As readers of my bLog will no doubt know, I'm a big fan of the Vintage Computer Federation Forums. The community there has helped me with several projects that I would not have been able to complete on my own. I recently saw a post from a gentleman who had listed four different Unix workstations. I reached out, and he generously agreed to pass on an IBM RS/6000 machine, a big thanks to Peter M. for this machine.
First things first, Peter let me know that there were a couple different versions of IBM AIX which were not yet archived including the first version of AIX that can run on this box, IBM AIX 4.3.3, and also IBM AIX 5L V5.1, so those are online now for anyone else who may need them. There are earlier and later versions of AIX already archived, and there's still quite a bit of software avaliable online including a person who is building GNU tools for the OS.
This machine is a Power3 computer. It's a single core PowerPC based processor from about year 2000. Specifically, this is a 44P Model 170 at 333MHz, 1MB L2 Cache and with 512MB RAM. This machine was assembled in the USA at the IBM manufacturing facility in the Rochester, MN factory. I've been in that facility many years ago so this machine is a part of Minnesota Computer History.
It was reported that the machine had not been used for several years and so as usual I started in with a light dusting and cleaning. I didn't have to take the machine far apart but I had been warned that the CPU daughter card would come loose and prevent the machine from starting, so I addressed that right away. The RAM also needed to be re-seated, the battery reinstalled, and the GPU reinstalled. Thankfully, all the hardware manuals for this machine are still online at the fantastic IBMFiles.com website, so getting through the error codes on the front panel was pretty straightforward. If the machine stops booting it's quite easy to look up the error codes where it got hung up, much like the POST codes on a PC.
It was interesting to install the oldest version of the OS that would run on this machine, version 4.3.3, so I did that and looked around a bit at that but eventually I decided that the last version would be more useful, so I went looking for AIX version 5.3, and was able to find disk images for that online. I burned the 8 CD set and started the install upgrading over the top of a 5.1 install. That worked quite well and the machine is up and running with networking...
I'm happy to have the machine cleaned up reloaded and up and running. This completes the first phase of work on this machine, but I look forward to spending more time getting software tools loaded onto the machine, doing some more networking with it, and learning more about this era of AIX.
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