this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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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