Mt. Xinu

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 ...

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

those ****ers 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

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.)

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.)

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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1 3rd August 12:31 lyndon External User Posts: 1	Mt. Xinu 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 ...

2 3rd August 12:31 External User Posts: 1	Mt. Xinu they supported a special connection between two vaxen which would let them share dec raXX 80mb disks under special cir*stances. i think we were able to share the mag tape, too. those **ers 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

5 3rd August 12:31 lyndon External User Posts: 1	Mt. Xinu 1) You had 1.5GB and you needed quotas? 2) You got the sign wrong; you sacrifice the gods to the cats. 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.

6 3rd August 12:32 External User Posts: 1	Mt. Xinu total. for a system with ~2500 users. about 120 users were typically logged on. 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.