Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[dmr]

Incidentally, speaking of Mt. Xinu, anyone have any of their
calendars?  I have the 1989 on my wall here, another at my office.
I've looked them up occasionally on Ebay without success.

	Dennis

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[Jim McKie]

I have a couple somewhere, I'll look them out
when I get back from my trip and we can compare.
I also have a Mt Xinu t-shirt.

--jim

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <dmr@plan9.bell-labs.com>
To: <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, February 14, 2006 9:00 PM
Subject: Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu


> Incidentally, speaking of Mt. Xinu, anyone have any of their
> calendars?  I have the 1989 on my wall here, another at my office.
> I've looked them up occasionally on Ebay without success.
> 
> Dennis
> 

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[Marina Brown]

Jim McKie wrote:

>I have a couple somewhere, I'll look them out
>when I get back from my trip and we can compare.
>I also have a Mt Xinu t-shirt.
>
>--jim
>
>  
>
It would be appreciated if it were possible for anyone to scan
and share the graphics - if that is legally possible.

Since this is a rather unusual crowd - does anyone have the
BSD X-wing Breaking away from the Death Star posters ?

--- Marina Brown

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[Bruce Ellis]

anyone have any spare tk50s?

brucee

On 2/16/06, Marina Brown <marina@surferz.net> wrote:
> Jim McKie wrote:
>
> >I have a couple somewhere, I'll look them out
> >when I get back from my trip and we can compare.
> >I also have a Mt Xinu t-shirt.
> >
> >--jim
> >
> >
> >
> It would be appreciated if it were possible for anyone to scan
> and share the graphics - if that is legally possible.
>
> Since this is a rather unusual crowd - does anyone have the
> BSD X-wing Breaking away from the Death Star posters ?
>
> --- Marina Brown
>

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[jmk]

Jim McKie wrote:

>I have a couple somewhere, I'll look them out
>when I get back from my trip and we can compare.
>I also have a Mt Xinu t-shirt.
>
>--jim

I have
	1997-1988	command of the month
	1989	lessons in art
	1990	platform of the year

Were there any others?

--jim

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[dmr]

 > Actually, the loon in both cases [dual 780, LOX + charcoal]
 > is George H. Goble, who still works here
 > at Purdue.  He used to have a web page that documented both endeavors, but
 > the powers-that-be made him remove it, probably for liability reasons.
 > (Too many people were being crushed trying to jimmy their 780s together.)

 > Ah, the Wayback Machine has it:

 > http://web.archive.org/web/20010702140624/ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/~ghg/

 >Click on "CLICK HERE" at the bottom for the page on the dual 11/780.

Yes.  I would guess or suspect that the suppression (if not from
mere boredom by Goble) had more to do with the charcoal spectacular
than from toppling dual 780s.

Incidentally, I think the first multiprocessor Unix was
done at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey for an MS
project; this was a PDP-11.

	Dennis

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[quanstro]

On Fri Feb 10 22:35:50 CST 2006, lyndon@orthanc.ca wrote:
> 1)  You had 1.5GB and you *needed* quotas?

total. for a system with ~2500 users.
about 120 users were typically logged on.

> Nah, we dumped the big disk farm (three canaries and an eagle) onto  
> QIC 120 MB carts.  On accounta that farm was hanging off the Sun  
> 3/160.  The 785 with the SI only spoke to lowly RA81s.  A lot of  
> them, mind you.

we just had stacks and stacks of ra disks. after a power outage i bet 
the inside of a jet engine would have been quieter.

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Feb 10, 2006, at 8:47 PM, quanstro@quanstro.net wrote:

> we just had stacks and stacks of ra disks. after a power outage i bet
> the inside of a jet engine would have been quieter.

A stalled jet.  We never took down the power grid after a restart,  
but came close a couple of times.  (We didn't have staged spin-up for  
the drives ...)

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[quanstro]

On Fri Feb 10 22:14:18 CST 2006, lyndon@orthanc.ca wrote:
> 
> > they supported a special connection between two vaxen
> > which would let them share dec raXX 80mb disks under
> > special circumstances. i think we were able to share the
> > mag tape, too.
> 
> Was this related to the first 2-way 78x that (I think) was built at  
> Goergia Tech?  (It's been a long time since I read the paper about  
> this.)  (I'm thinking about the same loons who start their BBQ with  
> liquid oxygen.  Both projects have entertainment value.)

no. they were independent 780s, except for the goofy-net between
them.

