Thank you Dave for a concise technical explanation! It is also helpful to have personal anecdote's like yours to tell visitors. :) I also will have to explain to visitors what is UNIX, how it was important, who invented it etc. On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 5:53 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On 07/19/2016 05:32 PM, Jeffrey Brace via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Yes! I got the login and password from Evan. Then Jonathan G. and David ?. helped me figure out the command to properly shutdown: sync;sync;sync;shutdown.
I just wanted to check that the machine worked so that I could demo it to visitors. I just wonder what I could demonstrate to them that is interesting. I also have to research the significance of that machine. Evan put it in the museum for a reason.
The big deal with the UNIX PC is that it's a full-blown UNIX system on a desktop for less than $10K, when such a thing was unheard of.
It runs SVR2 on a 68010 at 10MHz. The base configuration was 512KB of RAM and a 10MB hard drive. This was enough to run the whole OS and get work done. The original spec was a 5MB hard drive, but as far as I know that version never shipped, as 5MB wasn't enough to install even the first release of its OS. The graphics are 720x348 monochrome, the same as the ubiquitous Hercules video system at the time. The graphical environment, called "ua" (User Agent), is quite advanced for the time, and for its memory footprint.
It was done for AT&T by Convergent Technologies.
As a matter of opinion, this machine has the finest keyboard I have every used on any platform.
I worked in a store in NJ which received some of the first released UNIX PCs. We had a regular churn of academic types who had seen the press release and came in to ogle it.
Contrary to popular belief, it has nothing at all in common with the 3B2 family, other than the name of the company that sold it.
Overall the machine was groundbreaking in many ways, and way ahead of its time.
-Dave
-- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA