want desktop icons, like every other desktop has? Too hard to maintain in the file manager so we'll just remove it and force you to install an extension, and if you complain, well you just shouldn't use your computer that way because "minimalism is the future". Tell that to every normal Joe and Mary who just want to get their work done and puts their most-needed documents right on their desktop so it's just one click away. Their developers are arrogant prats (like every other project that Red Hat usurps while parading around that they support free software, lol whatever). While GNOME doesn't have a tonne of framworks, instead it relies on (and is the reason every other distribution is forced to include) subsystems like Systemd, Wayland and PipeWire that nobody asked for. Classic Red Hat forcing everyone to use Linux how they want you to, right down to the init system. Funny how Canonical gets hate for making Linux easy with Ubuntu, but Red Hat gets zero hate when they're the reason your desktop has graphical glitches and random crashes (GNOME on Wayland randomly booting you back to the login screen causing you to lose all your work with no explanation sound familiar?) and your audio doesn't work (PipeWire, just like Wayland, is incomplete, beta-quality software yet they're still trying to force it on everyone), and has loads of security bugs (systemd and all of its tentacles and everything it touches and tries to integrate... and runs all on PID 1 :wink:).
Cinnamon is alright, they have the right idea of how to make a usable desktop and it was forked from GNOME 3 right at the start before Red Hat forced everyone to use insecure and buggy bloat software no one asked for like systemd, Wayland and PipeWire in the name of "innovation". But at the end of the day, it's still GNOME 3. Bloated. MATE and Xfce are lighter, but that's only because they're outdated. You show a desktop runinng MATE or Xfce to an average user, they'll laugh at it thinking it's from 2005. Of course there's still more like that one that Elementary OS has (wow it's just GNOME re-skinned to be even more iPad like... who cares) or that Pop OS Cosmic thing (it's literally just GNOME with more bloat extensions for window tiling, as if any normal computer user works like that).
@@ps5hasnogames55 for the last 17, almost 18 years I have been a Linux user, a distro Admin/Dev, minimalist, and for the last few years recently a more pragmatic user of whatever tool gets the job done.
KDE-Plasma has for the past few years been more stable than any other environment I have tried/used, including the self styled wm only setups I used in the past and does not require a massive investment of time and effort to be usable.
There is no such thing as a perfect distro or desktop environment, if there were, then there would not be so many available.
Plasma Desktop has evolved and is evolving to be among the most usable and configurable environments, both on Linux and FreeBSD.
The issue surrounding the licencing of qt may not become an issue as KDE has documented their plans should it become problematic.
Although I currently use Kubuntu, I would whole heartedly recommend ArchLinux+PlasmaDesktop to anyone, even to adventurous folks not afraid to experiment that are new to Linux
I used to work with a HP9000. It was only turned off 1 time in the years I worked there and all I ever had to do with it was run the daily backups, It worked perfectly! We also still had the HP 3000 it replaced but never needed to hook it back up.
I worked for HPE and the customer we supported had K class machines still online and running in 2020.
Interesting! Reminds me of the MicroVAX II - not the narrow MicroVAX, but the fat box about the same size, and similar interfaces - SCSI, etc. Neat times!
My company is still running an HP9000 D250 in both the US and Canada. It still runs our old ERP software from back in 1998 and is happy to be chugging away in our server room. I loved those long gone days of being the HP-UX guy and was happy to see that maybe I can pick up some side work with whatever knowledge is left in my head.
My dad worked with these up until he retired in 2016. The company he worked for still has them for back end inventory type stuff. I remember them upgrading the one they had in approx 2008 or so. You couldn't buy new parts for the most part so they bought an old one from say ebay or someplace and stripped out the memory and cpu's to max out the one they had. It still worked well and was as fast as a modern server for the job it did with a lot of that due to how well risc chips work for certain applications. The one Achilles heel it had was that it was so old there was no parts or support available from HP anymore.
Thanks for this little visit to the past. i need to admit it makes me feel really old since we replaced many other servers back in the days with the then new K-Classes.
