I wanted to like BeOS so much. I even have a VM with Haiku on it. I occasionally spin it up, gawk at how retro-cool the UI is, look around at everything I’d like to be able to do, realize I can’t seem to find any usable software for it, close it and try again in six months.
I want to say my exposure was 5.something? On a PPC server used for a production management database. I liked SMIT from what I can remember (the documentation was good), but everything went well silky smooth once I managed to track down bash for it and basically automated half my job with basic scripts, lol
Also fun fact, I once took the server offline by tripping over a SCSI 3 cable to the raid array (while sorting out the bird’s nest of a comms room) and it took me 3 days to restore everything from backup.
Oh fantastic! I was one of those young whipper-snappers with the technology of the future for OS installations - floppy disks. I can’t remember what sort of tape was being used during my “learning the value of backups the hard way” experience above, but they were chonky and took about 8 hours to parse each full one so I could pop home and eat between feeding them into the machine.
It all worked like a charm though, no lost data or anything :-)
The first “real hardware” (ie: not a “personal computer”) I had at home was a 3B2/300 (mid-80s AT&T 32 bit WE32000). Installing Unix on that was about a dozen floppies. (I still have them!)
Full Unix (SVR3) on a system with 2 meg of ram & a 40 meg hard drive…
lol, I never had anything like that at home (though I did end up with a 68K based VME system at one point). That AIX server was outgoing tech for SMEs even then, and I never worked for anywhere big enough to have anything Unix-y on it after that :-/
Still, it used to be cool how much oddly mixed hardware there used to be, whereas now there’s a slick VM solution for any size of business.
Oh, I’ve always liked VME. A lot of big computers (low-end supercomputers, exotic high-end servers) had a proprietary system bus, but multiple VME busses for IO. Very nice arrangement.
Yeah, I use a VME setup at work for data capture and it’s serviceable and reliable (reliable enough to still be working off a coax network cable, lol).
The one I had at home had a 60K-based motherboard with some custom roms and a load of serial ports … I never managed to get it to do anything useful, unfortunately
Nobody in here talking about BeOS, QDos, Geos (like windows for the C64!), AIX, or OS2 Warp? For shame!
QNX fucking rocked, I wish it had been useable as a day-to-day system. If I had to pick one it would be that sighs wistfully
I liked BeOS. Rock solid.
Yeah, BeOS looked, for about 5 minutes, like it might be the future!
And then it wasn’t :-(
I wanted to like BeOS so much. I even have a VM with Haiku on it. I occasionally spin it up, gawk at how retro-cool the UI is, look around at everything I’d like to be able to do, realize I can’t seem to find any usable software for it, close it and try again in six months.
My experience with AIX was very early, on first generation RS/6000s. AIX 3? I had a Powerserver-930 at home. SMIT was weird.
I want to say my exposure was 5.something? On a PPC server used for a production management database. I liked SMIT from what I can remember (the documentation was good), but everything went well silky smooth once I managed to track down bash for it and basically automated half my job with basic scripts, lol
Also fun fact, I once took the server offline by tripping over a SCSI 3 cable to the raid array (while sorting out the bird’s nest of a comms room) and it took me 3 days to restore everything from backup.
That was my first steady IT job.
Setting up the server I had involved booting & installing from (8mm) tape! Slowwwwwww.
Oh fantastic! I was one of those young whipper-snappers with the technology of the future for OS installations - floppy disks. I can’t remember what sort of tape was being used during my “learning the value of backups the hard way” experience above, but they were chonky and took about 8 hours to parse each full one so I could pop home and eat between feeding them into the machine.
It all worked like a charm though, no lost data or anything :-)
The first “real hardware” (ie: not a “personal computer”) I had at home was a 3B2/300 (mid-80s AT&T 32 bit WE32000). Installing Unix on that was about a dozen floppies. (I still have them!)
Full Unix (SVR3) on a system with 2 meg of ram & a 40 meg hard drive…
lol, I never had anything like that at home (though I did end up with a 68K based VME system at one point). That AIX server was outgoing tech for SMEs even then, and I never worked for anywhere big enough to have anything Unix-y on it after that :-/
Still, it used to be cool how much oddly mixed hardware there used to be, whereas now there’s a slick VM solution for any size of business.
Oh, I’ve always liked VME. A lot of big computers (low-end supercomputers, exotic high-end servers) had a proprietary system bus, but multiple VME busses for IO. Very nice arrangement.
Yeah, I use a VME setup at work for data capture and it’s serviceable and reliable (reliable enough to still be working off a coax network cable, lol).
The one I had at home had a 60K-based motherboard with some custom roms and a load of serial ports … I never managed to get it to do anything useful, unfortunately