22 Apr
2021
22 Apr
'21
4:53 p.m.
On 2021-04-22 14:23, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 4/22/21 6:16 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
Well, Update have two of them. One can start with the turn of a key. The
other one can maybe get to running condition, but would require some work.
The biggest problem right now is that the cooling is broken, so we even
had to turn off the 11/70, and it seems next year we might not have any
location anymore... :-(
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
The 86x0 do load all microcode from the FE at
startup time. It takes a
little while to boot an 86x0 because of this. The power system is also
software controlled, and at power up, only a single power supply is on.
Everything else is turned on by the FE at a later stage. Fun to watch
the system start up. Slowly, LED after LED lights up, as different parts
gets initialized.
This is the way IBM mainframes (post-S/390, and a few earlier than
that) work too. You've probably seen the ones with the laptops built
into the front of the CPU cabinet; they run OS/2 up to the z890, and
after that they run Linux. They inject the microcode into the hardware
as a part of the POR (Power-On Reset) process. Booting (er, IPLing)
them takes quite a while, depending on the configuration.
That's how IBM turns them into zero-resale-value bricks when at
decommissioning time.
I just love that machine. :-)
I wish there were more of them around. :-(