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Old 10th January 2010
b8e168 b8e168 is offline
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Default Really old computer

I found an old computer on a Finnish auction site today. It's described as a Unix-computer made by NCR in the late 70s/early 80s. It has A3-sized memory modules and a tape drive. It's size is 60x12x65 cm and it weighs 37 kg. No other information is available, but 5 photos of the machine is available at cs.helsinki.fi/u/mvvuorel/nixi/.

Can I run Open/Net/FreeBSD on this machine? I'm pretty sure I could get it for 1€, and it would be fun to try something other than x86 and x86-64.
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Old 10th January 2010
BSDfan666 BSDfan666 is offline
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That would be an NCR Tower, they were indeed UNIX workstation & servers.. but I can't find a great deal of information.

From what I can piece together, they created these UNIX systems for use primarily as database servers.

It appears that they ran TMX, or NCR's own Unix based on AT&T SVR3.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transac...ment_eXecutive

I did find these emails to the NetBSD mailing list, unfortunately it would appear that no port to this system exists yet.. the CPU (..m68k) is supported, but the rest of the systems hardware may be completely undocumented and NCR proprietary.

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-m6...5/06/0000.html
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-m6...5/06/0001.html

Hope that helps

Last edited by BSDfan666; 10th January 2010 at 06:32 AM.
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Old 10th January 2010
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ephemera ephemera is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by b8e168 View Post
I'm pretty sure I could get it for 1€, and it would be fun to try something other than x86 and x86-64.
1 Euro !?
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Old 10th January 2010
Beastie Beastie is offline
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Yeah, shouldn't these rare "collection" machines cost more like thousands of Euros/Dollars?
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Old 10th January 2010
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It's an NCR tower, not their first cash register.
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