I've got a SGI machine from the same year. It could _theoretically_ fit half a gig of RAM, but was actually limited to much less by the amount of power and cooling that the RAM modules of the time required.
We also had a SGI running all our customer hosted websites and Mail in 1996.....now we have 480 servers to do the same....feeling old
That was back in the day when RAM was a legitimate factor in determining the power draw and cooling requirements of your system. Does yours have the fast-page SIMM modules or did they move on to the SDRAM DIMMs by that point?
The age problem of sysadmins are not as bad as with mainframe. I'm 42 and have installed and managed HPUX, Solaris and AIX plus other Unix dialects. And also had coworkers the same age as me do the same..
Exactly! I hate it when others start playing the ignorant ageism card, saying no one knows how these systems work because everyone that use to use them has all retired!
It's a real discussion point in the mainframe world - I'm a UNIX guy, but our mainframe team is all retirement age and they're looking at pulling me into a hybrid role since half of the Linux systems I maintain run on the mainframe.
Going from Linux to proprietary UNIX is easy, especially if you spend a little time in OSX. Mainframes are a whole different beast.
I was consulting on several HP projects in the early '90's, and I got to crash a prototype one of these in the Cincinnati HP office. They gave me access to it to do my builds, and I threw a -j9 onto my make command line to parallelize the compiles. Locked it up so hard, they had to power it off!
one of these were in an AT&T data center in NJ. I never saw it, but i designed and developed an Informix based application on it. The application was to configure, build, and sell communications equipment and services. Basically this application and server helped build the information superhighway in the late 1990’s
I used computers like this in the early to mid 90s regularly in university. Based on my experience with them they didn't have redundant power supplies because they were actually good, not because we tolerated more downtime.
There is more redundancy in servers today because they are garbage quality in comparison. Today we address downtime by adding more garbage machines instead of just building better ones.
I decommed an HP 9000 recently, it had an uptime of over 13 years! HP sold a custom rack for these that matched the aesthetic of the server. It held several disk arrays in addition to the server, and a common use was as a file server. We used dozens of them like that, each with a whopping 1 or 2 TB of storage! The tape was probably a make recovery a.k.a. Ignite tape, especially if it came from a small environment with no Ignite server. I imagine a system with telephone connectivity like that was used for EDI, maybe even with a bank of bisync modems attached :-)
When I was an undergraduate at MTSU, we had an HP-9000 v2200 server which served the whole campus. Everyone's email and a good chunk of homework was done on that system, which was named "frank". I was a computer science student, and so I was pretty well acquainted with the system. It was pretty cool to log in, run "who", and see like 1500 active users scroll by. I also played with a little assembly code for it. Not a bad instruction set, really.
This one is like a scaled down version of the v series, but it still brings back some good memories. Thanks for sharing!
I love Free Geek Twin Cities! I saw the posting and that it said ebay. Was a little sad but it makes sense since they would get way more $ for it.
Great find, thanks for the video. A box like this would be on a rollaway platform with others of its kind, pontoon drives and related UPS/power and the like. The platform lived under the console desk/rack system.
I worked for a company that built semi-conductor manufacturing equipment and we had one of these fully spec'd out. It drove something like ~60 xterms. Sitting right next to it was another huge HP server which drove ntrigue, which exported NT sessions via X protocol to the xterms. HP UX 10.20 and HP UX 11 were a PITA.
Also that DDS2 drive is likely built by a long defunct company "Exabyte". They worked great were reasonably fast and the tapes were cheap as could be. Neat find.
It's called PA-RISC because the PA is Precision Architecture; HP analysed all the programs they could find, and kept the instructions program actually used. And gave the CPU shedloads of cache. So much, that at the time, they were the best Database servers, as most-used tables fit in cache memory.
That vent design around the case made me think it was something from mid-to-late-90s IBM at first.
Edit: half way through video; I noticed the tower PC behind it and now I see just how big this thing is. WOW!
