Quote:
Originally Posted by cromag
Not my first computer, but I had an AT&T 7300 -- basically a 3B1 with a smaller hard drive (10MB or 20MB). But I swapped out the hard drive for a 40MB half height hard drive, so I was in 3B1 territory. That one's gone, but I got a second one, un-upgraded, that's still in the garage.
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The base model 7300 shipped with 1MB RAM and a 20MB drive, but I believe a 40MB drive was an option.
The 3B1 I got shipped with 2MB RAM and a 72MB drive. A client of the systems house I worked for had a 3B1 like that supporting a user on the console and four dumb terminals and a printer, running a specialized distribution management application. Performance was acceptable.
The drives were MFM drives, which pre-dated IDE. Performance was surprisingly good. Among other things, there was a compiler option you could set to compile code that could be paged directly off the drive for faster access. I had lots of fun figuring out how to get an 18.X version of Gnu Emacs to successfully compile that way. (The trick turned out to be in the order of the arguments to the ld command that linked the compiled object modules into an executable the system could run.)
Another friend was a big fan of them, and I believe he still has something like five working 7300s and 3B1s.
I was tickled by a machine that would boot and run AT&T Unix System V Release 2, a full multi-user, multitasking OS, and do useful work with adequate performance in one [b]megabyte[/i] of RAM. I added expansion cards to bring mine to 3.5MB RAM. It flew.
I looked at my 10mhz 3B1 running full multi-user, multitask Unix System V R2. Then I looked at my 33mhz 386 box with
8MB RAM struggling to run Windows for Workgroups 3.11, a multitasking shell on top of a single user, single tasking OS, gazed in the direction of Redmond, WA, and said "What are you
doing?" I still say that.
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Dennis