Saturday·11·March·2006
Some new old non-x86 hardware //at 16:39 //by abe
Because dyfa and dwalin are moving they had some old hardware (but not only hardware) to give away.
I got from them an old HP Apollo 9000 Series 400 Model 400t from 1990 (with an MC68040 processor like some Amigas had, 24 MB RAM and some 1992 HP-UX as operating system), which I decided to call »tub« (“Le TUB” was the prototype of the Citroën HY), a Sun Sparcstation IPC (which I decided to call »acadiane«) and two terminals, one true DEC VT320 and one VT100 compatible.
The IPC unfortunately seems to have a defect power supply, so I probably have to look around at eBay a little bit. The Apollo boots fine and probably also had the correct date in the hardware clock, but the software didn’t accept it. So it asked for the current date. Went fine. Until it asked me for the current year:
WARNING: bad date in real-time clock--check and reset the date [...] _______________________________________________________________________________ You will be prompted for the daten and time. Please enter all values numerically, for example January is 1. The values in the paraenthesis give the acceptable range of responses. _______________________________________________________________________________ Please enter the month (1-12), then press [Return] 9 Please enter the day of the month (1-31), then press [Return] 28 Please enter the last two digits of the year (70-99), then press [Return] 05 Value out of range. Please try again. Please enter the last two digits of the year (70-99), then press [Return]
Using cal, I found out that 1977 has
exactly the same calendar as 2005 and is in the same distance to the
leap years. So I set the year to 77.
Yet another case of programmers not believing how long their software will run. And this box was only ten years old when Y2K came — some parts of the operating system on it even only eight years… Well, I hope, that’s history when NetBSD runs on that box.
Haven’t tested the the terminals yet, although I don’t expect any Y2K issues with them. ;-)
Now playing: Roxette
— Real Sugar
Tagged as: acadiane, Apollo, BSD, DEC, eBay, Hardware, HP, IPC, m68k, NetBSD, Now Playing, Other Blogs, RISC, Sparc, Sun, Terminal, tub, Vintage, VT100, VT320, Y2K
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