Have a few PA-RISC unix machines but funnily enough, HP/Agilent used PA-RISC in their modular logic analyzer/oscilloscopes in the 90's and it made them extra-ordinarily flexible in terms of things like being able to remote control the scope via remote X11 connections, and they had a built-in C IDE for adding custom protocol decoders.
I love the font on those old vt100 terminals. I had bought an old SGI Personal Iris 4D back in 1996 - nowhere near as powerful as that HP, but similar vibe. I loved it, but just like that machine, it was like having an airplane taking off next to your desk. So noisy.
RISC isn't an architecture. It's a concept/design principle.... It simply means a reduced set of instructions, as opposed to CISC like x86.
Wrong. RISC is indeed an architecture, just as CISC is. cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/risc/whatis/index.html#:~:text=RISC%2C%20or%20Reduced%20Instruction%20Set,in%20other%20types%20of%20architectures.
@@orbitalgolem91 From your own link: "RISC, or Reduced Instruction Set Computer. is a TYPE of microprocessor architecture"
Key word emphasized in caps above. It's a TYPE of architecture, not an architecture in itself.
Synonym to "type": Category, Classification, Family, Label. You could rephrase that sentence above to: "RISC is a category of microprocessor architecture" if it helps make more sense to you.
An architecture would be things like x86, ARM, Risc-V, PA-RISC, MIPS, etc... They all are encompassed by a classification/type like RISC or CISC.
Don't shoot the messenger. I didn't invent the ISA acronym (Instruction Set Architecture", where the term "Architecture" comes from in the context of computer science.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_set_architecture#Classification_of_ISAs
RISC and CISC are mentioned there as classifications of a computer architecture. RISC and CISC are meant to classify an architecture's complexity.
Von Neumann, Harvard, and ISA are examples of computer 'architecture'. RISC is a 'type' or 'implementation' of the Von Neumann architecture.
4 years ago, I was a Junior Linux Admin at a fortune 50 company. We, at the time, still had a relatively significant HP-UX compute footprint running business critical apps. I never dabbled with the platform, but it was fascinating as a legacy OS.
As a side note, my current company retired it's final Solaris server recently ;) we are largely an Oracle Linux shop with over 13,000 VMs.
I used to learn to code Java on Solaris in 2015 in a German university! When I finished university, they adopted Suse linux for their unix labs.
You are 100% correct that people can make big money by maintaining old server equipment. My friend learned ALGOL and APL when working for Unisys in early 1990s and since then he is not out of work for more than a week. So many old systems and so small number of people who understand them. I honestly didn't even belief APL isn't that common language to learn, hell, Pascal isn't that common these days. I know a little bit of FORTRAN and machine code for M68000 and people are contacting me all the time!
Seeing that key reminds me of when most computers had them to lock being able to power on. First time I've seen one in a LONG time. Thanks for the memories!!
Also, don't forget DEC with their various Alpha-based unix machines, or SGI with their MIPS stuff.
and VAX/VMS
@@tekvax01 VAX/VMS lasted well into the early 2000's running in steel mills, power plants, and other places where operation had to be rock-solid.
Well that brings back memories! Damn I am getting old....
Proper rackmount kits were available for these, I’ve converted bunch of them back in the day. Internal modem was mostly used for software called Predictive, sort of early call-home solution. These servers were really popular - most of the banks, telekoms etc. had ton of them.
I worked at a large print shop around that era that came with one of those. Essentially it came paired along a large Heidelberg offset printer. The thing did spooling and other things. It also came with its terminal display that ran a postscript server that allowed us to push, pause or cancel print jobs on that huge machine.
Many servers of the day were used as high-end workstations. That's what the graphical head was for, not "managing the server". That's also what those blanked out audio ports were for.
Most DDS2 tape drives would play out standard DAT audio tapes too!
I wrote software for HP/UX all the way up until 2011, and even at that point the bank I worked for had not completely decommissioned their HP equipment.
7:15 if only I can say I still do that now, 😩 I always thinking go only digital is bad and this is one of best example of it, sure it's will take time but it's still got the job done than what we do now, well I still use half it manual so it's better now.
