I seem to recall the 3B2 was one of the first machines I dealt with that had a “soft” power switch. I remember not having sufficient privs on one machine to turn it off. Fortunately, I had sufficient privs to yank the plug out of the wall.

Slick little machines. Built by Convergent Technologies, running CTIX (their System V port). Back in the day I was a Convergent reseller. We never pushed the 7300, but we did shift a few MiniFrame and MightyFrame servers. The MightyFrame was an impressive little beast. We sold a couple that were supporting upwards of 40 terminals running database applications running under Mistress (later renamed Empress, in one of the earlier instances of political correctness invading the IT landscape). CTIX incorporated the Berkeley network stack, and one of the systems ran an X.25 link to Datapac. Perhaps the coolest aspect of the Convergent systems was the RS422 daisy-chained terminal interface. The PT-100 and GT-100 terminals had loop-through RS422 interfaces, running at a couple of hundred Kb/s (I forget the exact speed). You would daisy chain strings of terminals from the server, so 40 terminals only burned up four RS422 ports on the server side (in our deployments, at least). Using these terminals was reminiscent of working on a 327x, since screen updates tended to come in bursts that looked just like block-mode updates. The GT variant supported bit-mapped graphics - blazingly fast compared to something like a Tek 4010 running over an RS232 line. --lyndon

Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote: I did! I spent many pleasant hours developing gawk and its documentation on mine. There was a separate USENET network of 7300 and 3B1 owners (unixpc.* heirarchy) which I was on. With the Telebit modems, things moved REALLY fast. Comp.sys.3b1 is still alive and occasionally sees activity. Ah, the nostalgia... :-) Arnold