Old computing...

[KGIII]

I'm not sure how many of you are interested in computer history. This guy will be starting a new project:

He's even got an old computer from the 50s that he's managed to make running and a single bit computer (with paper tape input) hangs on his wall because that's where he has built it.

I find his channel interesting and try to catch all of his videos. There are a number of similar channels but this one has some hardware you've likely never seen.

 

[Mike-W0BTU]

That's incredible. Unlike any other retro computer that I've seen. And it's so clean!

I believe my old 32 bit Dell PowerEdge servers would be jealous.

 

[KGIII]

That's incredible. Unlike any other retro computer that I've seen. And it's so clean!

I believe my old 32 bit Dell PowerEdge servers would be jealous.

I was 'there' for a lot of computing history, starting in the late 60s/early 70s. So, I find this sort of stuff interesting.

Your servers might qualify as 'vintage' these days. I think they use a rough definition of 25 years old is vintage. There's a pretty vibrant, though fairly small and geeky, community around these things.

The guy I linked to will be starting a new 'series' soon, meaning he'll fix that computer - possibly taking him months and months to get it working. The Bendix he has there is the oldest analog computer running in the US. He fixed it for a museum and will be sending it back soon.

I watch a handful of these channels, if I have time. I don't really get into the 'doing' part of the hobby, though I do have some older computers. If I'm going to play Zork, it might as well be on a TRS-80.

 

[MikeRocor]

That's incredible. Unlike any other retro computer that I've seen. And it's so clean!

I believe my old 32 bit Dell PowerEdge servers would be jealous.

How old are your PEs? Just a couple of years ago, I shotcanned a couple of PE 2300 - I had thought they'd make interesting end tables but then common sense and good taste (such as they are) kicked in and I thought, "Just don't"

 

[theLegionWithin]

i've really enjoyed his Centurion series, I'll check out the latest project

 

[Mike-W0BTU]

How old are your PEs? Just a couple of years ago, I shotcanned a couple of PE 2300 - I had thought they'd make interesting end tables but then common sense and good taste (such as they are) kicked in and I thought, "Just don't"

I'm not sure. The older one is PE 6300, the other a PE 2550. I'd have go down and look to be sure.

EDIT:
From time to time, I think about installing Debian on them. But I have other things of higher priority.

The 6300 has Windows 2000 Advanced Server on it. That was nice. All our computers had Windows 2000, and with WSUS it took care of updating them all.

The 2550 ran CentOS.

I even found a robotic tape drive. SCSI. Automatic backups!

I'm fairly certain that swapping the existing 32-bit Xeon CPUs with 64-bit ones would turn them into 64-bit machines, allowing of course 64-bit Linux OS. The mother- and daughterboards were all 64-bit ready.

Both PEs had advanced features that didn't become common until years later, such as 1GB Ethernet ports and the fastest SCSI that was ever sold.

Both were of course RAID-5 hot-swappable SCSI arrays. The older one even had a sixth drive, called a 'hot spare' (IIRC). You could pull that and another drive, and the server would keep right on serving.

 

[KGIII]

i've really enjoyed his Centurion series, I'll check out the latest project

That was a fun one. I've been watching his channel for a while. I'm not sure when I started.

I don't always make the time to watch everything I'd be interested in. It's not a high priority but this upcoming series should be pretty interesting as he learns about it and works on it. The Bendix was fun to watch.

As far as I know, he hasn't been into the hobby for all that long, at least when compared to others so that adds an extra element as he's rapidly learned and improved. His channel isn't all that popular when compared with those more 'general interest' channels but I enjoy his content.

I might just have to compile a list of channels along this line. There are some good ones and I'm sure there are some channels that I don't know about.

The YouTube algorithm is well-trained by me, so it does a pretty good job at providing interesting content. I've made an effort to train it by using the subscribe function and occasionally adding comments. This has helped the algorithm bring forward more content creators.