Now this brings back some memories! I got my start in Unix working at a telco, processing billing data. I had a K200 pretty much as my own toy. Yes, it was used for serious number crunching but I did all the system admin and coding. Good times.
To interact with it, I had an X terminal on my desktop, made by HP of course. It was very expensive (costing more than a Windows PC) but fairly dumb. It booted from the server and actual processing happened on the server.
worked on hp9000 in 93-98. their mutiscreen x windows gui was eons more advanced than anything macs, windoze etc had. 19" trinitron screens were the top notch. somehow hp9000 *felt* sexier than solaris and ibm's stuff of that time, but solaris were overall more advanced. don't know that silicon grafix had at that time and how it compared... i remember at some point they decomissioned a big bunch of worstations and we recovered extra ram from it, running c++ on these babies with 128Mb of ram in 1995 was like living in future, usually everybody around had 32Mb max :-P later i negociated with it people and recovered one of these $10k monitors, with special cables (sync on green) it was possible to use 'em on pc with matrox g200, that was such a joy to have that quality screen at home !!!
hmm a talking hand!
I've had to support some of the rack-mount servers from that series. Such a weird bit of kit.
Man that brings back memories! I ran an Oracle Databases on those machines for 2 different companies in the 90's. The first was a call center with 300 users on dumb terminal green screens. (Windows was new then and not adopted to the call floor yet.) All caller scripts and order capture/processing occurred on that machine.
I routinely do 50 gig data cache alone in RAM these days. I can't remember what I did with the RAM on those. lol
The second place was a Natural gas company during the Late 90's doing Y2K conversion off a mainframe to UNIX Oracle. All the meter reads were input into the DB and billing was processed on one of those. I do remember we had all 4 CPU's on that rig. Dont recall the ram though.
Since this was pre-NAS/SAN a HUGE part of my job was balancing I/O across the disks in the scsi chain. If disk 2 was 100% bound and disk 3 and 5 were idle you had work to do. :)
I believe that rig had room for two Scci controllers and so part of my balancing act was across controllers *and* disks.
When I was on call and had to dial in that was a 300 Baud modem- You could watch the lines draw on the screen like a teletype.
I will stop, I could bather on about the glory days of IT all day! :)
Story time. I worked for a consulting company in the 90s that had one of these as our only development server. The company was so cheap that they didn’t pay for licenses (“we don’t buy software” - our VP). The Oracle tools had an expired key that was stolen from a client, and to keep them running, a cron job was set up to set the date back every morning. The server also ran our email (internal as well as internet), and depending on the client software, all email was dated that one day.
And that loud monster sat in an empty cubicle in the middle of the office.
IBM also had AS400 which had his own OS called OS400. HP also had an HP3000 server with its own OS. I worked with the last one when I worked at Cheops technology in Belgium they where one of the few company's who sold these systems.
I think we still have one or two running either some backup or printer software in two datacenters (Former HP Support, DXC now :D )
We ran several HP systems like this (I know we had at least one K-Class 9000 machine) back in the day. I know that we still have at least one machine that's running HP-UX B.11.11 (although the second-last company to have bought the company I work for moved all of our hardware to literally the other side of the country, so I don't know exactly what we're running it on). I think that B.11.23 was the last PA-RISC version of HP-UX before HP switched over to the Itanium chip (their "Integrity" systems).
We had a wire rack with probably 6-8 terminals very similar if not identical to the one you showed.
I don't know for certain that it was an MDP, but we had those "dongles" with multiple serial ports for hooking up to dumb tubes. I forget if we ran 9600 or 19.2.
Calling HP-UX a "custom OS" is a bit of a stretch. HP-UX, IBM's AIX, and Sun's Solaris/SunOS were all basically System V Unixes, in slightly different flavors. Our application ran on all three operating systems (plus Data General's DG/UX for a short time), and of course now Linux. There were only relatively small numbers of #ifdefs in the code to conditionally compile under the various operating systems. So, unless your vendor was all-in with HP, it would have been a relatively simple (if not expensive) matter to migrate to another flavor of Unix. We have at least one customer who started out on PA-RISC/HP-UX who's now running the exact same software on a Linux VM (we just rewrote the OS-specific bits for Linux and recompiled the rest of code).
Shell scripts were more of a crapshoot; most things were the same (although there were annoying differences -- I mostly called them bugs -- under certain circumstances for things like "awk"), but anything which got into system administration (e.g., adding users) or hardware management had to have OS-specific functions.
I was responsible for the DDS2 backup system for both the legacy Netware and client Macs from the 1990s. I found a stack of tape in a box I has as my closet was the "off-site" vault.
We had a failure of the Netware server and the tapes failed after a month when the backup system reported no errors. When we tried to restore the system the software couldn't restore the file catalog despite the successful job completions.
TEST. YOUR. BACKUPS.
I had admin duties on a model D (210 or 310) in 1997. Sure it's a server but we used it as a DEV server and it actually was placed in the office. It was running HP-UX 11.0. We used it for Oracle software (version 7) and I think the database software was part of the HP bundle (machine, OS and DBMS). At the same time period I also looked into some the Linux distributions appearing on CDs. Comparing HP-UX and Linux I remember feeling relieved of the easy administration in HP-UX; especially disk partitioning/volume administration was smooth in HP-UX.
I have a slightly older HP9000 PA-RISC server (a Nova-class HP9000 800/I40), which is a 10U rackmount box. Used to use it as my home web and mail server, running HP-UX 11.00. Getting a GNU build chain up and running on one of these is a nightmare.
Mine came with the MDP as well. Need to replace the power switch and put in a SCSI2SD to really get it going again.
We had one of these at work and they were built like tanks. Similar to the Compaq Proliant servers, wouldn't surprise if some of these are still running. Super reliable machines.
I just want to say, I work with modern servers and networking equipment. We still use serial I/O to control them. It’s tried, true, and, in some cases, the only way to get to the BIOS/UEFI/RAID config. We don’t start with it. We start with SSH. But, when that fails, we pull out our console cables.
In 1990 the University I was attending got a server like that, had several terminals connected and replaced 2 Vax 11/750s
I've still got one of the slim HP9000 machines propping up a shelf somewhere, they were real beasts at the time.
Brings back memories. I used to manage a HP 9000 D370 running hpux. I was in the server room changing backup tapes and had just labeled the "put in service date" for a new DDS tape with that day's date when my wife called me at work to tell me a plane had crashed into the world trade center. That tape always gave me the creeps every time I put it in.
Purple HP was best HP. That old HP color display you showed with the workstation, great displays those were.
We still have one of these running in our old datacenter, non-prod of course, but as of 3 weeks ago was still used for lookup and audits. We could never get the business to decommission. It's the model that is in its own rack and has external scsi disk enclosures.
Brings back some memories...
I worked for an ERP company at that time and HPUX was the prime platform (along with Sun, IBM, Convex). But we also supported SGI, DEC-Alpha and, worst of all, Siemens-Nixdorf.
First off, the original version of HPUX was 10.20, which I did not like it at all. Even simple changes (e.g. size of shared memory pools) required a kernel rebuild and praying that the system would come up again. Sun Solaris and IBM AIX where much better at that time.
AFAIK, these systems are also sold as workstations, hence the option to install a graphics adapter and the PS/2 ports. If you needed to have a graphical console, you could go for an X-Terminal (remember WRQ Reflection?). I have never seen an HPPA server with a graphics adapter.
This is the type of machine that would be used in a retail store setting for inventory DB and to run POS systems and probably dumb clients via direct serial connection to do lookups etc on menu based application to that DB.
Running Piece Of Shit systems? 😂😂😂
@@adventureoflinkmk2 😅 "Point of Sale system"
@@adventureoflinkmk2 Point of Sale, but almost always also known as "Piece Of Shit" system. My own personal experience with POS systems is that the corporation always hires the cheapest bidder to develop the system and it's always garbage that looks and operates like a Geocities website designed by an 8 year old from 1997.
