NetWare 3.12 Server Taken Down After 16 Years of Continuous Duty 187
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica's Peter Bright reports on a Netware 3.12 server that has been decommissioned after over 16 years of continuous operation. The plug was pulled when noise from the server's hard drives become intolerable. From the article: 'It's September 23, 1996. It's a Monday. The Macarena is pumping out of the office radio, mid-way through its 14 week run at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, doing little to improve the usual Monday gloom...Sixteen and a half years later, INTEL's hard disks—a pair of full height 5.25 inch 800 MB Quantum SCSI devices—are making some disconcerting noises from their bearings, and you're tired of the complaints. It's time to turn off the old warhorse.'"
Netware 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Netware 3 ruled.
Netmare 2 on the other hand earned the name.
By version 5 it was back to Netmare (for different reasons).
I once walked into a dusty environment, remote location and could hear the drive bearings from 100 feet away through a fire door. Backed up successfully but never spun up again.
Re:Netware 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Netware 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Salvage was one of the best new features of Netware 3. That and not having to gen sys from 360K floppies.
On netmare 2 the first thing you did when you got your first one up was put a copy of the install images on the share. Linking up (IIRC they called it genning sys) a copy of the server required you to feed it each of about 20 floppies three times each in apparently random order. Get one interrupt wrong and you get to start over (better to reset the interrupt jumpers to match the config you had).
I should not remember any of this crap.
Re:Netware 3 (Score:4, Interesting)
I got a call from an acquaintance who was a low level runner for a law firm. He asked if there was any way to resurrect files that had been deleted by a disgruntled employee who was laid off. She deleted a ton of important stuff. They didn't have any backups and were in a panic. I told him salvage might work, and explained how to get to it.
He was a hero that day.
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A law firm?
You should have made a huge deal out of it and charged them $50K or more to run Salvage. Sell them a whole new server while you take the old one to recover the files.
Fucking lawyers would do it to you without hesitating.
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If I were those guys I'd just image the drives and get new ones. Maybe port the whole thing over to a bit more modern hardware.
Re:Netware 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt the drives were exactly 'up'. Spinning, yes.
I had a legacy Netware 3.11 server once upon a time... it was up for years and years, and by the time I got to the company it was like a legend. Eventually though there was a power outtage that outstripped the UPS system and required a re-start.
It wouldn't load. We sent the hard drives out to be recovered and they didn't actually exist anymore - the surface had been work away years before, and the server had been running purely in RAM.
Netware was awesome.
Re:Netware 3 (Score:5, Informative)
This works better for the CD-sized version of knoppix [wikipedia.org] if you have only one-Gig of RAM, if you've got more than 6GB RAM, go ahead and use "toram" for the DVD-sized versions of Knoppix.
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What did the server do that it ran entirely in ram and was also useful? Or were they just leaving it on to see how long it would go at that point?
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I can't see that, somehow - drive heads actually don't normally make contact with the platter (there'd be friction problems if they did), therefore there's no way the platters will show surface wear after several years of spinning
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You're right - no contact. What the drive recovery people told us was that there was a leak in the casing, and enough outside, unfiltered air/pollution got in that over the years the disk surface was worn away by that.
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I doubt the drives were exactly 'up'. Spinning, yes.
I had a legacy Netware 3.11 server once upon a time... it was up for years and years, and by the time I got to the company it was like a legend. Eventually though there was a power outtage that outstripped the UPS system and required a re-start.
It wouldn't load. We sent the hard drives out to be recovered and they didn't actually exist anymore - the surface had been work away years before, and the server had been running purely in RAM.
Netware was awesome.
I concur. In 1995, my then employer had been running netware for quite few months on DX2 66Mhz for some time. It was running in 1999 when I left.
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That's a Montgomery Burns quote Homer.
Re:Netware 3 (Score:5, Funny)
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Was it discovered in the wall?? (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/12/missing_novell_server_discovered_after/ [theregister.co.uk]
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I remember this - oyg, was it 2001??
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That's how we dealt with drive bearing noise back in my day, kid.
Now get off my lawn!
1989 (Score:3, Interesting)
16 years and they did not run of space on it? (Score:4, Insightful)
16 years and they did not run of space on it?
also good hardware not to fail in some way other that time. Did they hot swap UPS batteries over the years as well?
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The guy has replied to this in Ars forum:
"The only thing it's been connected to since 2004 has been my personal computer (laptop)." - so while impressive, for the last 9 years it has not seen production use.
