Sperry anyone?

[Jules Richardson]

On Mon, 2004-11-15 at 22:14 -0800, nospam212-cctalk at yahoo.com wrote:
> Mine has the Sperry label as it was made before Sperry became Unisys. 
>  Later ones had the Unisys label.  I have a 5000/50 I picked up from a
>  company I worked for at the time that went out of  business.  It was an 
> NCR Tower that Sperry/Unisys put their label on.  We had a later model 
> 5000/55 but a friend grabbed that one, little laster processor and 
> other upgrades.  They had a 5000/60 which was by a different company 
> that I would have loved to have picked up but it required 220 power 
> which I couldn't provide at the time and was too big for me to house 
> back then as well.  Today yes, 13 years ago no.  A shame as it was a 
> dual processor model.  

I'm just digging through ten year old emails here - apparently the
Unisys line went something like:

- 5000/20 and 5000/40 - early 16-bit 68010 @8 or 16 MHz, MFM/RLL
controller.
- 5000/30 and 5000/50 - 32-bit 68020 @16 MHz, MFM/RLL controller.
The /30  has room for two memory cards, the /50 for up to four. The /50
also has room for one more internal disk (full heigth) and more Multibus
bays.
- 5000/35 and 5000/55 - 32-bit 68020 @25MHz, SCSI controller. Otherwise,
the same as /30 and /50.
- 5000/60, /65, /80... - Multi-processor (master-slave, not SMP). Never 
seen one of these.

I don't know if there was an NCR equivalent to the multi processor ones;
not heard of one.

I'm sure my Tower has an '030 and not an '020 as the main CPU. I'm also
pretty sure it only has two memory slots (like a 5000/3x) but definitely
has two drives fitted internally (more like a 5000/5x). Maybe I'll see
if I can bring it indoors later and then try and get it going again
after it's had a few days to acclimatise...

> Still have manuals and install media for the 5000/50.

Ooh. Wonder if that'd work with my Tower? I know the binaries were
generally interchangeable between NCR and Unisys models, but if I'm
remembering the '030 right, then my system's something other than a
5000/50 equivalent. 

>   Was thinking about putting it on my network at home again.  

Well at some point I want to have my one running at the museum; I don't
have the space to seriously use it here (plus they suck up a lot of
power)

Mine was a development platform for the XVT toolkit, so it's loaded up
with X Windows software; I remember hooking it up to a LAN and running X
sessions on remote X terminals from it ten years ago. Apart from the
power useage it was a nice little server back then :)

> Anyway, nice to see my 5000/50 is now worth $5-6. :)

Funny how some of these multi user Unix systems don't fetch much. I'm
surprised they don't go for more money just for the coolness factor (I
mean it's a proper machine rather than just running Linux on an old
PC :-)

cheers

Jules

-- 
The most secure computer in the world is one not connected to the
internet.  That's why I recommend NTL.