I've got a BIGGER one!

In days of yore, computer manufacturers would include tons of useful information on the products you bought. Need a schematic? It's in the back of the manual. Have a problem? Comprehensive troubleshooting in the manual too etc etc. One such company was HP. Their electronic equipment was legendary (not just computers) for the build quality and information provided to the user. It's almost as if they understood that you owned a unit they had made and you had a right to understand, use and even repair it as you saw fit. What a novel concept these days (looking at you Apple).

Anyway, they also made some fairly hefty high-end UNIX workstations. And guess what arrived in the garage in the last couple of weeks? Yep. An HP 9000 workstation, model B132L. Alongside the main unit and the absolute UNIT of a monitor (more on that in a minute) came HPUX on CD with many updates - also on CD - along with books and manuals. The only thing missing is a PS2 mouse. 

Ten grands word of 'puter.

It's an old fashioned, proper HP.

First things first. The monitor for this is FECKIN' HUGE and FECKIN' HEAVY. Seriously, this thing must weigh 40kg. I can just about lift it up off the ground and get it on the desk. Put it this way, the back end of my car was rather low on the drive back from pick-up... It's got three BNCs on the back for the video signal, with what looks like component video (it's actually RGB with sync on green). Resolution seems to be 1280 x 1024 which is pretty good for 1996. Oh, and did I mention it's 20 inches? 20 FECKIN INCHES! It's so heavy, it bends spacetime in the vicinity.

Is it the biggest monitor in the world? No.
Is it the heaviest? Probably.

But does it work? Well, the monitor does, yes. The first time I turned it on it scared the cheeses out of me because it did a de-gauss - as CRTs are wont to do - which makes a bloody loud 'BOING' sound. Subsequent turnings on were less exciting. It is a fixed frequency and resolution though so unless what its connected to is spewing out 1280 x 1024 at 72hz, there's not going to be much displaying going on.

Monitor boings and works.

The actual workstation itself is also built like a tank. These things were expensive back in the day though, starting at around $10,000. That's around a truckload of cash today. And that was the starting price.

So what would you have got for all that dosh, in 1996? Well, not as much as you'd think. First up, you get the HPUX OS which is a variation of UNIX. Anyone who has used Linux will be fairly familiar with some of the operation of UNIX although they are not exactly the same (more on that later). From a hardware perspective the unit I have has a PA-RISC processor running at 132Mhz. There's a whole 64Mb of RAM too, to go along with the IBM 2Gb SCSI (HVD SCSI2) hard disk.

So lets get that top off.

The case slides off like a very heavy
metal glove.

And we're in...

Starting at the front right we have a SCSI CD-ROM drive (caddy variety) which needs some mounting brackets (3D printer might come in handy here). I actually have a SCSI CD-ROM from an Amiga setup somewhere which I might put in here as I really don't like the caddies. 

Behind the CD-ROM there is the hard disk. Not much to say about that. It's a spinning rust drive.

Then heading over to the left side there is an additional graphics card. This card is what I've actually plugged the monitor into since the built in DVI connector doesn't work with a VGA-DVI adaptor (which is a REALLY tight fit). There is some signal but it's distorted and flickery. It may be that a standard VGA monitor might work properly. If I can find my missing VGA cable I could try and prove this...

In the middle is the CPU and RAM. Note the tiny heatsink. But also note the fairly hefty pair of fans at the front too.

At this point it occurred to me that there may be a battery somewhere in here. And I was right:

Ah. There it is. 

Battery.

It actually looks OK so I decided to leave it where it is for now. I will try and get a replacement at some point in the future.

After putting it all back together it was time to see if it would boot. After several days of training and a pep-talk from a nearby weightlifter, I managed to get the monitor up onto the bench (the photo above was taken after my epic lift) and get it all plugged in and ready to go.

Did it boot? No.

Why won't you boot?

So, I took the case off and found out that SCSI drives don't work wirelessly. 

You mean I have to plug it in? Sooo 90's..

Case back on. Pep talk. Work out. Monitor lifted. Try again...

Did it boot? Yes. Sort of...

It started HP-UX but then declared that there were lots of file errors that needed to be corrected. It corrected them without me confirming or denying permission and then re-booted. And got stuck in a boot loop. 

Basically, I think that the files that had errors were actually related to the GUI. So it would start up and attempt to start the GUI and fail, reboot and try again ad infinitum..

At least it starts to boot.

Console login but no GUI :(

Fortunately I have the CDs so I can re-install the OS from scratch. I did give this an attempt but I ran out of time. The disks had around 650 packages to install and it took about eight minutes to install three. If that was an average time for three packages it would take a few hours to get this installed so I need to wait for a lull in proceedings and a spare half day or so to do it.

I may be some time...

Did I mention the monitor is FECKIN heavy?