Unix on old-ish machines - advice sought

[Stan Barr]

Hi,

Pete Turnbull <pete at dunnington.u-net.com> said:
> On Apr 6 2005,  9:39, Stan Barr wrote:
> 
> > I'd like to get a straight (ie no X) Unix running on some sort of
> > older, but not necessarily ancient, hardware.  My Micro-11/73 is
> > not really suitable, and PDP-11s that are seem to be a bit thin
> > on the ground over here in the UK.  I've seen a few Vaxen and
> > MicroVaxen on the market lately so my thoughts are turning in
> > that direction.  I know a few people here run such machines and I'm
> > seeking advice on the best machine to look for and, at the risk of
> > starting a religious war, the best unix to run on it... :-)
> 
> A micro-11/73 would run 2.11 BSD quite well.  I have one like that
> (actually it's an 11/83 but not very different).

My 11/73 has quite a small hard disk and small memory, and I'd like
to keep it running RT-11 as it has some sort of colour frame-buffer
card and the software for that is RT-11 (though I've not figured it
out yet - must take the covers off and see exactly *what* the card
is!)

>  An 11/23 would run
> 7th Edition, but it would be slow, and have no TCP/IP networking.  A
> microVAX would do BSD quite well.  Or if you want something classic but
> not *too* old, my favourite would be something like an SGI Indigo.  An
> R3000 with Irix 5.3 would be quite nice (I have three of them).  If
> you'd asked 6 months ago you could have had one of my spares, and a
> monitor.  Maybe you'd like an SGI Indy, with Irix 5.3?  I certainly
> have a spare Indy.

SGI is one one my list, a few people have suggested Sun and HP as well.
I simply want a machine to demonstrate traditional unix to visitors as
an addition to my machines running RT-11, RSTS/E and early-ish MacOS,
oh - and this Linux box and the later Mac, must set up my AT as well.
Most of my visitors haven't used anything but Windows and need
educating :-)

>  BTW, I also saved a hub and a terminal server for
> you...
>

Still having difficulties with transport, may be going to Bradford soon
and York is not much further - we'll see...
 
> 
> -- 
> Pete						Peter Turnbull
> 						Network Manager
> 						University of York

-- 
Cheers,
Stan Barr  stanb at dial.pipex.com

The future was never like this!