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Originally Posted by cromag
I still have one! Well, it was a 7300, but I slipped in a half-height 40MB hard drive as soon as they were affordable (by the standards of the day). So my "wedge" doesn't have a monitor pedestal. The "user agent" had a weird Y2K bug -- it went from 1999 to 19100 -- but the core UNIX was okay.
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Yeah, it had the Y2K bug, which won't get fixed. But IIRC, you can reset the date/time after booting to the current one and it will behave.
The user agent was a Convergent creation called FACE. You could plug an ANSI terminal into it and get a usable mono character mode display similar to what you saw on the console. I thought it was one of the better UIs I'd seen. (I used Daniel Lawrence's version of MicroEmacs as my editor under MSDOS, and Lawrence's source built out of the box on the 3B1. I had fun customizing it to do something appropriate when I pressed one of the dedicated keys on the console keyboard. I had even more fun doing the same thing for an older version of Gnu Emacs.)
A client of the employer I worked for back when had a 3B1 with 2MB RAM, a 72MB HD, a serial ports card, and had four Wyse terminals and a printer attached, running a specialized distribution management application based on a UNIX RDBMS. Performance was acceptable.
There
was an amusing bit early on, when the client ran up a large LD phone bill. The machine had been shipped to the app vendor's office in Boston to get the DBMS installed, and they had it set to poll their local server for updates. They forgot to turn off polling when they shipped it to NYC for installation, and it matter of factly dialed out over the modem daily to check their server, because it had a dial-up number for the server it wanted to poll. Oops...
The vendor agreed it was their fail and split the charges with the customer.
(I contributed a fair bit to getting it working, and got offered a job by the vendor. I declined because I didn't want to leave NYC, but have wondered since if I should have accepted.)
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I used to turn it on for the kids to show them what a "green screen" looked like.
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I used to have an amber Amdek monitor plugged into my PC clone, driven by a Hercules graphics card. That was considered a European DIN standard because it was believed to be more readable and less likely to cause problems like eyestrain in use.
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Dennis