[TUHS] A Talk on Early Unix

[Ronald Natalie]

Ah yes, the 3B’s.   Running the state university computer department (in NJ) we got a lot of 3B’s (3B2, 3B5, 3B20).
The 3B20 was definitely a piece of telephone equipment.   They way you powered it down was to turn a knob to off and then hold a button down for three seconds until it went twang and turned off.    Anybody remember the original bell 303 modems?  That’s how you’d put them into loopback.   Used to have to do this from time to time on our old ARPANET modems at the request of the NOC.

The 3B5 was an interesting machine.   We found out how rugged it was when a drain pipe broke over the top of it (the Rutgers main computer center was underground under a court yard between the twin towers of the Hill Center).   The thing survived a deluge of water being dumped into it.