He also says that he works in a big financial institution with big-ass central UPS system and that explains the lack of reboots due to power outages.
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Great so this guy has been running this server for the past 9 years sucking down $30 / month in power for what purpose exactly?
Re:16 years and they did not run of space on it? (Score:5, Funny)
Just to piss of pompous, holier-than-thou assholes like yourself. Mission accomplished!
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16 years and they did not run of space on it?
also good hardware not to fail in some way other that time. Did they hot swap UPS batteries over the years as well?
The batteries, obviously, needn't affect the operation of the server, but that's some impressive record for the utility service in the area. Unless the location had a backup generator, no outages longer than UPS run-time over a sixten year stretch is incredible. As for the disk space issue, I strongly suspect that the server was the platform for some specific legacy application that "just worked, and was thus never messed with, while all the actual file and print service duties were shifted to newer platfor
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If all it was doing was serving print jobs, and it had enough RAM on it, the netware server should never have needed to access the drive after being booted.
Netware 5 products had some silly issues where if the SYS volume became full, the server would panic and halt, but NW3 didnt have such an issue. When I was forced to take that NW5 class so many years ago, I spent ample amounts of time poking holes in the NW server's supposed security. Oh, the joys of getting the server to create printer spool objects on
Novell's Top Uptime Contest - 2001 (Score:3)
Re:Novell's Top Uptime Contest - 2001 (Score:4, Informative)
I've run across a few Netware "sysadmins" who thought maintaining the longest uptime possible was their primary job duty.
I used to know some Linux guys like that as well, but in that case they were kids and didn't know any better.
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This isn't some deep arcane knowledge that only neck-bearded Unix sysadmins can grasp - this is pretty basic stuff. One would hope MOST people in IT know better.
Continuos? (Score:2)
You know those little squiggly red lines under words you type? I think they're trying to tell you something.
Re:Continuos? (Score:4, Funny)
You know those little squiggly red lines under words you type? I think they're trying to tell you something.
No, no, that's the name of the OS.
Unused for the last 8 years (Score:5, Informative)
"When I began work here in 2004, this system was completely orphaned
Way to spend (by my reckoning) 10,000 kWh of electricity.
Re:Unused for the last 8 years (Score:5, Interesting)
Kids nowadays. No sense of adventure and wonder. Best use of 10,000 kWh ever.
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Oddly, I replaced my main home server with a highly energy efficient model four years ago (mac mini). I was using a kill-a-watt meter to measure that I was spending > $100/year on the old server, and that was a significant factor on what to get as a replacement. All my other systems are energy efficient laptops at home. I use the kill-a-watt regularly to test devices suspected of burning excess power.
Are there things I don't do? Of course. But I hardly ignore energy efficiency. I also make sure I'm
Time to go indeed (Score:2)
Rule 1 about hard disks.
When the hard disk starts making funny noises it hasn't made before(especially after 10+ years), its time to start looking for a new hard drive, failure is imminent.
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Rule 1 about hard disks.
You can probably extend that to any electrical or mechanical system :)
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I'm pretty sure its possible, but I'm also pretty sure you'd need a clean room, and companies don't exactly sell spare parts for hard drives.
So you'd need a clean room, and a supply of same or similar disks.
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Considering they were 800 Mb disks in 5 1/4", full-height form-factor, there are options.
Like opening the case up, ripping everything out and replacing it with a SCSI to USB adapter, hub and a multi-terabyte RAID array of USB memory sticks.
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I bought the 'spare parts' for the hard drive I most recently repaired on Ebay.
I had a failed 200g Maxtor drive. It had a lot of important stuff on it that I wanted back. It failed in such a fashion that it just quit spinning entirely so I gambled that it was an electrical problem on the logic board. I went on eBay and searched until I found exactly the same Maxtor drive, even down to the firmware version. It's nice that they have the zoom-able pictures on eBay and that many sellers post high resolution
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except there is no good way to really repair hard disks.
There are many electrical and mechanical systems that aren't worth repairing these days. When's the last time you put new brushes in a motor? Ever try to solder new surface-mount caps onto a piece of modern electronics?
Re:Time to go indeed (Score:5, Informative)
Once a drive starts failing like that, the worst thing you can do is reboot the box... The drive may continue running for years, but if you shut it off it may never be able to spin up again.
Best thing is to get any important data off the drive without shutting it down.
