On 11/15/24 13:50, Ethan O'Toole wrote:
Ah ok. I guess I grew up early; never got into the "messing with other peoples' stuff is cool" vibe. I was always on the other side of that particular fence, trying to keep big networks running (to keep us all fed) with kids pecking at them relentlessly from every angle.
I am talking years before joining the workforce. Tech is way more accessible now, back then geeks were starved.
That was learning, learning, and more learning time for me. Way more rewarding than wrecking other peoples' stuff. :) At least for me. But I'm betting it was a different time; I entered the workforce in the late 1980s. But that's not to say that I didn't have a good bit of fun. FMC Corporation had a large facility near where I lived in NJ, and their VAX-11/780 had a captive "games" account that was pretty easy to break out of. I downloaded boxes of 8" floppies' worth of help files for offline reading, and taught myself a few languages on that machine. I didn't bust up stuff or make any messes, though. Just tied up their dial-in line. :) So while all of my friends were getting jobs at Burger King and 7-Eleven, I went straight from high school to being a VMS sysadmin for the DoD.
I don't know if that's a realistic expectation. I've never seen nor heard of a 5ESS that didn't weigh several tons. The processor is a minimum of four earthquake-rated 23" racks that, I believe, are not separable, or may only be separable in pairs. (3B20D vs. 2x 3B20S) There's the VCDX variant, in one rack, which is also technically a 5ESS but it's actually an emulator that runs on Suns. (i.e. "inflatable doll", it'll get the job done but it's not what you really want)
Every, and I mean every mention of the system I have made included VCDX in it. Right on down to mentioning the Sun system that runs the DMERT emulator.
Apparently I hadn't pattern-matched on that. Yeah those aren't "real" 5ESS's, the legendary kind anyway. The real ones are built around a 3B20D. The Suns in the VCDX systems run software that emulates the two processors in the 3B20D and talk to the switchframes. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA