In this "fun"-filled article, we get to see a retrocomputing enthusiast:
- Try to find a UNIX workstation that doesn't cost a huge sum of money, and get lucky.
- Then try to find HP-UX install media, which HP doesn't have, so they have to ask on Fediverse to find people with the correct install media.
- Then try to run period correct software that was written for an earlier version of HP-UX (which runs thanks to backwards compatibility) because they can't find a version online tailored to later versions of HP-UX.
They failed to run a lot of software they specifically got for their shiny new HP-UX. This is because a lot of UNIX workstation software is/was proprietary, and required licenses to use. Even the demo licenses have expired long ago. And the still-existing vendors aren't interested in helping out enthusiasts and/or don't even have the tools generate licenses for their old versions anymore. Don't take my work for it; the author of the linked article tried to get licenses, and all the conversations fizzled out.
This article is a harsh lesson in how FlexLM and DRM are cancers, and companies treat their own old software like trash to be swept away. Software is being destroyed at an alarming rate due to negligence. Even if the software isn't commercially viable anymore and the hardware platforms are niche, I argue that hard work and energy put into creating the software is only truly lost when people can't1 run those old versions anymore.
I personally don't have nostalgia for UNIX workstations, and if I had one (too damn expensive :/), I'd run one of the FOSS BSDs on it b/c I enjoy running period-incorrect software on old machines. But I feel horrible for those UNIX workstation enthusiasts who don't share my aesthetic. They're having significant trouble getting their old machines to run the way they want, to enjoy computing on their own terms.
I got pretty angry reading this. Which I take as: the article is doing a good job. I don't usually see problems like this in the DOS world. I wonder why...
- As opposed to don't run those old versions anymore; I'm not certain don't happens before can't. If the software is available to play with, people will use it.
unfortunately, all deeply accurate. and it pains me to see--it's my belief that if you're going to collect old unix workstations, it's important to remember the context. these machines were very rarely expected to run on their own. they boot up with the expectation that they're going to be pulling resources from the network to get themselves going. but, okay, let's assume you've got a computer lying around that can feed it whatever it needs to get going.
now what? i ran into this when i picked up an old VAXstation on the cheap... DEC was acquired by Compaq, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard, which split itself up into HP and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, and we're now at the point where anyone who cared about DEC's products has, with a high degree of probability, left the company. probably to retire so they don't have to think about computers in a professional capacity ever again. (fates bless them for achieving freedom.) since basically nobody's left who cares, there's no interest in trying to make software and patches and documentation findable. HP's support sites were legendarily fragmented and bad even before the corporate split. good luck if you want anything from the pre-Oracle days at Sun.
i met someone recently who affectionately refers to his collection of vintage computing as e-waste. he's gone to great lengths to ensure that everything remains functional, and that they can boot up in something resembling the environment they expect to thrive in. but this requires effort, and frankly it requires knowing the right people to be able to get yr hands on software. the retrocomputing community makes it easier, of course, but some things are still only whispered about because the patents are still active, or even more improbably, the software's still in development. HP sold VMS, the old DEC operating system, off to a third-party company who's still developing and supporting it. but only for x86. the old hobbyist-license program that people were using to keep old VAXen running? dead, as far as i can tell. HPE shut their hobbyist program down when they transferred the rights to VMS, and the new company isn't offering them. it says it right there on the new sign-up page:
Please note that in accordance with the license agreement between VMS Software Inc. and HPE, VMS Software Inc. are not able to distribute VAX licenses.
so go fuck yrself, i guess. it breaks my heart a little that these elements of computing history are so thoroughly abandoned and lost. partly out of nostalgia, to be sure, whomst among us doesn't yearn for when things... at least, we thought they sucked less. in some objective ways, they did. but goddamn, it sucks to see old ideas get implemented in worse ways--or, even more annoyingly, old ideas get completely ignored in favour of some shiny bullshit that isn't even half-baked.
sic transit gloria, and all that shit. keep circulating the tapes.
To expand on what Liz is talking about, I think: One of the even bigger (literally) tragedies of retrocomputing is that it is mostly constrained to individual-scale machines.
