anyone looking for a used IBM 704?

[David P. Schwartz]

Here's the link to IBM's site for the nitty gritty details:

http://www5.pc.ibm.com/us/products.nsf/$wwwPartNumLookup/_86506MM

As configured, this sucker probably cost $20k-25k new.

This actually looks like a pretty "generic" configuration inside, meaning
it
could probably be upgraded with little trouble.

Interesting layout.  It has a dual-bus architecture main board, whatever
that is
(maybe for each CPU board?).  The main board is larger than your usual PC
motherboard.  There are 6 PCI slots (three for each "side") and 4 EISA
slots.
SCSI is built on the main board (2xAdaptec 7880Ps), although they aren't
using
it.  There's a full-length PCI board with three Adaptec 7880P chips on it
(and an
RS6000 controller).  It supports RAID modes 0, 1, 5.

The ethernet card looks to be a no-name clone.  It's got an Intel 82557
chip on
it that's dated 1995, so it's probably just 10-BaseT.  Easily upgraded.

There's a cage with two CPU cards and a RAM card.  The CPU cards each have
one
HUGE heatsink attached to a socketed Pentium Pro 200 CPU, and one empty
slot.
The CPUs have a 66MHz FSB.  There are 8 x 72-pin 60ns 32MB SIMMs on the
memory
card, and 8 empty SIMM slots.  (All SIMMs must be speed matched.)

Come to think of it, just a really nice computer case like this with two
430W
hot-swappable power supplies and 12 hot-swappable fast/wide SCSI bays is
probably
worth quite a bit.  It's got 27 total drive bays inside it!

Nobody knew what was inside these.  There were several of them all lined
up, and
I had my choice.  I picked this one.  Later I found out It has 8 x 4.3 GB
drives
in it.  The box next to it had 12 x 9.2 GB drives, and the one next to that
had
10 x 9.2 GB drives.  However, I suspect that the 12 drive box was just a
"side-car" full of drives because all it had was a SCSI connector on the
back.
The other one probably was a quad-CPU w/512MB RAM.  I could kick myself!

I'm not sure what I want to do with it quite yet.  It would probably make
an
excellent database server.  What do you think?

-David

Rusty Carruth wrote:

> >
> > I picked up a used IBM PC Server 704 with two Pentium Pro 200/512k CPUs,
> > 256MB RAM, 8 x 4.3GB fast/wide SCSI HDs, dual 430W hot-swap power supplies,
> > e-net.  Very clean.
>
> cool.  is it 10/100 enet or just wimpy old 10?
>
> > I haven't powered it up yet, but supposedly it was
> > removed from service in fully operational condition.  You could set it up
> > as a server in your living room disguised as an end table / air filtration
> > system :-)  It's probably got Win NT loaded on it.  I think it's got a RAID
> > controller in it, too.
> >
> > I realize you can get this kind of power in a $800 PC today, but there are
> > folks who will only buy things that are built like Sherman Tanks and have
> > the letters "I.B.M." on them.  Do you know anybody like that?
>
> Well, unfortunately I.B.M used to mean 3x the price too ;-)
>
> > Also, does anybody know which Linux build would work best on this system,
> > in case I decide to use it as an email server?
>
> Well, if it were mine (hint ;-), I'd probably put either Mandrake 7.2
> or mandrake 8.0 on it.  If I were going to use it as a server, anyway.
> I'm considering going back to a more configurable distro if what happened
> from 7.2 to 8.0 is permanent - I'm very displeased with how my Mandrake
> Freq. install went (course, it WAS an old P100, but still, I had a real
> pain of a time getting it to configure the drives the way I wanted).
>
> (This email is sent both direct and via the list.  What's the price you're
> hoping to get for this thing? (send answer to either list or private,
> your choice)).
>
> (of course, *I*'ll probably just end up using my nifty keeno dual P90
> server instead, since you'll want real money for yours ;-)
>
> rc