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Gamer9430 said:
What?

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Oh yeah, it is definitely neat, and could be useful, just not sure what yet...
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I have my grandfather's camcorder that he bought in about '97 or 98. It uses the impossible to find(and expensive) mini-VHS tapes. He just had two or three of them, and would dump them off onto a regular VHS and record over them.

If I were into video editing, the 8500 would be a great platform for use with that camera because of all the mid to late 90s AV connectivity built in.

I just haven't had the inclination to do so, or to hunt down the software to do.
 
Gamer9430 said:
Oh, lol... If your nice to people, people will be nice back. It also pays to be in the right place at the right time 🙂
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Being in the right place at the right time is helpful...I was offered this today but don't have the room for it, nor do I have a spare 240V outlet 🙂
 

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poiihy said:
What the heck is that?! 240v computer??
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It's a Silicon Graphics Altix 3000. They actually billed/marketed this as a Supercomputer or mainframe depending on your specific use, but I'd think this one probably would fall into the Minicomputer category.

I don't know the full specifics. It is Itanium based, but I don't know how many processors it has. Opening the front cover reveals 4 separate units about 4U tall.

And, yes, it runs on three phase 240. The electrical outlet it's plugged into looks like a typical(US) household clothes dryer/major appliance plug.
 
bunnspecial said:
It's a Silicon Graphics Altix 3000. They actually billed/marketed this as a Supercomputer or mainframe depending on your specific use, but I'd think this one probably would fall into the Minicomputer category.

I don't know the full specifics. It is Itanium based, but I don't know how many processors it has. Opening the front cover reveals 4 separate units about 4U tall.

And, yes, it runs on three phase 240. The electrical outlet it's plugged into looks like a typical(US) household clothes dryer/major appliance plug.
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Those large plugs are probably 30 amp ones. 20 and 15 amp outlets are smaller; the size of a typical 120v 15 or 20 amp outlet/plug. That thing must use a lot of electricity! 😱 You'd need to install a dedicated 30 amp outlet for it. You probably can't use a step-up transformer with the 20-amp 120v outlet; it would draw too much current.

Can you take a picture of the insides? I wanna see!
 
poiihy said:
Those large plugs are probably 30 amp ones. 20 and 15 amp outlets are smaller; the size of a typical 120v 15 or 20 amp outlet/plug. That thing must use a lot of electricity! 😱 You'd need to install a dedicated 30 amp outlet for it. You probably can't use a step-up transformer with the 20-amp 120v outlet; it would draw too much current.

Can you take a picture of the insides? I wanna see!
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As I said, it's running on 3-phase 240AC. It would need an appliance plug to run it at home-not a huge deal but not something I would want to do with-assuming I had the space and a use for it!

I'll get the insides tomorrow.
 
I doubt that is actually 3 Phase 240V (3 phase 240V very rare) I would expect it being a US based 240V machine that it is split phase 240V (using 2 120V legs from the Big ass center tapped Transformer that takes say 14Kv and steps it down to "house hold" levels) if your houses sockets are on 2 separate 120V Legs then you can get 240V from from one socket on Leg A and and other socket on Leg B if that makes sense and power the machine up
 
LightBulbFun said:
I doubt that is actually 3 Phase 240V (3 phase 240V very rare) I would expect it being a US based 240V machine that it is split phase 240V (using 2 120V legs from the Big ass center tapped Transformer that takes say 14Kv and steps it down to "house hold" levels) if your houses sockets are on 2 separate 120V Legs then you can get 240V from from one socket on Leg A and and other socket on Leg B if that makes sense and power the machine up
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At least in the US 3-phase is actually the norm for "heavy" appliances like air conditions and clothes dryers. Since it's available at the electric box in a typical US home, it's not a big deal to run it to the appliance.

The computer is plugged into the wall with the typical 4-prong(+, neutral, -, and earth ground) twist lock plug as is usually seen on these type of appliance. I have no doubt it's 3-phase going into the box-as for what it does when inside, I don't know. It may split it into two separate single phase 120V circuits to balance the load better.

I know enough about US domestic wiring, though, to say with 100% certainty that it's 3-phase going into the computer.
 
None of the above-it's an L14-20. It's a 4 prong "twist to lock" 30A plug.

Perhaps calling it "residential" is a stretch, but I've used this particular outlet a lot on scientific instruments and other sorts of things that draw a lot of power.
 
bunnspecial said:
Yes, that one.
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If that is indeed the plug it uses then it's quite obvious that it uses the standard US 240V split phase system using 2 120V legs as I mentioned privosely. There is no such thing as 3 phase 240v (well there is in VFDs but that's another thing completely) rember 3 phase is 1.73x the base voltage so for example 120x1.73 would be 208v 3 phase like you see in older industrial places.
 
I'm pretty sure SGI had their own proprietary operating systems, although I think there was also a build of Red Hat that would run Itaniums.

Remember that when we get into this realm of stuff, off the shelf stuff just doesn't cut it. We have several SGI systems around the department-most of them(the Octane, O2, etc) are based on MIPS processors. This monstrosity is Itanium based(as the label I photographed shows).

Think of trying to find PowerPC software, but 100 times worse since the market share is tiny and anything that will run on them is typically very specialized.

If I had to guess, this was probably set up as a mini-cluster. It's in a computational chemistry lab(in the process of being decomissioned, and I've been given pretty free reign over it at least for this week 🙂 ) Most of the other SGI stuff(admittedly all of it MIPS based) around the department is set up to do protein computational work-it wouldn't surprise me if this was used for something similar or otherwise just to do the "heavy lifting" at least back around 2003 or so when it was installed.

Now that we have a pretty well up-to-date supercluster on campus, most folks don't bother maintaining their own clusters at least to any great extent but just use the university one.

