[TUHS] Reaction to the 3B2 at Bell Labs

arnold at skeeve.com arnold at skeeve.com
Mon Nov 28 04:59:20 AEST 2022


Georgia Tech got two 3B20s.  They did very little more than consume
electricity and look impressive.  I wanted to port 4.2BSD to them,
but that never got off the ground.

"Ron Natalie" <ron at ronnatalie.com> wrote:

>
> >. But everyone knew what the J stood for. The 3B2 served as a doorstop.
>
> Shades of the jerq terminal.    The J prefix persiste in the code long 
> after the nickname was quashed.
>
>
> Being in charge of the Rutgers computer center, we were gifted a lot of 
> ATT hardware.   We had one 3B20 (now that was a pure piece of phone 
> equipment, you shut it down by turning a switch inside and holding the 
> button down until it twanged.   Just like putting an old 303 modem into 
> loop back).   We also got three 3B5's (noted for the one installed in 
> the New Brunswick computing room that got completely drenched when a 
> pipe burst and kept on running) and countless of the 3B2s.    I chortled 
> in that unless you were logged in as root, you couldn't work the power 
> switch.    Yanking the cord out of the wall was still and option.


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