I used to administer a few of those! They would have been about 5 years old by then and starting to get outdated. Replaced them with various newer models. I think they were like L class, A class, etc.
The audio connections were for workstation console support from HP9000 graphics consoles like the 700 series. This usually replaced the terminal console which lacked graphics and audio support. I had a HP712 with audio connected to my desk side server.
You've heard of micro-computers, here's a micro-mainframe.
As a side, the catch with picking up mainframes and COBOL is that most roles expect 10+ years experience.
I worked on these things and their immediate successors at my first big boy job. PA-RISC chips were in all HP-UX systems, from pizza box workstations to the big Superdome clusters. They were impressive chips in their day.
Funny thing about serial consoles is they've never really gone away. Sure, IP KVMs exist, and lots of modern servers have some sort of light-out manager that'll do keyboard and video redirects. But most servers these days, even Windows servers, run GUI-less that serial consoles, either directly or through a BMC, are still very common. And of course pretty much all networking gear that can be managed at all can be managed through a serial console.
13:58 nice voice crack lol
The MPD went to a serial break out. Most companies used them to connect dumb terminal in the office. I took care of an office that had about 60 dumb terminals and about 40 serial printers all connected to a system with only 128MB of ram. The system had almost 100 users on it connecting to it and it ran great. For the company it ran everything and would been hard for the to convert to something else. They had it until they sold the company in the early 2000s. They would run a system for 10 years before doing upgrading. I had one system had an uptime of 4 1/2 years. These system where just rock solid and run so efficient as unix uses share memory for it libraries and most users are running the same programs.
I use extensenvly DAT in 1998-1999, where the digital mixdown of audio studio recording was recorded into DAT for backups and for Masters to burn into CDs.
The coaxial-like network connector is not really a coaxial. Especially with the connector the said transceiver plugs into. It's an old standard for networking called Token Ring. Network cards back then had those two connectors. The gameport-looking one, and the coax-looking one.
I used it back in my first tech days, when I was 16 years old or something. And... it was a MAJOR pain in the ass to configure and setup properly. So glad the standards changed haha
Loved these boxes back in the day. With the matching ups they had wushing fans used to sound like a plane taking off. We had one of these that required a dongle on the console port of DSR/DTR and RTS/CTS crossed before it would boot, and it would halt the system if you disconnected dongle or a terminal.
I remember having to pay upwards of 500$ for a WHOLE GB of ram in my first gaming build in 1999. It was worth more than the Savage GPU in that system...
I have a couple of those at my warehouse. I should take a closer look at it.
The first time I worked with a HP-UX system was at a job where I was a Unix admin for mostly Linux systems. I had also worked with AIX on & off for 15 years so I was already familiar with other Unix systems. Mainly they needed me to run the shutdown so they could do maintenance, then I'd bring it back up.
But turned out the hard drives were flakey, and the only reason they hadn't failed was because they had been kept running. 14 hours later, much of that being on line with HP tech support, finally got it back up and running. Fortunately this was a remote job, so I was already at home.
This machine was a “Departmental Server”. The bigger “Enterprise” servers for the data center had redundant power supplies.
This reminds me of college and telnetting into a wide variety of custom unix servers on campus. If I couldn't get some code to compile on one, trying another would usually be more successful.
Back in the end of the 90s I worked at a place that used the DAT data back up. Lucky for me the old tapes were perfectly good for audio recordings soa lot of my audio stuff was recorded on ex data tapes. All I need now is a Dat audio deck to play them back on!!
That « MDP » port, with the distribution box: most likely for dumb terminal. They had something like that till 2010 where my mother work, they had a custom system developed for them and every employee had a dumb terminal connected via serial.
In the old days (80's & 90's) computer companies are making their own CPU. HP has PA-RISC, IBM has IBM Power/ PowerPC, Sun has SPARC, DEC has Alpha, Silicon Graphics has MIPS and even Intel has i960. So if just CPU is considered, the above companies all made their own servers in whole. However, if you take careful look, many less critical components are OEM. E.g. tape drives you mentioned, ethernet cards/chips, memory chips, disk drives, even the operating system (e.g. IBM AIX is not written by IBM) and etc. Very few, if any, single company can make all of it.
