[TUHS] Do you have any historical UNIX computers?

[segaloco via TUHS]

On Monday, June 9th, 2025 at 10:21 AM, Vicente Collares via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> Hello TUHS people!
> 
> Someone recently posted a question about your prized UNIX artifacts to
> this list, that discussion [1] seems to be about various memorabilia.
> What about computers made to run UNIX? Do you have or used to any
> interesting historical hardware?
> 
> For my part, I have only used UNIX on emulated systems so far but would
> like to purchase some hardware. Given that I have little space it would
> need to be something small. According to you how does one get into that
> specific type of retro computing?
> 
> See you around cyberspace,
> 
> Vicente
> vicente at collares.ca
> 
> [1] https://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2025-June/032020.html

Back when I worked in the lab we had an RS/6000 running some 4.x AIX release hanging around for data retention reasons.  I was able to connect with it via rsh (yep, no security here...) and could play games like wump and quiz in a terminal on my desktop.

Aside from that, we have some sort of HP boxes running HP-UX driving our high res mass specs in another lab, have had to remotely tinker with those before.  Was glad I had learned ed by that point, whatever vi was in there struggled with rsh for whatever reason.  Any time I have to get on those I still wind up using ed exclusively.

Finally had the privilege of bumming around on some of the machines maintained by the LCM at the time, they had some PDPs and 3B2s running various UNIX versions, you could simply ssh to them.

- Matt G.