[vcf-midatlantic] Museum Report 7/16 & 7/17

[David Ryskalczyk]

I agree, they weren't necessary. It's partly habit for me when dealing with old UNIX boxes. An old friend who ran the VMS and Unix machines where I work (and gave a ton of stuff away in the '90s) did it for the Solaris systems there — probably as a matter of habit — and of course I picked some of that up. We ran a SPARC lab until the late 2000s — unfortunately on Blade 150s, which aren't all that great. I did manage to write a NetBoot system install script for a platform that only had the Bourne Shell and deploy it, though :)

The UNIX PC seems to have a reasonable shutdown script anyway (there is no "halt" only "shutdown" — it does appear rather advanced for its time), so even if this was useful somewhere it probably wouldn't be on that platform. But, old machines (where you don't necessarily know what you're dealing with) and habit :)

David R

> On Jul 19, 2016, at 20:57, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic at lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
> 
>> On 07/19/2016 08:53 PM, Bill Sudbrink via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
>> Originally, if I recall correctly, it was:
>> 
>> sync
>> sync
>> sync
>> halt
>> 
>> Yea, later on, all that fancy "shutdown -h" really made the
>> sync's unnecessary.
> 
>  The syncs were never actually necessary.
> 
>> But, can you really trust the jerk who wrote the shutdown routine?
> 
>  Generally speaking, yes. ;)
> 
>> Slightly changing subjects, I don't recall ever seeing the
>> system in question.  The first 68K *nix box I ever played
>> with was a Masscomp.  An MC-500 if memory serves.  Is that
>> the machine we're talking about here?
> 
>  No, the AT&T UNIX PC 7300, a.k.a. the 3B1.  It was by no means the
> first 68K-based UNIX system, of course.
> 
>            -Dave
> 
> 
> -- 
> Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
> New Kensington, PA