The Living Computer Museum in Seattle closed during the pandemic. It seems unlikely that it will ever open again. While I had some Doubts about many of their curation choices, they did have an entire floor of interactive exhibits. Most of them were microcomputers, and it was very cool that you could use a Lisa, a Sun, a TI 99, a Tandy CoCo, and a NeXT in short order, with your own two hands, at your own pace. I know the preeminent collector of Xerox graphical workstations, and yet the first time I ever used one was at the LCM, not at his house.
However, what was even cooler was the Mainframe Room. A door at one end of the second floor led into a loud, cold room with raised flooring, in which a variety of machines from CDC, IBM, and others lived. There were terminals along one wall which would let you log into these systems, and in fact, you could even telnet into some of them from home.
You couldn't touch the hardware, there were big signs to this effect everywhere - but it didn't make sense to touch these machines, and this is germane to my point.
An IBM System/360 is not a "device," unless you also think we should apply that term to, say, a steel mill. Yes, iron comes in one end and steel I-beams come out the other, and it all works together, but undeniably it is a collection of many devices, gadgets, and machines that collectively accomplish a goal.
I don't know which is more complex: the infrastructure behind a steel mill, or that behind a mainframe computer, but I know that neither one can be casually reconstructed.
If you find a Sun anything lurking in a disused office at your university, there's a good chance you can bring it home, plug in an IEC cable, possibly a monitor you already own (or one you can get on eBay for $400 shipped), and boot it right up. Perhaps the hard drive dies, but you can see the firmware go, and maybe replace the HDD.
You won't find a System/360, and if you do, you will not be able to get it working. I have only ever heard of maybe a half dozen people under 60 who would even know where to start. They are extremely complex, extremely specific, and extremely big. They also did not get casually discarded or forgotten in offices - most of them were deliberately sent to the trash, because they were simply too massive to keep around once they weren't needed anymore.
There were countless incompatible revisions of everything. If you want a working mainframe, you will need to scour high and low, far and wide to bring together hundreds of parts, largely unlabeled except for line noise like "10-1058A." Even the cables are so obscure that you will have to build them, not buy them. Some of the connectors were custom.
Nothing will work. You will need to read schematics in manuals that are not on the internet, then do board repairs at the component level. You will need to test single transistors and know how to tell if one is "injured," because they will not necessarily be entirely dead, nor will it be practical to bulk-replace them. You will make hours-long repairs that do not fix the problem. You simply cannot tinker one of these back to life; you will need to become a genuine expert.
You will end up with at least one full 19" rack; probably several. I know someone whose entire garage is currently occupied by a single computer. I do not believe anyone else has one of these. There is no room to move around it. It does not work, and if it did, it would require a 480V AC supply at an amperage that would be challenging to obtain at most warehouses.
Once you've done all this work and you get the thing to boot up, congratulations: it's very, very boring. Even the people who are into these things struggle to make them do anything. I was going to add some adjectives to that sentence, but that's really it.
Among one of my retrocomputing friend groups, the joke is that mainframes were for printing invoices. This is basically accurate. Generally, you can't sit down at a mainframe and "open a program," and if you can, it's going to be unspeakably austere: a blank terminal with a blinking cursor and a couple meaningless numbers at the top and bottom of the screen, considered a UI masterpiece for its time.
Most of the programs are also gone - 99% of the software that ever existed for these systems was bespoke, never left the company that developed it, and even if you get it, you'll probably be in the "Disk 5 of 10" situation, where it depends on external systems that no longer exist. You might manage to get a hold of the tape labeled "LITECORP ACCNTNG 1980 V1.6", but you aren't going to get the blank database that was handcrafted when the thing was first written, without which it can't run.
And even if you got all that... it probably just prints invoices. That's what these were for. All your bank branches or insurance agencies send a tape once a month with the output from the minicomputer that runs the terminals at everyone's desks, and then a clerk reads each one into the machine, it slurps up all the customer records, and then a "chain printer" begins spewing (literally) bills that will later be stuffed into envelopes and mailed out.
Very probably, this system had no UI other than "INSERT TAPE TO READ." If the software barfed, it probably dropped a physical trouble ticket* and a "Systems Analyst" (midcentury term for "devops thought lord") would either stare at the raw database or launch a debugger for some horrifying sludge language like PL360.
