Setting the date in ULTRIX

Ultrix 4.5 has a Y2k problem- the date command cannot set any date with 00 as the year. However, ULTRIX itself has no problem using dates past 2000, you just have to trick it to set the date by jumping to the last second of each year, letting it roll over the year then doing…

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Dive into IRIX

I’ve been diving into IRIX lately, setting up both 5.3 on my Personal Iris and 6.5.22 on my Indigo. It’s been interesting unlearning 20 years of Linuxisms and embracing the IRIX. There is an interesting project going on called irisware which aims to resurrect a modern pool of open-source software for IRIX. Which is not…

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Sparcbook 3

The Tadpole Sparcbook3 was dug up out of storage in time to submit it for the Reddit Portable Battlestation contest.  This one came from a Craigslist buy at least a decade ago, and I promptly just stuck the whole box in storage. It came with a couple of CDROMS, batteries and accessories (scsi cable, 2…

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RISC Workstations of the 1990s

Inspired by the amazing system collection and blog of Sophie Haskins aka cronmom I’ve been trying to figure out what workstations I have (and what I want) from the classic RISC workstation era. I have a couple of them from the Nextslab all the way to the svelte DEC Alpha XP1000. My recently acquired SGI…

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DEC Professional 350: Booting

I found the DEC Professional 350 in Ebay for just $150 and I considered a nice way to get a PDP-11 system that could at the very least run BSD— for a decent price. PDP-11s are not only expense but the peripherals are also expensive prone to issues and it’s difficult system to bootstrap let…

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