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Originally Posted by cromag
I hate to argue, but I was doing tech support for GBS (General Business Systems) right after the first divestiture, and the 7300 came with half height 10MB and 20MB hard drives and 512K or 1M RAM(an early base model had a 5MB drive, but it was useless and never released). The 3B1 came with a full height 40MB or 67MB drives and 1M RAM. There were a few odd variants that were being tested just before the line was discontinued, and you could run even larger capacity hard drives if you replaced the WD controller chip, but I'm sure those were the only models AT&T sold.
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Your memory may be better than mine. (Feel free to argue. I can be wrong, and would rather folks get the right information.)
I'm a little startled art the 512K RAM model, though I can believe a 10MB HD. The ones my employer sold began with the 20MB HDs. (We were a B2B outfit, and had some notion of the minimum HW our clients would need.)
I had a 7300 with 1MB RAM in two 512KB cards. It was an office machine and unused. I grabbed one 512KB card and swapped it into another machine that could use it. The 512KB RAM model technically booted and ran, but was snail slow. The company I worked for got acquired and relocated, and I declined to go along. My successor didn't understand why the office 7300 was so slow.
(I took pity on him and explained the circumstances.)
Yes, I think you're right. The base 3B1 had 1MB RAM and 40 or 67 MB drive. I got an extra MB of RAM and the 67MB drive on mine, and added an additional 1.5MB RAM on expansion cards.
I encountered an outfit online selling optional larger HDs later on. Vague memory was that you had to replace the controller chip as well as the drive.
Doing that was a challenge for mere mortals. The 7300/3B1 design
looked neat, but was a royal pain to service. Getting it open was a challenge. Getting it closed back up again was a greater one. And the motherboard was on the bottom of the housing, so if you needed to get to it you had to get other stuff out of the way first.
IIRC, There was also a never produced follow on model intended as a low end server that had a color monitor and various other improvements. It would have been neat. The chap I mentioned upthread with five or so 7300s/3B1 was trying to get his hands on the new OS for it, but never could.
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Documentation is sparse on the web these days, but I did find this:
Note that the image they include is a 3B1, with the monitor pedestal to accommodate a full height drive.
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Someone back when said it looked like a Triumph TR7, which I thought an appropriate descriptor.
It was a pity AT&T never figured out how to sell systems. They positioned the UNIX-PC against the IBM-PC running DOS as an alternative single user machine, but didn't realize it was all about the software. There was an addon card with an 8086 CPU and 512KB RAM that could be used to boot DOS and run DOS applications as a guest process under Unix. Another fond memory was teaching folks how to break Lotus 1,2,3 copy protection so they could actually
run it on a UNIX-PC with an 8086 expansion card.
Another bit I'll have to try to get off of my 3B1 at some point was a freeware package developed by AT&T folks to serve as training wheels for DOS users dealing with Unix. It was an extensive set of Korn shell scripts, functions, and aliases to let you use DOS commands like dir on the command line and have them recognized and return something useful, by converting them on the fly to the corresponding Unix commands. It was a very neat bit of shell scripting.
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Dennis