For industrial infrastructure such as pumps.. (Score:2)
...sixteen years of operation is ordinary. It's sad that this considered outstanding for a router.
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Pumps generally have a less varied workload - they usually have to do just one thing. Also they are based on old, well understood and highly mature technology that doesn't see double efficiency every few years.
By the way, my wifi router is about ten years old, and still working.
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Industrial pumps don't have constantly spinning drives to worry about, and can be taken down for regular maintenance.
Pumps have constantly spinning shafts to worry about.
But I've never seen a grease fitting on a hard drive.
Put it down easy.. (Score:3)
Put that old war horse down easy, it did it's duty and then some, it deserves some respect.
I loved Netware and worked on 2.x, 3.x and 4.x, it's a real shame what's become of Novell.
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Put that old war horse down easy, it did it's duty and then some, it deserves some respect.
I loved Netware and worked on 2.x, 3.x and 4.x, it's a real shame what's become of Novell.
Agreed. Netware "just worked". It was a pain in the ass to set up, but even that could be overlooked because the result was so solid. While they were the only game in town, the price for that performance was reasonable. Unfortunately, the marketing geniuses at Novell pretty much missed to the coming tsunami that was Windows networking. The effect was apparent after Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (the first one that actually sort-of worked) came along, causing an immediate dip in Netware sales. By the time NT c
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30,000,000 miles (Score:2)
Is the order of magnitude these heads have traveled (in a circle).
8000rpm x 60 x 24 x 365 x 16 x (5.25/2/2)*pi x 12 x 5280
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So, no hope of catching Voyager?
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Check me. Should be 3600rpm x 60 x 24 x 365.25 x 16 x (5.25/2/2)*pi / 12 / 5280 = 1.97 million miles.
Actually the heads don't "travel" at all except back and forth with every seek, but that's the average linear distance that the disc directly under the head traveled.
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Circumference is 2*pi*r, or pi*d, and the platters on a 5.25" drive were around 5.1" in diameter, so it should be:
3600rpm * 60 * 24 * 365.25 * 16 * 5.1* pi / 12 / 5280 = 7.66 million miles [google.com]
But only on the outside of the disk, if the heads were on the inside, maybe around 1" diameter, then it's:
3600rpm * 60 * 24 * 365.25 * 16 * 1* pi / 12 / 5280 = 1.5 million miles [google.com]
So the heads have ridden over somewhere between 1.5 to 7.66 million miles of platter travel
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Where's the factor for football field length?
Security Updates - Yeah Right (Score:3)
This was a NetWare 3.12 box and...
Time to install... Lantastic! (Score:3, Funny)
It's slower but more than fast enough, supports printers too although you'll really miss those Novell print queues. And Lantastic has evolved too, you are no longer limited to Arcnet, it supports the *new* 10baseT half duplex cards! Patches are available for the DOS stack to accommodate just about any combination of hardware IRQ and base IO PORT. Just be sure to load the network TSRs BEFORE you run Borland Sidekick.
Whoa! I was having 1984 flashbacks for a moment.
More Dead than Alive (Score:2)
âoeNetWare 3.12 Server Taken Down After 16 Years ...â
Required a wooden stake.
The condition of software... (Score:2)
Software outliving it's hardware... sigh.
There's something innately human about that which strikes me as... odd.
The question for the windows guys, then... (Score:2)
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0 downtime per year. That's a perfect score, 16 years in a row. This is assuming the system was available all that time.
But if the network burpped once for 300 milliseconds, then it would only be eight-9s.
If you don't like the per year limitation of the calculation, let's say that the system was up for 16 years, but should have been up for 17 years (arbitrary). Then that's only one-9.
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Open source netware? (Score:2)
What ever happend to the Open source NetWare [linuxtoday.com] ? I was never clear if it was a clone or not [informatica.co.cr].
Now the other question I have is, why would anyone run it?
Quantum drives (Score:3)
I always was rather impressed with those Quantum drives. I had a Quantum 1.2GB hdd in my computer when we suffered a house fire, and that drive was the only piece of electronics to survive in usable condition. Indeed, it lasted a good 4 or 5 years beyond that.
Not one mention (Score:2)
All of these replies about Novell Netware, and yet I haven't see one single mention of where Novell is today, how NDS came to be known as eDirectory, how Netware was ripped out and slapped on top of Linux under the name SuSe Enterprise Linux, which is totally free to download almost every product they ship and use on your own home network in an uncrippled fashion (so long as you don't want to security updates via a 30 day trial).