* This is artistic license - I don't know that the physical "ticket drop" ever occurred outside of the phone company.
I have very little firsthand experience with these, I admit, and I'm conflating stories from other people. But this seems to be the consensus among everyone I've known who used this kind of gear.
Likewise, supercomputers - a word that has inspired awe in nerds for decades - are absolutely mind-numbingly uninteresting. A supercomputer is basically a device which accepts 10GB of integers, sits spinning its fans for two days, and then spits out "10.582338." Scientists hoot and holler; this means something to them, but to nobody else.
Basically: retrocomputing mostly orbits devices that are easy, convenient, and immediately satisfying to collect and restore. In much the same way that people collect cars, but not so much semi trucks or locomotives, which have to be preserved by Organizations, I don't really see much discussion of what is to become of Big Iron. And then there's stuff even further beyond that.
There's that whole Youtube series about restoring the Apollo computer - which I think tailed off in viewership massively after one or two eps, because it turns out that, yeah, you talk to it in line noise and it just spits out a bunch of red LED digits. you can't, exactly, "play" with it, or even "use" it for anything other than landing a spaceship.
It's good someone's fixing that up. But let's go even further: Who's preserving the bowling alley computers?
I've been thinking about this for literally decades. Something drives all those monitors over the lanes that show the scores, and then the skiier wiping out when you whiff it. Nowadays they might be dedicated devices, but we can be absolutely certain that in 1995, there wasn't a video playback unit in every single one - and in 1990, there wasn't even a computer in every one.
They had to be terminals. But what kind? Obviously they were graphical, and they had those little custom keyboards. There almost certainly wasn't one dedicated computer per lane to talk to those things. My guess is that the screens were "graphical dumb terminals", if you will, and in the back room there was a minicomputer with 50 serial ports, half to talk to the keyboards, half to send proprietary drawing commands to the displays.
And then the video clips? Where did those come from? My guess is: Bank of five or six laserdisc players that get switched through to a display via some obnoxious serial-controlled matrix switcher whenever a clip needs to play.
The input from the lane sensors has to be some nightmarish spiderweb of 22 gauge wires tied into gigantic bundles that run from the mechanics into the backroom and terminate into some horrific 256-lane GPIO module.
And nobody knows anything about all of this, as far as I can tell. I'm making shit up from whole cloth because there are zero webpages about it. And as old lanes go out of business and get demolished, or upgrade to newer gear, you can be sure the old stuff is just being goldscrapped.
So what's the point of this rambling post? This: We are losing more than we are saving. How should we feel about this? What should we do?
Well, you can try to Paul Allen (founder of the living computer museum) the problem away. Become rich, or inveigle yourself with people who are rich, and begin traveling the world, collecting every scrap of every single machine that has ever been made and packing it all into a series of warehouses.
But then, where should you stop? If your warehouse contains System/360s, shouldn't it contain bowling alley computers? Why not traffic light controllers? Avionics from mid-80s Boeing jets? What computer isn't worth preserving? You can either keep absolutely everything, or set an arbitrary line somewhere.
Keeping absolutely everything is problematic. I've been to the warehouses of people who did this. The machines sit. Nobody is using them. They are inconvenient to dig out, and in uncertain condition. No one has the energy, time, and resources to get them all working (not to mention the fact that much of "fixing" old machines is really borrowing from peter to pay paul; eventually we will run out of machines with donor parts.)
If you do pick an arbitrary cutoff for what to keep, well, you're probably going to have to go with "is it interesting / unique / relevant." Can anyone alive now relate to it? Can it inform us in some way about the past, or give us ideas about how to improve the present? And can nothing else provide the same stimulus?
The problem is that once you do this... you're probably going to throw out a lot of those Unix workstations. What makes them special? Often, not very much. They're mostly "crappy linux." They mostly had very similar commands and similar UI, and mostly ran software that was either very austere, or "version 1 of a program that was ported near-identically to Windows NT in version 3." I have used several of them - SGIs, Suns, HP Apollos, AT&T Unix PCs, to name a few - and even the people who knew these machines intimately shrugged when I asked "what can I actually do on here, what makes this special." They admitted readily that the answer was "nothing, it kind of sucks."
