[SML] turning off light boards

[Steven Santos]

I used a PDP-11 in high school back in the early 1990's.  One of my
after school jobs at the time was assisting a friends father
installing and maintaining Digital Alpha and Sun Solaris servers, as
well as the workstations that went with them.  Had one client that had
3 PDP-11's (a 55, a 65 and a 70 IIRC), 2 racks of Sun servers (6ish)
and  and 8(!) digital alpha servers (2100 series I believe it was) and
a home-brewed box they called "big bertha" that had a ton of hard
drives in it and wired to it.  No one ever told me what these guys
did, but we spent a LOT of time making network authentication work
right.  The PDP-11's did not want to work with Sun's network
authentication.  Neither did the Windows for Workgroups (3.11)
machines want to do it.

I still remember being blown away that an office of 12 would have this
many servers running, and that each of these guys had a bleeding edge
W4W 386, a DEC term and a Solaris box (with 2 screens!) sitting on
each desk.  My whole school had 1 pdp-11 that powered 2 classrooms of
workstations, plus the school admin terminals.

Now my phone has more computing power than that whole office did.
---
Steven Santos
Director
Simply Circus, Inc.
86 Los Angeles Street
Newton, MA 02458

P: 617-527-0667
F: 617-934-1870
E: Steven at SimplyCircus.com


On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 4:23 PM, Kristi R-C via Stagecraft
<stagecraft at theatrical.net> wrote:
> DEC made tanks. I used to program on a PDP 11/70. I think you could have bombed it and it would have been fine.
>
> Kristi R-C
>
>> On Nov 26, 2015, at 12:32 PM, Chip Wood via Stagecraft <stagecraft at theatrical.net> wrote:
>>
>> Did that in '75 when NSA retired their PDP-1 (Serial # 1) for a PDP-10 back when core was core and NSA was only a little paranoid.  Ran a million cycles of random data thru it and they said that wasn't enough. So we yanked it and put it on a shelf.  That thing could still be there after 40 years.
>>
>> Chip 1
>>
>>> On 11/24/2015 8:41 AM, Alf Sauve' via Stagecraft wrote:
>>>> On 11/23/2015 10:36 PM, Richard John Archer via Stagecraft wrote:
>>>> volatile core memories
>>> Never heard of "volatile" core memory.   One of the advantages, possible the only one, of 'core" memory was that it was not volatile.  It actually was a real pain if you were trying to scrub it clean of classified data.     Been there. done that.
>>
>>
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