Oh this would be a dream job for someone like me. Just way too much to relearn, it's been so many years since I did any assembly I'm not sure I'd remember the first thing. Plus I have almost no hardware maintenance skills, which could be disastrous. But still, I can dream...
Remember when enterprise administration was more than just a browser dashboard?
Keeping old computers running for everyone to enjoy is getting increasingly difficult as the years pass. Parts get harder to obtain, and the skills needed start fading away. Peter Onion can usually be found in The National Museum of Computing's (TNMOC) Large Systems Gallery, where machines include a huge ICL 2966 mainframe and …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 16th January 2024 10:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
My computing career started on the 2966. VME/B and VME/K. Used to be able to tell when the system was about to crash just by listening to the hoot. You also knew when OLTS (On Line Testing System I think it stood for) was about to finish - it sounded like R2-D2. 200Mb disk packs with drives the size of a washing machine. And the bright orange operator consoles. I still have a picture somewhere with a message saying "smile". The groan of the engineer when we called in snapped drive belts on the FD640 drives.
I miss those days sometimes. You had to KNOW the computers to work out how to make things run faster (like how to lay out the filesystems on the disks to cut down on head travel time). And who can forget the magnetic tapes. Having to use that special tool to trim back the tape leader and add a new BOT marker!
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Tuesday 16th January 2024 10:53 GMT Pascal Monett
A valuable effort
I do hope they're going to keep that computer going for a long while. It is a worthy testament to the skills and engineering that built for us the world we live in today.
But let's not knock slim and trim. Let's not look down on those slabs of Gorilla glass and toxic metals. The slowest of them have more power than the Apollo flight that reached the Moon.
Slim and trim has brought us CPUs that do much, much more with much less energy usage. And are capable of auto-throttling their power consumption and thus their heat generation. That will be a very good thing for the space stations of the future.
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Wednesday 17th January 2024 19:27 GMT ldo
Re: PulseAudio??
Somebody hasn’t been keeping up with the times ...
And yes, it can take advantage of systemd, too.
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Tuesday 16th January 2024 11:51 GMT Bebu
The ris[ck] of cyber-conversion :)
A slippery slope as sir Humphrey might observe, replacing irreplacable parts with RPi SBCs emulating the missing bits.
One day the 29000 will be all Pi or V.
I suppose as long as its running its "living" history in some sense and enthusiasts can actually program it. One might port the Rust compiler :)
A memorial to British computer industry that now rests with steam locomotives and Brunnel's ship "The Great Britain."
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Tuesday 16th January 2024 13:21 GMT Admiral Grace Hopper
Hmmmmmmmmaaaaaaaahhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhmmmmmmmm
A highlight of being the room with the 2900 while it was running reminded me of how you could tell what was going on by the noise that it made as it ran the loaded programme. Of course modern processors generate sound too, but at frequencies that are beyond my ears and probably those of bats too.
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Tuesday 16th January 2024 14:26 GMT 42656e4d203239
Re: Hmmmmmmmmaaaaaaaahhhhhhhmmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhmmmmmmmm
>>Of course modern processors generate sound too
Possibly (though the amplitide of the vibrations would be tiny) however many sideband attacks rely of the equivalent in the RF spectrum (or the power LED, or the backlight of the monitor etc. etc. etc). Indeed many crypto functions are (being re-)written to make such sideband attacks much more difficult.
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Tuesday 16th January 2024 14:39 GMT Steve Kerr
Sad times!
When I went to a visit to TNMOC, it was rather a shock to find a lot of the machines I've used from early home computers to large mainframes are now museum pieces!!!!
I done work experience on an ICL 2966 running VME & George 3 and a financial institution I worked for had a couple of ICL 2966's, amongst other things like an IBM 4381, Wang, VAX's, HP 3000's, Tandem nonstop, Stratus! A bygone era.
Used Prime computers whilst in college
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Thursday 18th January 2024 03:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sad times!
Why was Horizon allowed to go live?
‘It was a prototype that had been bloated and hacked together afterwards for several years, and then pushed screaming and kicking out of the door. It should never have seen the light of day. Never.’
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Tuesday 16th January 2024 20:04 GMT Scene it all
A couple years ago I built a fancy light sculpture for the TV room, with randomly shifting colors from LEDs buried under some tubes filled with cut glass crystals. In the base is a small RISC-V single-board computer. I programmed the whole thing, bare metal, in assembly language and it turns out that the RISC-V instruction set is VERY similar to the old IBM 360 from over 50 years ago. All the same programming techniques. It brought back fond memories.
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Wednesday 17th January 2024 20:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
The TNMoC is a great place to visit!
Esp. for IT types. As others have said, there will be a lot of - "That was my first computer!", "Ah! I used to own one of those!", "and my mate Tom had one of those!", "Oh! And one of those", "And one of those too!", "That was the first computer I used professionally", "That was the...." etc. This will go on for hours. You will love it. Guaranteed. :)