[HECnet] Towards the Mouth of Madness....

DECnet/AIX was a 3rd party effort IIRC I haven't searched the internet yet but who knows what is available. Perhaps the opensource decnet kit may be portable. I wasn't aware that AIX was so hobbyist friendly. The hardware is vey unfamiliar for me though. Hans Verzonden vanaf mijn draadloze BlackBerry -toestel -----Original Message----- From: Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com> Sender: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2011 21:34:31 To: <hecnet at Update.UU.SE> Reply-To: hecnet at Update.UU.SESubject: Re: [HECnet] Towards the Mouth of Madness.... On 12 Jul 2011, at 19:00, Sampsa Laine wrote: So with my long, non-billing Sunday afternoons giving me ideas, I've started to ponder procuring a midrange IBM box, say an AS/400. How much do these things cost (like say a 93 vintage), weigh and dissipate heat? Also, how do you hook them up? Don't buy an AS400. Buy an RS/6000 - you can pick up a decent one for anywhere between 50GBP and 5000 GBP :D My personal home use favourites are the RS/6000 43P Model 150 (mini tower with PCI and a 640e Power PC), the 44P Model 170 (similar to 43P but POWER-III up to 450MHz) and the 7046-B50. All of them are workable in that they are quite, don't use MCA expansions and don't draw a fat lot of power. All of them will run AIX 5L too AFAIK which is relatively recent and well supported. Nice thing about IBM too is the computer IS your OS license. Because no IBM RS/6000 (or any other system aside from x86 gear) is sold without an OS license, they don't bother printing them they just let anyone with hardware run the OS (support costs extra mind you). It's a nice touch and means AIX is very accessible as a Hobbyist. It's taken over my 'pet UNIX' slot from Solaris since Oracle castrated the free license. Others mentioned DECNet will run on AIX, I suspect not on more modern versions but maybe 4.3.3 might run it? -- Mark Benson My Blog: <http://markbenson.org/blog> Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mdbenson "Never send a human to do a machine's job..."