[Beowulf] Win64 Clusters!!!!!!!!!!!!

Peter St. John peter.st.john at gmail.com
Mon Apr 9 15:32:51 PDT 2007


I got my 286 in late 83, didn't get a HD for it and install unix until maybe
85 or 6. I paid money for Microport (not to be confused with Micropro, which
had OS9, a unix work-alike for real time, not to be confused with OS2...)
which licensed System V (and Im' thinking SVr3.4, I must have the books
somewhere). It was less than half the price of Xenix, but Xenix was
available.
It was around 92 that I switched to linux when I got my 486. Up to that time
I had made do with a 386 daughter-card for my 286, which was what brought my
memory all the way up to 1536K, woo hoo; I had been 512 + 256 + 128 = 896, I
think, by populating up the motherboard (which came with 512, the original
IBM AT) and an expansion/extension card (I dont remember which was which
now).

The distro was  a box full of many > 3 floppies, Slackware? that seemed
better than downloading over my phone line, which was maybe 1200 baud then?
I mean, bps :-)

Tony?

Peter


On 4/9/07, Michael Will <mwill at penguincomputing.com> wrote:
>
>  I used minix on 286 briefly until I found out about the 3-floppy MCC
> linux distribution that included gcc around 1992 ;-)
>
> I never got to play with amoeba since both Minix and Amoeba where not free
> at the time linux came out - did you?
>
> http://www.cs.vu.nl/pub/amoeba/amoeba.html shows an 80 node amoeba cluster
> based on sparc and seems to be free now.
>
> Michael
>  ------------------------------
> *From:* beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] *On
> Behalf Of *Peter St. John
> *Sent:* Monday, April 09, 2007 2:54 PM
> *To:* Tony Travis
> *Cc:* Beowulf Mailing List
> *Subject:* Re: [Beowulf] Win64 Clusters!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
>
>  Tony,
> I should have said, ** I **  wouldn't have reasonably expected unix to run
> on an 8088 at the time (System V booted with 512K on a 286 but "vi temp"
> hung so I had to expand memory). At the time I was unaware of any versions
> besides Berkeley and AT&T. Now of course even IBM can boot linux on a
> wrist-watch (but the power supply is ungainly). At the time 8-bit word
> seemed inadequate; I could not find a way to buy quantity one 3B2 from Ma,
> so motorolla ( e.g. Fortune 32:16 nice box in '83 made me want a unix
> workstation for home) and intel 286 seemed like only options I could find.
> But I didn't know about usenet back then.
>
> When was Minix ported to 8088? Some people kept PDP11s running for a
> pretty long time :-)
> Peter
>
>
> On 4/9/07, Tony Travis <ajt at rri.sari.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> > Peter St. John wrote:
> > > Well, I could run unix with all 1536K, but not MS/PCDOS 3.2. So call
> > it
> > > a software issue of failing to work around the hardware issue.
> > Obviously
> > > the hardware was not a show-stopper.
> > >
> > > But it was the 286 I did this on, not the earlier 8088, which I don't
> > > think could reasonably have been expected to run unix; but the
> > original
> > > comment regarded the 80286.
> >
> > Hello, Peter.
> >
> > People have very short memories! Minix runs fine on an 8088:
> >
> >        http://www.neonbox.org/minix_laptop/index.html
> >
> > I replaced a pdp11/34 running Unix version 7 with an 8086 running Minix!
> >
> >
> > Hmm... I wonder if anyone remembers Amoeba?
> >
> >        Tony.
> > --
> > Dr. A.J.Travis,                     |  mailto:ajt at rri.sari.ac.uk
> > Rowett Research Institute,          |     http://www.rri.sari.ac.uk/~ajt
> > Greenburn Road, Bucksburn,          |   phone:+44 (0)1224 712751
> > Aberdeen AB21 9SB, Scotland, UK.    |     fax:+44 (0)1224 716687
> > _______________________________________________
> > Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf at beowulf.org
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> >
> >
>
>
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