Tallest Tower in the Land (not a mac)

[IIfx]

Well, I was digging through my storage in the depths of Lab 2...and guess what I found!

My old Compaq Proliant 1500 Workstation/Server! The thing is a beast of 1994! Yes, that tall thing on the left is a computer.

Specs:

Dual Pentium 1 Socket 5 at 166mhz

12 banks of 72 pin SIMMs (Currently 82mb)

8 EISA Slots

4 PCI Slots

Hot Swap SCSI-2 Array (I lost the trays Need to find them...)

Hot Swap PSU (400w)

Compaq SCSI-2 RAID Controller

3Com 1/100 Ethernet PCI NIC

This machine made a beast for Windows NT 4. I seek to restore this computer to its former glory. Unfortunately it uses one of those stupid Rayovac 4.5 volt batteries that you cant find a replacement for anywhere, time to rig 3 AA batteries together. The system has a highly advanced BIOS that is configured using a set of 4 floppies. Unfortunately it needs a working battery to even operate correctly. Without it it complains of defective 2nd CPU, missing RAM, faulty controller information, faulty everything, and it thinks its 1980.

Now...what do I fill 8 EISA slots with? Its easier to fill Nubus...

One cool thing is how the front is covered in LEDs once HDDs are added. 3 LEDs for each drive.

An oddity about this PC is how its licensed to run SCO Unix. The serial sticker is on the back.

Sad thing is how it makes a 9500 look short.

So now I have about 4 projects going at once. Working on my IIfx and Q800, that server thing, cleaning up all my stuff and performing a liquidation of stuff I dont need but others may need.

Yay. ;D

 

[Unknown_K]

Nice machine, did they use the same case with dual PPros?

 

[IIfx]

Same hardware too, but with different CPU card. (CPU is on a daughterboard with RAM, with most electronics on a backbone)

Good luck to me finding the Pentium Pro board, the machine is rare as it is. It would be cool though to upgrade it to the PPro. Then it would be the top of the line 1996 model!

Back in 2004-2006 I actually used this as a main desktop. 56k USR Dial Up Modem, Matrox PCI Video, Sound Blaster, and Windows 2000 made it into a pretty decent machine for use. Win2k pushed the limit a bit on the Dual 166mhz CPU, but with the fast RAID disks it would beat the snot out of plenty of slightly newer computers.

So, I aim to restore this old workhorse. It will go well sitting next to the 9500.

 

[Unknown_K]

Too bad I never found one of those tower servers at the local recycler before it went bust, mostly they had the short fat servers (P2/P3).

My tallest old PC is a Pentium 90 Zenith Server Z that is much taller and deeper then a 9500 (heavy as hell).

 

[coius]

I wish I could've scored the tower, board and 4 (yes 4) 1.2Ghz Pentium III Xeon CPU setup my aunt had for her business.

Her machine was a complete video editing system a full ATX board with 4* 1.2Ghz Xeon CPUs, 2048MB PC-133 ECC RAM, 6x 32GB 15k RPM Ultra-160 SCSI Drives on a real hardware RAID Controller (Full PCI-X 133Mhz Slot for it) with 128MB Cache (i think it was an LSI card, not sure but it was a full-length card with 3x SCSI 68-pin connectors), Dual DVD-RAM drives, Windows 2k Pro (3-4 CPU workstation license)

and dual Matrox 128MB Video cards, one PCI the other AGP Pro

It also had a full avid setup with the ability to work with 720i/p video and DV in/out.

My aunt back between 1993-2006 owned a local company here in my city before she retired. They did commercial training videos and corporate internal as well as commercials, especially (since my aunt and her business partner were heavily involved in) the local humane society (my aunt is the reason I was able to get my dog before they hit show room status)

So when she upgraded the system (I put a Dual Core AMD 64 w/ 2GB RAM, and 128MB PCI-E Radeon HD x1600 in it) I wasn't able to keep the parts. She ended up selling them all off to someone for I think close to $700 which funded the parts for the rebuild.

The case was wicked. The desk I had barely met the top of the tower, and it was a tall desk.

she had about 4 or 5 of these machines back when they were in production and new and I think she mentioned the full setup for her business cost her close to $210 grand for all the machines. Then they upgraded the video rendering/data servers and had to pull a second mortgage on the house they were running it out of to cover 1/3rd of the server cost.

In the server room I was impressed with the 5 Unit SCSI RAID enclosures hosting probably 10-12 SCSI Drives (I think about 150GB SCSI drives before they dissolved) and she mentioned at the time (which was unfathomable for me) that they had close to 7 TB of space across the servers they had.

I should mention that Union Pacific was a big customer of theirs, so they had got quite a bit of money

 

[CelGen]

If it's anything like my 1600 was then you have a mini jet engine next to your desk.

 

[Gorgonops]

Eight EISA slots is... just wow. I have no idea what you'd fill that many with. (Once upon a time I did do some part-time admin of an NT-based rackmount PBX system that had a huge ISA backplane filled with about a dozen POTS interface cards, but that's a pretty specialized application.)