> We had to halt the microcode floppy IPL to poke a register on the TU 
> (?)x controller to put our (not DEC approved or supported) SI9000 tri- 
> density tape drive into the correct density in order to read the  
> install/upgrade tapes ;-)
> 
> God I miss real hardware!

i don't miss the stuff at all. quotacheck took 2 hours on a grand total
of 1.5 G of disk. (assuming you didn't need to plug a terminal into the
back of one of them and sacrifice a few cats to the compter gods.)

oh, and i just remembered. the weekly backup took about 8 hrs for 1.5G
onto 9 track. we did have a VHS-tape based backup that was never completely
trusted.

- erik

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

>> God I miss real hardware!
>
> i don't miss the stuff at all. quotacheck took 2 hours on a grand  
> total
> of 1.5 G of disk. (assuming you didn't need to plug a terminal into  
> the
> back of one of them and sacrifice a few cats to the compter gods.)

1)  You had 1.5GB and you *needed* quotas?
2)  You got the sign wrong; you sacrifice the gods to the cats.

> oh, and i just remembered. the weekly backup took about 8 hrs for 1.5G
> onto 9 track. we did have a VHS-tape based backup that was never  
> completely
> trusted.

Nah, we dumped the big disk farm (three canaries and an eagle) onto  
QIC 120 MB carts.  On accounta that farm was hanging off the Sun  
3/160.  The 785 with the SI only spoke to lowly RA81s.  A lot of  
them, mind you.

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[Jack Johnson]

On 2/10/06, Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca> wrote:
> 2)  You got the sign wrong; you sacrifice the gods to the cats.

I can verify that this works.

-J

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[quanstro]

they supported a special connection between two vaxen
which would let them share dec raXX 80mb disks under
special circumstances. i think we were able to share the 
mag tape, too.

those suckers had paper consoles, 4 and 8mb of memory
and the largest ethernet card i've ver seen --  whole 9 yards.

the kernel had to be rebuilt to change boot devices!

- erik

On Fri Feb 10 21:47:27 CST 2006, lyndon@orthanc.ca wrote:
> 
> On Feb 10, 2006, at 7:40 PM, quanstro@quanstro.net wrote:
> 
> > mt xinu 4.3bvd (sic).
> 
> Whatever was the magic of the Mt. Xinu releases?  I've worked on  
> generic 4.2 as well as Ultrix 1.*, but nobody was ever able to  
> explain the difference ...

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

> they supported a special connection between two vaxen
> which would let them share dec raXX 80mb disks under
> special circumstances. i think we were able to share the
> mag tape, too.

Was this related to the first 2-way 78x that (I think) was built at  
Goergia Tech?  (It's been a long time since I read the paper about  
this.)  (I'm thinking about the same loons who start their BBQ with  
liquid oxygen.  Both projects have entertainment value.)

> those suckers had paper consoles, 4 and 8mb of memory
> and the largest ethernet card i've ver seen --  whole 9 yards.

Oh yah?  My 785 had a paper console (LA34), 24 MB of memory(!), and  
also took up close to 27 feet of floor space :-)  (We had Ethernet,  
too, but I never measured the size of the card.)

> the kernel had to be rebuilt to change boot devices!

We had to halt the microcode floppy IPL to poke a register on the TU 
(?)x controller to put our (not DEC approved or supported) SI9000 tri- 
density tape drive into the correct density in order to read the  
install/upgrade tapes ;-)

God I miss real hardware!

--lyndon

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[plan9]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 08:09:30PM -0800, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> 
> Was this related to the first 2-way 78x that (I think) was built at  
> Goergia Tech?  (It's been a long time since I read the paper about  
> this.)  (I'm thinking about the same loons who start their BBQ with  
> liquid oxygen.  Both projects have entertainment value.)

Actually, the loon in both cases is George H. Goble, who still works here
at Purdue.  He used to have a web page that documented both endeavors, but
the powers-that-be made him remove it, probably for liability reasons.
(Too many people were being crushed trying to jimmy their 780s together.)

Ah, the Wayback Machine has it:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010702140624/ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/~ghg/

Click on "CLICK HERE" at the bottom for the page on the dual 11/780.

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[Richard Miller]

> the kernel had to be rebuilt to change boot devices!

Much easier just to use the debugger to patch the device number
in the kernel image.

Re: [9fans] More 'Sam I am'

[quanstro]

i don't miss the vaxen i used to work on with h29 2400 baud "stonet"
terminals and often a 1+ minute login time. 2400 baud is slow enough
that i used to use ^s/^q as a pager

mt xinu 4.3bvd (sic).

