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For any computer people from the early 90's

Gazdatronik

Gazdatronik

Super Member
I have an opportunity to get a Hewlett Packard 3000 series minicomputer, I believe its the 917 series PA-RISC, probably from around 1992. Two reasons, its mounted in a huge rack that I can stuff my rack gear into, but also, having dreams of turning it into the ultimate dos box, or something.

This thing was primarily used for business computing, from what I understand, it would serve up to 8 terminals at once. 192 mb of memory, not exactly a small amount in those days.

My understanding is that a computer is a computer, is a computer, but I have little background in business minicomputers. How proprietary are these things? Would it be possible to say, run windows 95 on it? Does it even have PCI slots?

In other words, what on earth could I possibly do with this thing? If nothing, I will still use it as a rack, but hate the idea of trashing the computer and server within it.
 
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Yeah - if you are not a hot coder, its not likely you would be able to run anything recognizable to you on that old iron ...
Unless you are familiar with those old systems, its of marginable value to you as a processor/system.
Think of the power of a modern smart phone ... the rack is not that smart.
Gut it and put something you know in a little space inside the big rack ...
 
THIS^^^ plus the fact that some of those old computers were not that reliable in the first place and required frequent repair. That's why they were constantly backing up the data to tape. IIRC, they called this spooling.

If it brakes and you need to get a part you will be SOL unless you find a pack of serrious nerds trying to keep these things alive. :D
 
DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT IT BEING USABLE FOR ANYTHING!

ITS ALL PROPIETARY SOFTWARE.

EVEN IF THE OS IS STILL THERE, THE CHANCES OF IT BOOTING ARE IFFY.

EVEN IF IT BOOTS, THE CHANCES THAT IT HAS ANYTHING USEFUL ARE SLIM TO NONE.

IT IS A BOAT ANCHOR!

A COMPUTER IS A COMPUTER IS A COMPUTER IS WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Dr. Hagstrom PhD, Computer Science.
 
It will heat your house a bit in the winter. With it's proprietary hardware and OS and zero support, it won't do much more.

There ARE some emulators to run it's software in a server environment, for those businesses mired in the past with legacy software.

Thus they strive to keep the software alive, running on new, repairable hardware.

And I'm a sucker for old computers. I have a few 486 laptops that should run rings around it, on Win 3.1

I have donated quite a few old, running computers to various museums.

I even resurrected an old Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP 8/i for fun long ago (a wire wrapped backplane, with all the same colored wire.

And I say, the most valuable part of that pile is the simplest stuff, the racks and enclosures.

I have a REALLY nice, heavy duty WELDED 19" DEC rack - with side panels no less!!
It holds almost as ancient test equipment : scopes, spectrum analyzers and synthesized generators.

And pretty soon, I have to start reconsidering the space and utility of all that...
 
Thanks to everybody! Except to the lone jerk:confused:

It is/was the main computer at my job, in use until last week. I'm definitely going to use the rack case. If I get it-
Was talking to my co-worker tonight, and he said taking it out of service was a bit premature, as the new computer system isn't working as well as they'd hoped. They will probably wheel it back in its place where it can sit, gather orders and print thousands of part labels from its 4' high dot matrix printers, ad nauseum.

But I do hope I get the rack, its rather pretty in its "TRON Michelin man the future will be exciting" sorta way
 
I used an HP 3000 as part of our order management systems back in the mid 90's. If I remember correctly, HP was offering a version of UNIX/Linux for it instead of the proprietary MPE operating system. If you wanted to, you could probably get that working, but it would be more trouble than it is worth other than doing it for curiousity's sake.
 
I was hoping to use it for the front end for my digital samplers and synthesizers, since I was told that this particular machine had scsi support. My music equipment is fairly ancient and I occasionally require some "legacy" devices to do special things with them.

Its a 918LX, I was one number off. Looks like they were selling these until the late 90's, but info on these is kinda sparse.
 
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First of all RISC means Reduced Instruction Set Computer. You might have trouble getting DOS 6.22 to run on it, let alone 95. Win 95 might like the RAM, but if it cannot deal with the processor forget it. And it sounds like if you want to run SCSI, you might be stuck with 50 pin, and those drives are usually only like 4.55, 9.1 or whatever GB. And slow. And hot and use a shitload of power. I had some in a full tower case and the software set it up so they didn't even try to start at the same time because most power supplies would choke. I had two power supplies together with one of those wires that take it off the switched output they used to have.

And then the big joke came. The power went out. Remember that ? The whole east side of the country, both grids, completely no power. Well the joke here is that when I got home from my two hour long drive from work (because people ran out of gas because they cannot buy it without electricity and they ran out on the highway) I found no power ANYWHERE, a 23 mile stretch.

Well I did what had to be done, bought a bunch of beer and cigarettes. Dude who owned the store was standing there with a gun. Had to bust into the cash cache because of course the credit card machines were not working. Of course the banks have insurance for this but we do not.

Enough rant...
 
JURB is right...the clue was in the name...the RISC machines tackled the speed question at the core, (no pun) and gave less instructions to be looked up every fetch, therefore whatever OS was around at time for the consumer likely will not work - nay I guarantee it - refardless of architecture. CPU loop- probably, the rest - ugly death

however....there are countless websites out there for the old machines and some people do get them running for the same reason they buy and maintain crosleys. (I myself got a NiB sinclair!) I even know of some people running TOPS in a DEC10 they found and after a zillion tries were able to read in the boot tape. (you read that right) Its actually far harder than oh I dunno....getting fixing and running an old 2 channel silver face...
 
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