For a while I had this strange urge to seek out one of those dual Socket 5 systems just to see how well Linux actually ran on one. (The slowest multi-CPU Intel system I've owned was based on one of those Abit BP6 dual Celeron motherboards which were crazy-popular back in 1999.) I sort of think I'm over it now. (Supposedly there are multi-socket 486 systems floating around as well, but it's easier to get a signed photo of Bigfoot than it is to lay your hands on one of them, leaving Sun Sparcstation 10/20s as your best bet for finding some super-slow SMP action.)

 

[Unknown_K]

Anything SMP using 386 or 486 CPUs would need a specially written OS/driver set for them so even if you found the machine pretty much nothing would run on it. I passed on a cheap dual P5 motherboard on ebay last year because while it looked interesting I don't think I would use it (I have a dual PPro overdrive system running Win NT). If I ever found a complete SMP 386 or 486 system running some kind of exotic UNIX I would jump on it just for the hell of it.

EISA is cool but 99% of the cards made for it are SCSI and Networking. I have a couple ATI 2MB video cards and another brand I forget now plus some video editing cards made by Matrox (one is EISA and the others are ISA, something like 4 cards connected to each other).

 

[Gorgonops]

Anything SMP using 386 or 486 CPUs would need a specially written OS/driver set for them so even if you found the machine pretty much nothing would run on it.

The Intel MultiProcessor Specification version 1.1, describing systems which used the discrete Intel 82489DX APIC or its equivalent (built into 75mhz or faster Pentium processors) includes 80486 systems, and companies such as ALR made compliant boxes. (Old enough versions of) Linux *in theory* should work on MP 1.1 compliant 486 boxes, possibly with some tweaking. Of course it's very difficult to find much in the way of user reports because by the time Linux meaningfully supported SMP at all those machines were getting to be pretty long in the tooth and they were never common.

Linux on proprietary non-SMP architectures like the Compaq SystemPro or Sequent's early 386 "mainframes" is another story, although I seem to recall there being at least some experimental SystemPro support at one point. (Whether "experimental" meant "really actually works" or not is another question.)

 

[IIfx]

I found out about the Compaq Proliant 4000 in an old episode of the Computer Chronicles (Same Server case, back pane, etc) and its a QUAD Pentium 1 machine. I never even thought such a thing existed.

No clue why these old SMP machines are so appealing to me all of a sudden.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

So how tall is that MicroChannel Server? :?:

Depth and width would be interesting too!

 

[IIfx]

So how tall is that MicroChannel Server? :?:
Depth and width would be interesting too!

*EISA/PCI

Ok here are the dimensions:

25 1/2 inches tall

22 inches deep

9 inches wide

Installing NT 4 server on it now...it booted from CD which is amazing to me. Normally a PC this old forces me to use a floppy boot.

Thats a good sign I guess ;D

The SCSI connector on the motherboard (external) is really really weird. Its long and flat, does not look like any other I have seen.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

*EISA/PCI

:lol: Same $#!^ different vendor! But having PCI on there is nice

Have you looked into Fast/Wide SCSI II or III Connectors? :?:

Gotta measure the height & depth of my AncientMicroChannelMonster, but it's not wide enough for a 5.25 " Drive in landscape mode, it has a portrait mode 5.25" bay.

Height may be equal, but I'm SURE you've got mine beat on VOLUME! :disapprove:

 

[IIfx]

:lol: Same $#!^ different vendor! But having PCI on there is nice

Correct, EISA was Compaq, HP, and some others response to IBM not sharing the sandbox of MCA, so they made their own.

In my mind some Compaq employ thought this out:

(Based on the most famous quote from Portal 2, by Aperture Science CEO Cave Johnson)

When IBM gives you lemons....make IBM take the lemons back! Get Mad! Demand to see IBM's CEO! Make IBM rue the day it thought it could give COMPAQ the lemons! Do they know who COMPAQ is? Its the company that gonna burn their market down, WITH THE CLONES. Compaq is going to engineer a bus, that burns their market down!!! -cough-

I went overboard there with the colors, but it was all for fun.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

:lol: [] ]'>

Yours may have 74% more displacement, but at 23.5" x 19" x 6.5" with rotating Feets & a full length handle . . .

. . . mine's a POS PS2 PortaTowaaa!!!!!!! )

 

[IIfx]

:lol: [] ]'>
23.5" x 19" x 6.5" of PS2 PortaTower w/rotating Feets & a full length handle. )

I has feets...but not the handle.

A 50lb server with a handle. Why didn't they think of that?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

:lol: You posted before I was finished editing!

Maybe I should slap a fold-down desktop/LCD onto the side of mine! )

 

[CelGen]

The SCSI connector on the motherboard (external) is really really weird. Its long and flat, does not look like any other I have seen.

Like the one at top pictured here?

Ultra SCSI is always nice have.

 

[IIfx]

The SCSI connector on the motherboard (external) is really really weird. Its long and flat, does not look like any other I have seen.

Like the one at top pictured here?

Nope, thats not it. Same height, but wider connector. Must be some special compaq scsi connector. The motherboard controller is UltraSCSI though.

There are two controllers in this PC, the motherboard one without a RAID, and the Compaq Smart 2DH RAID controller, which has normal connectors.

Internally, the motherboard connector is both USCSI and 50 pin old SCSI.