There are some nice 19" racks in the lab that I think I'm going to grab-they are about 5' tall and I think would be a good home for my Xserve and some of my other rack mount stuff. Fortunately, the racks themselves aren't bar coded(I'd have to jump through a lot of hoops to get the SGI, as it is bar coded).
 
bunnspecial said:
It's a Silicon Graphics Altix 3000. They actually billed/marketed this as a Supercomputer or mainframe depending on your specific use, but I'd think this one probably would fall into the Minicomputer category.

I don't know the full specifics. It is Itanium based, but I don't know how many processors it has. Opening the front cover reveals 4 separate units about 4U tall.

And, yes, it runs on three phase 240. The electrical outlet it's plugged into looks like a typical(US) household clothes dryer/major appliance plug.
Click to expand...

Lucky! my house has a couple 240v floating around just for kicks, I would totally take it! ID probably run the Minecraft server on it 😛
 
128keaton said:
Lucky! my house has a couple 240v floating around just for kicks, I would totally take it! ID probably run the Minecraft server on it 😛
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As I said, if you think finding PowerPC software is hard, just try finding software that will run on an Itanium! The MIPS processors that SGI developed in house and used pretty heavily is even worse.

This room held a lot of exciting stuff, including a Sun SPARC workstation. If I knew much about programming, I could have a lot of fun with some of this stuff. Playing with some of the obscure RISC processors(MIPS and SPARC) interests me, but as I said I don't have the programming knowledge to really do anything useful. Unfortunately, I don't, so it's probably best left alone. I'm up to my ears in Macs anyway.

To get this back around to Gamer's finds, though-have you ventured very far into the 8500 yet? I should have mentioned this earlier, but be aware of brittle plastic. I probably break something on mine every time I open it-fortunately nothing critical. I consider it a rare find when I get a mid-90s Mac that still has its power button intact 🙂. Fortunately, you don't actually need it, since the button on the keyboard is a lot more convenient anyway.
 
128keaton said:
Lucky! my house has a couple 240v floating around just for kicks, I would totally take it! ID probably run the Minecraft server on it 😛
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Can that super computer run Java? Java 5 at least? If so then you can run the server on it! If not then that sucks...
 
bunnspecial said:
As I said, if you think finding PowerPC software is hard, just try finding software that will run on an Itanium! The MIPS processors that SGI developed in house and used pretty heavily is even worse.



This room held a lot of exciting stuff, including a Sun SPARC workstation. If I knew much about programming, I could have a lot of fun with some of this stuff. Playing with some of the obscure RISC processors(MIPS and SPARC) interests me, but as I said I don't have the programming knowledge to really do anything useful. Unfortunately, I don't, so it's probably best left alone. I'm up to my ears in Macs anyway.



To get this back around to Gamer's finds, though-have you ventured very far into the 8500 yet? I should have mentioned this earlier, but be aware of brittle plastic. I probably break something on mine every time I open it-fortunately nothing critical. I consider it a rare find when I get a mid-90s Mac that still has its power button intact 🙂. Fortunately, you don't actually need it, since the button on the keyboard is a lot more convenient anyway.
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I have not had too much time to play around with it, but I've opened it up, can't really get to much with its odd design. I cracked something off, but whatever it was, didn't seem important. So I closed it back up and booted it up. It is running 9.1, and I don't remember much else about it. I'll probably just clear it and do a fresh install of 9..2.2. The internet via the Ethernet doesn't seem to work, since (I think) I set it up properly, but neither Netscape nor Internet Explorer could connect. I have not had an issue with my PowerBook connecting to the Internet via Ethernet before, so I must have done something wrong.

Brittle plastic is the enemy of these old machines. As I mentioned above, I broke something off on the inside of the 8300. Lucky it wasn't as important as a latch to attach the cover on a 6100/66. There was a second 6100/66 at the school, and I was taking a look inside to see if there was anything good, but both tabs broke fairly easily clean off. A piece of the hard drive cage broke off in the one I took, but luckily it wasn't the main lever to put out the drive. Surprisingly, every power button works on all my old macs, and my 512ke doesn't have any cracks whatsoever. The only important thing that is broken on one of my older macs is the volume down button on the Performa 6360. It still works, but it's fallen into the slot and I can't get it to stay out.
 
Gamer9430 said:
I have not had too much time to play around with it, but I've opened it up, can't really get to much with its odd design. I cracked something off, but whatever it was, didn't seem important. So I closed it back up and booted it up. It is running 9.1, and I don't remember much else about it. I'll probably just clear it and do a fresh install of 9..2.2. The internet via the Ethernet doesn't seem to work, since (I think) I set it up properly, but neither Netscape nor Internet Explorer could connect. I have not had an issue with my PowerBook connecting to the Internet via Ethernet before, so I must have done something wrong.

Brittle plastic is the enemy of these old machines. As I mentioned above, I broke something off on the inside of the 8300. Lucky it wasn't as important as a latch to attach the cover on a 6100/66. There was a second 6100/66 at the school, and I was taking a look inside to see if there was anything good, but both tabs broke fairly easily clean off. A piece of the hard drive cage broke off in the one I took, but luckily it wasn't the main lever to put out the drive. Surprisingly, every power button works on all my old macs, and my 512ke doesn't have any cracks whatsoever. The only important thing that is broken on one of my older macs is the volume down button on the Performa 6360. It still works, but it's fallen into the slot and I can't get it to stay out.
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I unfortunately have a bunch of broken plastic on my Performa 550 🙁
 
Well, sadly I was unable to get anything else today since I had to go. Monday, however, I'll grab the 7300. I think I'll just grab everything one at a time, but I'm thinking of not grabbing the CRTs since I can't ship them, and when I lose the computers, they are useless.
 
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