I got a Compaq server from early 90s that had an internal tape drive, on board NIC and BNC and came with NT 4.0. I can't for the life of me remember or find what model computer that was. It also had this plastic ducting insert inside the tower that made it so not a spec of dust was inside even though it was over 20 years old when I got it.
The printing company I work for has a TON of old Computer Hardware from the 90's that's just been hanging around in storage. It would be cool to see how those systems worked and what they did back then.
On the topic of servers and video output: Certain IBM servers back in the day shipped with a ThinkPad that would fold out as part of the server cage to let you interact with the server (either via a terminal emulator or graphical management tools)
Greetings from Brainerd Minnesota!
We had a phone system at work that used an interface like that to manage.
Holup... first of all, lots of folks racked 9000s. We did- we had an entire row of them in one of our dcs. Our network rack had several back in the day. Yes, it was a pain, but we still did it.
Second, I firmly remember our 9000s with dual, redundant power. It was a different power supply module than the one in yours. Redundant power (and network, for that matter) was extremely important.
Finally- computing in the 90s was absolutely mission critical. Server went down? Work STOPPED.
That's what all the Y2K running around was about. What would we do without computers?!?
i worked on a VERY reliable system that used a row of these servers in racks. 5 9s reliability. HP-UX was great
We have one of those ruuning until 2010 in our it departament in argentina. So it's very nice ro see one running again🙃
The blanked off audio jacks would have been fully present on the VISUALIZE K460 workstation configuration, which also would have included a color graphics board installed in a HSC slot, either behind the option card cover, or in a double wide carrier to the right of the CORE I/O board. I think the only graphics options were a fairly basic 8 bit card (then called 8 planes) or a 3D accelerator (VISUALIZE-48XP) which had some fairly exotic capabilities but was also aimed at PEX because people hadn't standardized on OpenGL yet. FDDI isn't just from before Fast Ethernet was common (or even existed), it also was functionally faster than Fast Ethernet in many situations. I would suggest it was more killed by Gigabit Ethernet than it was by Fast Ethernet.
In those days 4GB of RAM would be like 4TB of ram now. The big difference is that most servers now can actually support that much ram, its just not super common to max them out. (My R630 from about 10 years ago can support just over 3TB of ram if I was crazy enough to max it out)
That was one of my Comdex wet dreams. To stop by the hp booth and own one. Also HP-UX is still around and used. Now you need the matching rack and das? storage arrays.
Nice. The company I work for has an HP 3000 9X8 that's still in active service!!
I used to work on these Reduced Instruction Set servers. We ran an old version of Macola and some Fortran written programs with a Btrieve backend. God, I miss those days.
I learned a little HP-UX when I was learning AIX 15 years ago. The only thing I remember about HP-UX is “sam" just like "smit" in AIX. But I don't know whether it has "sam" in 1996.
Fantastic video on the HP 9K! Closed Systems / non-x86 still exist, I believe IBM is still making PowerPC based systems running AIX. The memory list prices are similar to what we have today though. The largest module for HPE Servers is 256GB and costs $46K at list. Interestingly the ratio of memory density between PCs and Servers has increased. With 256GB DIMMs, a 2P server (e.g AMD EYPC3) could have up to 8TB (8192GB) RAM, whereas a decent laptop is probably 16GB today. The typical Pentium (socket 7, '95 onwards) would have had 16-32MB at the time. That means the 9K could have 128 to 256 times the RAM of the standard PC. Today, 16GB (laptop) > 8196GB (1U, 2P Server) is 512 times the memory footprint.
The whole 9000 line from HP covered both *workstations and servers*. Just from the wording those ports would have been used on the workstations, the "Visualize Workstations" lettered B, C and J classes.
I would love to know if things like this would have been used in any applications for, say, 2d or low/mid requirement mmorpgs in the upcoming year(s) with tibia, ultima online, etc. I dont know much about the topic.