Of course, one option is to simply accept all this in a "cosmic truth" sense. Yes, we are only preserving a fraction of what was made - but in 50 years, it will very probably all be dead. Why waste our lives struggling to preserve a past that is simply decaying? Do we really get that much out of it?
Avionics from mid-80s Boeing jets?
Uh oh, I feel as if I have been summoned…
There are people out there who do keep collections of avionics, but for the most mundane reason: they still fly that equipment and they are still maintained. As long as you can test the equipment and ensure that it meets its original operating characteristics, they’re good to be used. You and I could walk into an aerospace surplus store in Arizona and buy some equipment today. There are still operators who buy this equipment because it matches exactly with the equipment list certified in their aircraft.
These systems also rely heavily on external signals to operate. ILS receivers can’t operate without their respective signals. Air Data Computers need to have static and pitot probe simulators to make them function in tests. Displays need a whole series of support systems to operate. If a system is decommissioned, like LORAN, those receivers just no longer operate. You’d have to build a simulator just to make the equipment operate normally.
In a lab environment, we do some amount of preservation in the course of development and support. We need to preserve the software build systems and systems test rigs so that we can use them for the lifespan of the product. They may be replaced by something new in the future, but we don’t know that today. I still have numerous PCs running Win95 to test some equipment I’m responsible for. I don’t dare touch it because it has been working in this fashion for the past 15-25 years. It exists in its own time.
Avionics, at their core, are really tough, single purpose computers. They have no other purpose in their service lives outside of what they were designed for. And that’s by design! Most are more measurement devices than computers. And they don’t have much interface for us to play with. They exist purely for function.
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I think the core desire with saving all the computer systems is that we are trying to preserve the feelings that these systems gave us. Many of these single purpose computers or systems only exist for the singular function in which they were built. @cathodraydude’s questions on where we stop is an interesting one. Do I need to recreate the full bowling alley system, complete with badly aligned CRTs and bubble button keyboards, just to enjoy these gutter ball animations? Can I simulate parts of this? Do I need to? Should I preserve the vending machine in the corner? How much of this feeling can I preserve without the bowling alley itself?
I can make a VOR receiver relevant for aviation education today. I can use it to teach students what these devices do and how they can improve them in the future. I can only do this because they still hold some relevance as a functioning system today. Once the VORs are decomissioned, I can’t do that any more. It exists as a curiosity outside of it’s original context. However, I don’t have any feelings about the unit sitting in front of me. I have feelings about the work I did with the equipment and about the people I worked with. I don’t really care about the system itself.
I can’t help but wonder if a new question emerges: Are we really seeking to preserve the art of the machine instead? Time is spent on attempting at capturing the look, the feel, and the noise. To root the machine back in a facsimile of its period where we, the preservationists, can admire how it once was. A Cray Mainframe not only has its place as a piece of artwork, but also has the rarity of one. We seen images of them and imagined they would be like. The real work these computers did was in nuclear physics, weather modeling, and cryptanalysis. They were never seen or touched outside of a secure laboratory setting. The idea and the look persists with us. The art of the machine seared in out imagination. But, now, there it is! Sitting for anyone to figure out how to use.
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Preservation creates a simulation for those computers to live inside of so we may be able to conjure the feelings they gave us. We preserve the art of the computer. MAME exists so we can interact with the computer and play its games again. Those arcade cabinet computers had a direct connection to us and how they made us feel. They still hold a relevance with us. They moved us. They created feelings. They continue to do so inside of their simulation. We feel the art. The art and function are one with games.
It’s the feelings these systems give us that we seek to preserve. I don’t need the cabinet to feel like I’m playing Galaga for the first time, but it helps. I can sit with my child, play Galaga, and create new memories untethered from the hardware. The cabinet will only enhance that new feeling. But I can never recreate my original feelings for my kid. They exist in their own time and place. I don’t need to rebuild an avionics network just make my kids feel like a pilot and I certainly don’t need an ADF receiver to get that feeling across.
I have a UNIX workstation that I bought to run one piece of software. The software just barely works. Common tasks fail frequently. Maybe someday I'll post about it. I kind of doubt I'll ever boot it again though.