- erik

On Fri Feb 10 21:03:01 CST 2006, jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com wrote:
> Many years ago now, a good friend of mine remarked that
> if we actually made all those whining about the state of things
> now compared to the "good old days" go back to using v7 Unix,
> they would quickly realise that times had actually moved
> forward and there were things they were used to that it didn't
> have and that they really needed. I used v[567] and I've
> ported v7, and I wouldn't go back. From what I understand,
> Plan 9 was an attempt to build on that by saying "this got
> us so far, but times are changing and it won't cut it with
> networks, bitmapped displays, SMP etc, we need a better base".
> That was a long time ago and no one has, to my limited
> non- computer science knowledge, attempted anything similar,
> they're all still working on copying 30 year old technology.
> 
> I don't have an iPod, my mobile phone is 5 years old and I
> turn it on about 4 hours a week and there are many things
> about the 21st century that make me grumpy. But you can't go
> back. You should, however, be careful about how how you
> go forward.
> 
> --jim

[9fans] Mt. Xinu

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On Feb 10, 2006, at 7:40 PM, quanstro@quanstro.net wrote:

> mt xinu 4.3bvd (sic).

Whatever was the magic of the Mt. Xinu releases?  I've worked on  
generic 4.2 as well as Ultrix 1.*, but nobody was ever able to  
explain the difference ...

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[plan9]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 07:46:19PM -0800, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> 
> On Feb 10, 2006, at 7:40 PM, quanstro@quanstro.net wrote:
> 
> >mt xinu 4.3bvd (sic).
> 
> Whatever was the magic of the Mt. Xinu releases?  I've worked on  
> generic 4.2 as well as Ultrix 1.*, but nobody was ever able to  
> explain the difference ...

AFAICT, it's just BSD with NFS bolted on.  We're still running it on a
MicroVAX, though we're now down to only one working Eagle:

Feb 14 13:05:33 merlin vmunix: 4.3 BSD + NFS UNIX #19: Thu Oct  6 14:48:43 EST
+2005
Feb 14 13:05:33 merlin vmunix: real mem  = 8355840
Feb 14 13:05:33 merlin vmunix: avail mem = 7001088
Feb 14 13:05:33 merlin vmunix: using 255 buffers containing 522240 bytes of
+memory
Feb 14 13:05:33 merlin vmunix: uba0 at tr0
Feb 14 13:05:33 merlin vmunix: uda0 at uba0 csr 172150 vec 774, ipl 17
Feb 14 13:05:33 merlin vmunix: ra0 at uda0 slave 0
Feb 14 13:05:33 merlin vmunix: ra0: raeagle
Feb 14 13:05:33 merlin vmunix: dhu0 at uba0 csr 160020 vec 300, ipl 17
Feb 14 13:05:33 merlin vmunix: dhu1 at uba0 csr 160040 vec 310, ipl 17
Feb 14 13:05:33 merlin vmunix: qe0 at uba0 csr 174440 vec 770, ipl 17
Feb 14 13:05:33 merlin vmunix: qe0: hardware address 08:00:2b:0d:44:a7
Feb 14 13:05:33 merlin vmunix: root fstype ufs
Feb 14 13:05:37 merlin savecore: reboot after panic: Segmentation fault

Old CS profs. never die-- they just make you maintain their old stuff
forever. :)

ObPlan9:  someone should port Plan 9 to the MicroVAX!

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[Brantley Coile]

> ObPlan9:  someone should port Plan 9 to the MicroVAX!

Ask Norman.  He still runs MicroVAXen with Research Unix on them.

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[Bruce Ellis]

probably not enough memory for a workable plan9.
my MicroVAX is fully stocked (i think) - a full 9 MB
of memory.  this is fine for Research Unix (V10) but
a cheap PC is better for plan9.

brucee

On 2/15/06, Brantley Coile <brantley@coraid.com> wrote:
> > ObPlan9:  someone should port Plan 9 to the MicroVAX!
>
> Ask Norman.  He still runs MicroVAXen with Research Unix on them.

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[Jim McKie]

> On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 07:46:19PM -0800, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> ...
> ObPlan9:  someone should port Plan 9 to the MicroVAX!
> ...

a few months ago i found a binary of the plan9 vax compiler when
looking for something in the dump, but no source. there was one because
the original fileserver was a vax750 with a worm drive and connections
to gnots (terminals) were serial. there's a microvax in the storage cage
still.

--jim

Re: [9fans] Mt. Xinu

[Bruce Ellis]

maybe a good console server - it as a bucket of serial ports.

brucee

On 2/15/06, Jim McKie <jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 07:46:19PM -0800, Lyndon Nerenberg wrote:
> > ...
> > ObPlan9:  someone should port Plan 9 to the MicroVAX!
> > ...
>
> a few months ago i found a binary of the plan9 vax compiler when
> looking for something in the dump, but no source. there was one because
> the original fileserver was a vax750 with a worm drive and connections
> to gnots (terminals) were serial. there's a microvax in the storage cage
> still.
>
> --jim
>
>