...fribble is now a Digital AlphaStation 4/233. I don't want to do any major changes to this page until I get my new site layout figured out. So consider this page a historical reference until I get my ass in gear and update it properly.
Until then you can see a quick description of the machine on the top of my homepage.
Fribble is a Digital Multia system, also know by the less-glamourous name of "UDB": Universal Desktop Box. This was Digital's attempt at a low-cost Windows NT workstation. Fortunately, it is not running NT- instead you have the wonderful world of Linux, which by all accounts is much, much faster on this machine. I have nothing to complain about it, except that the case is very small, has only 1 expansion slot (PCI), and gets frightfully warm. But the UDB is very inexpensive and quite fast. They are commonly available used or surplus for around $300 (full system) or for $99(no RAM or hard disk). The best way to buy them is as the $99 bare-bones machine, and then add your own memory and a large, fast external SCSI-II disk. Otherwise you are limited to 2.5" hard disk internally, which are slow, expensive, and add to the heat problem. There is an IDE controller internally as well, but again you need to use notebook computer drives on it.
I have some manuals and documentation for the Multia/UDB that will eventually be onlien here.
Close-up of Fribble and drives The orange flag on top is a Bell Atlantic "Buried Cable" flag, which you can read here.
Now you can see how long Fribble has been up, and what updates and outages are scheduled. Check it here.
Once I find the SPEC ratings for Fribble and my other machines (below), they will be available here for your curiosity. Basically, they're pathetic compared to modern machines, like Pentium II/III or Alpha 21164/264s. Actually, anything is pathetic compared to a 21264, but that's another matter altogether (grin).
"From Fribble To You" - shows part of the torturous path that data travels to get from fribble to the outside world (with pics.)
I also have piles of other computers around, which I (sometimes) use as part of my work in CIEEM. These are mostly older systems of varying degrees of obsolesence. They can be a lot of fun to play with.
I don't yet have an HP or a SGI workstation. Hey, you folks at HP and SGI hear that? I can tell my future employers what I think of IBM, Digital, and Sun boxes, but there's just no way I could possibly recommend a nice HP or SGI machine. So if you have a spare PA-RISC or one of those nifty O2's around, I certainly wouldn't mind taking it off your hands...
And to you nice guys at Sun who give away Solaris for me to play with, thanks. Now how about an UltraSPARC so I can actually run it? Come on now, prove to me how much better it is than the Digital machines I'm so fond of. :)
How you gonna do it? PS/2 it!
Well, they're reliable if nothing else. Within their class of machine, they are indisputably top-of-the line. That is, a 386 PS/2 is really fast, for a 386. What makes them so fast in their class is what prevents them from being upgraded in any useful way: these are Microchannel bus machines, which locks you into IBM propreitary devices, with few exceptions. Anyway, here's what I have. The pics are a little out of date because I'm moving stuff to make room for my Suns.
Lovely PS/2 gear. The stacked units in this picture are (from bottom to top):
For anyone who cares, the monitor is an 8515. The small box with the thick cable is an Ethernet transceiver, used because the Ethernet boards only have AUI ports.
I have quite a collection of PS/2 reference and device setup (.ADF) disks. I'm in the process of sorting them and making disk images for a future Microchannel support archive, but in the meanwhile, you can email me if you need MCA disks.
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"The Price Was Right": IBM POWERserver 530
(a.k.a. ballast.cie.rpi.edu)
It isn't breathtakingly fast, but it's not too shabby. Besides, it looks damn impressive. This is about 20" wide, 30" tall, and 32" deep, and weighs 117 pounds. Since it has only two wheels on the bottom, you have no doubt about that weight once you move it (you have to hold one end about 2" away from the floor or it drags). It has a modestly huge 600W power supply, 48MB of RAM, and two 670MB SCSI-II hard disks. It had a third disk which failed, but who cares, the whole machine was free. IBM's diagnostic tests were run from floppies (8 of them), and they confirmed the failure. I have a feeling that most of the AIX filesystem once lived on that drive, which is why I ended up reinstalling AIX from scratch. This is not a particularly fun thing to do.
Fribble and it's drives now sit on top of the RS/6000, since its big enough and just about the right height to use as a desk.
I gave this machine the name "ballast" because of its immense weight, limited usefulness, and the fact that if the building began to sink into the ground, it would be one the first things to be thrown out the window.
Ballast currently does nothing but crunch RC5 blocks for Distributed.Net. It does this rather poorly due to the POWER cpu's RISC instruction set lacking most of the desirable shift and rotate instructions. A ~40MHz clock doesn't help either.
On a positive note, it has a pretty good 8mm SCSI tape drive and a CDROM drive, but it's a pain to mount the drives under AIX.
I have another RS/6000, this one a Model 320 workstation. It's sitting in pieces in another room for now while we decide its ultimate fate.
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Sun SPARCstations
"It's not the size of the box, it's what's inside that makes it suck." Machines like the IPC are what made people lose interest in expensive workstations and buy PCs instead. The only redeeming features of this machine are its nice video display (has the optional color framebuffer) and the fact that it's small and cute looking. Other than that, you have a 25MHz Sparc struggling to get anything done.
But, with Linux and some external hard disks, it makes a fairly decent webserver. Go visit it at toast.cie.rpi.edu, it's feeling lonely.
This is a pizza-box chassis machine with a 50MHz (?) processor. I'm going to try Solaris 7 on it once I put some more memory in. This machine has a nice framebuffer (video) card using two SBus slots.
I don't have much available on these machines. Unfortunately, neither does Sun. I was able to find part of the service handbook describing the Sun 4C class of machines, which include the IPC and the SS2. View the Sun-4c Handbook Online.
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"What a deal!": DECstation 3100
Another freebie. I have three DECstation 3100s and a very large DEC monitor to go with them. Also, I have a couple original keyboards, a RZ55 external disk drive, and a TK50 tape drive. The problem is that they have marginal hard disks and no operating system installed. These are UNIX workstaions, orignally made in 1989. They use MIPS 2000-series processors and have 24MB of RAM. I haven't made them do anything useful yet. There's a version of NetBSD for these systems, which is nice, given that the original Digital Ultrix operating system will soon be completely discontinued. There is supposedly a Linux port in the works, but I'm not holding my breath.
Picture of a DECstation 3100 Not my picture, this is from Digital's web site. I can hardly imagine rendering the images shown on the monitor in the picture using a DS3100. I suspect that all the applications you see running on the screen are actually run on something like a VAX, and the X-windows display is just being exported over to the 3100.
Send comments, gripes, suggestions to: Jameel Akari
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Modified on 7 Jun 1999