Anyways, cheers Novell, you will be missed o/ ;|
Re:Is this supposed to be a good thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Netware 3.12 was quite secure and rock solid. It did one thing (file and print serving) very, very well. It's a testament to good software design. The fact that you make light of it probably indicates that you were not in the IT field back then and have no sense of perspective. I wasn't a huge Netware fan, being more of an OS/2 and Unix guy back in the day, but I had a great deal of respect for the product.
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I have very fond memories of 3.12, running a few site servers in the US, Mexico and Honduras. Although installing or patching was a pain with boxes of floppies to feed in to the server. It did what I asked it to do.
When I first looked at IPv6 addresses I had an IPX flashback. When we transitioned to IP from IPX (and to NT 4) I thought "these numbers seem finite compared to what is possible in IPX."
Whatever happened to the "Old Novell Guys" website from the late '90's? I am one. /Sorry if I am rambling.
IPX & IPv6 (Score:2)
Re:IPX & IPv6 (Score:4, Informative)
Kind of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internetwork_Packet_Exchange
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I guess I should be clear: IPX was layer 3.... SPX was layer 4. The use of the mac address in the IPX address reminded me of the use of the mac address in IPv6. The network address in the first part of the IPX address was the network. But you could assign any network address you wanted. So it had that shortfall.
Re:IPX & IPv6 (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. It was called SPX (Sequenced Packet eXchange). You had an IPX address which is basically a MAC address and you preface that with a colon (:) and a six hex char SPX address.
The SPX address is roughly analogous to an IP subnet. The IPX address would be the individual IP host address. Note that the protocol doesn't stop you from repeating the full IPX range on each SPX network, you would have to override the automatic MAC address to IPX address assignment which would be unwieldy.
I suspect that a full modern internet running on IPX/SPX style addressing would look a little different from what we used back in the day. It might look rather more like IPv6 perhaps ...
Cheers
Jon
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We ran an IPX-based public internet in the 90s (Score:5, Informative)
IPX addresses had two parts - a 4-byte network number and a 6-byte host number that was almost always the MAC address. The network number was locally assigned, and in practice was almost always 00:00:00:00 (the default local network, because almost nobody actually bothered with routing), or FF:FF:FF:FF (broadcast), though some people got fancy and actually split up their networks into routed segments 1,2,3 etc. instead of bridging.
So you could theoretically run an Internet-like network on it if there were some central authority assigning network numbers instead of everybody rolling their own, and it would scale better than IPv4 because there were 32 bits of network number!
AT&T ran an IPX public internet in the mid/late 90s, in coordination with Novell. We assigned public network numbers, and sold connections. By now I've forgotten exactly what years it was, and I wasn't organizationally close enough to it to know if they actually got many customers, and of course there weren't really a lot of applications for it, but it probably ran for about two years.
IPX and SPX addressing formats - correction (Score:3)
Just a correction for JSG's post - the IPX address had two parts, a 32-bit network address and a 48-bit host address. SPX was separate - it's the Netware Layer 4 protocol that's roughly equivalent to TCP. IPX network addresses were locally administered, not globally, and most people just used the default network address of 0 (i.e. 00:00:00:00) and if they had multiple LANs they bridged them rather than routing, though some people got fancy and assigned network numbers 1,2,3, etc. the way they currently as
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Yes this is true. In today terms IP=IPX and SPX=TCP. SPX was often used for things RCONSOLE (Todays MS MMC / RDP)
A personal favorite network number I used that was easy to recall was AC:EB:AB:EX. There were many others like DEADBEEF, but given most installs used 802.2 and 802.3 Ethernet framing, you needed two network numbers often for each NIC.
Netware IPX on Cisco Routers, IPX vs IPv6 (Score:2)
The first time I studied for the Cisco CCNA exam, in the mid-2000s or so, it still had questions about how to configure Netware IPX. Unfortunately, they wouldn't accept the right answer, which was "Tell the users that Netware has supported TCP/IP since Version 5, and if they're still running IPX it's time to upgrade their software." :-)
But one thing I did like about IPv6 was the IPX-like address autoconfiguration. On the other hand, when DHCP came out, it did autoconfiguration just about as easily, and th
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This actually makes me curious - in developing IPv6, how much of IPX ideas taken? One apparent drawback of IPX is that it was solely computer centric in that one would use the MAC addresses to formulate the IPX address. What if the device that needed an address (as is increasingly the case today) is not a laptop, but a phone, or a Bluetooth module, or something w/o an Ethernet card or Wi-Fi? IPv6 is good in that way.
