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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
- Path: sparky!uunet!destroyer!terminator!pisa.citi.umich.edu!rees
- From: rees@pisa.citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
- Subject: Re: Old Apollo system wanted....
- Message-ID: <5a8a88e9.1bc5b@pisa.citi.umich.edu>
- Sender: news@terminator.cc.umich.edu (Usenet Owner)
- Reply-To: Jim.Rees@umich.edu
- Organization: University of Michigan IFS Project
- References: <1992Aug13.160654.21360@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>
- Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 20:33:02 GMT
- Lines: 32
-
- In article <1992Aug13.160654.21360@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>, aj681@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Carlin Wiegner) writes:
-
- I need an old multiuser system, I was looking at PDP-11s but
- they need 3 phase power which isn't the easiest thing to get.
-
- That depends on the 11. As I recall, even the 11/70 (the biggest model I
- ever used) could be wired for single phase. Some of the peripherals,
- particularly disk drives (rk07?) required three phase, but you could
- certainly put together a working system that runs on household power (single
- phase, 110/220, 30 amps or so).
-
- Another fun early Unix system was the Interdata (later Perkin-Elmer) 7/32
- and 8/32. This was the first non-11 system to get a port of v7, and the
- only non-11 to run v6. This one ran on single phase but took lots of it,
- maybe 40 amps of 220. There were in fact two ports of v7 for it, one by
- Dennis Ritchie using the Johnson portable C compiler, with the stack growing
- forwards, and the other by Miller at Wollongong using the Ritchie compiler,
- with the stack growing backwards. The Miller v6 port was my first Unix,
- back in 1979.
-
- For a "modern" alternative, you can now pick up Vax 780s for a couple of
- thousand. You can either run 32v (a v7 derivative) for historical accuracy,
- or bsd4.3 for modern convenience.
-
- Three phase is hard to come by. I tried to have it brought in to my garage
- once for my IBM System 3, and the local power company (Seattle City Light)
- wanted $10,000. I ended up rewiring the cpu for single phase and running
- the system off of 10 Mb 5440 (?) disks instead of the monster 40 Mb disks.
- Never did get the 5424 96-column card punch/reader working properly.
-
- These days, I tend to stick to modern hardware, like my dn330 with attached
- Tektronix 4014.
-