One thing about autoconfiguration, though, at least in IPv6, is that it uses too many b
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One of my clients ran PosgreSQL on their NetWare 3.12 server for years for an insurance agency app. No downtime, no app errors, not even abends.
Another ran the Advantage database engine through 2000. We had a 15 minute call 0002 EST when the app failed ot reload, and before I could get off the call the Y2K patch was in my inbox. Up at 0015, no further problems.
NetWare was my favorite server OS. Miss it still. Only Debian makes servers tolerable for me.
Security seemed to be a nonissue. Nearly every patch I r
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Funny you mention OS/2, you'd load the OS/2 namespace module on Netware 3.12 in order to get long file name support.
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Secure my ass, bindery hacks were easy. On more then one occasion I have had to recover admin passwords after disgruntled employees left.
Re:patch much (Score:4, Insightful)
"My linux systems require constant patching for them not to be p0wned by script kiddies. Therefore it follows that every other system is the same.".
Love that logic.
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"My linux systems require constant patching for them not to be p0wned by script kiddies. Therefore it follows that every other system is the same.".
Love that logic.
If you find an OS that doesn't sooner or later turn up something exploitable, please let us know.
Especially if it jacks into a network.
Re:patch much (Score:5, Informative)
Essentially - other than tunneling IPX over TCP/IP, which the site may or may not have been using - this version of Netware had no TCP/IP support. No web server, no nothing. Odds are this this wasn't much of a risk. My guess (the article didn't say) is that they were using it for something really specific.
Re:patch much (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess (the article didn't say) is that they were using it for something really specific.
It's pretty obvious the only thing they were using it for was to watch the runtime go up and up.
The drive bearings had been noticeably failing for quite some time. The operators might pay some lip service as to why that somehow didn't matter, but the bottom line is - if the risk of a drive failure during operation isn't a problem, the machine isn't serving any real purpose.
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tcpip.nlm [tstc.edu]
I think I first ran Apache on NetWare 4.11. 5.0 had a full stack, even the Tomcat server. GroupWise offered a web server on NW 4.x forward.
No, 3,12 didn't do all it could with TCP/IP, which was a little of a bummer.
Re:patch much (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the patches I applied to 3.12 didn't require a reboot, and those that did didn't require shutting down the power. Such requirements as reboots are uncivilized.
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Most of the patches I applied to 3.12 didn't require a reboot, and those that did didn't require shutting down the power. Such requirements as reboots are uncivilized.
Does any patch require shutting down the power? The last time I remember a patch that required shutting down the power, it was a wirewrap change on the backplane.
Re:patch much (Score:4, Informative)
So, that was one example of a patch that required shutting down the power.
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So? Is there some rule requiring every tech website to report unique content?
I don't follow Arstechnica, so I'm glad that having been on Arstechnica doesn't disqualify something from being on slashdot.
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Of course every channel on TV shouldn't show the same programming, just like every website on the internet shouldn't report the same stories. But if one news report on TV covers a particular story, that doesn't mean it's wrong for a TV news report on a different channel (which might have a different audience) to cover the same story. Same with websites.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Informative)
This was on Arstechnica like 3 days ago. This site is increasingly feeding on news carrion.
This site has been doing that for years.
There's still no other site with the quality of exta information you get from the comments.
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On Fark you get pictures.
Re:Seriously? (Score:4, Funny)
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to borrow from "Mr. Merlin" (anyone remember that??):
"You're Merlin? You gotta be like... eight hundred years old?"
"I do forty push-ups a day and I don't eat fried food..."
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Yup. [youtube.com]
(1600 years old and thirty push-ups, but yup).
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Only volume sys: needs to be mounted at all times, other volumes could be mounted and dismounted by console commands. [And again server class hardware supported physically swapping the d
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It's not Windows.
Most systems 16 years ago were very secure (except Windows). Also, most systems didn't need to reboot for security updates (except Windows).
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I have stuff yet to ever come up.
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Try getting even 6 years out of current hard drives. Now everything has this planned obsolescence by manufacturers, since they want to sell you again soon as possible...
The other way to look at it is that you are no longer forced to pay extra for overengineered parts that provide longevity that you aren't likely ever to use anyway.
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DEC always prided itself in marketing fully transistorized computers, so it was unlikely to have vacuum tubes.