NCR Minis: Re: PeeCee clones; was:PCW's 25 worst tech products

[Patrick Finnegan]

On Wednesday 28 June 2006 22:11, Ken Seefried wrote:
> I spent some time with the NCR minis at AT&T and a soon to bankrupt major
> airline.
>
> The premier box was the 3600, which was probably the box that the original
> poster described as "2 refrigerators", or some such...it was about that big
> or bigger.  As I recall, it had up to 32 i486 processors (I vaugly recall a
> Pentium upgrade, and maybe a PPro one) and used some Teradata interconnect
> IP.  They were touted as "data warehouse" boxes, and were usually used for
> some big DB app.  Million dollar boxes.  Ran pretty bog standard SVR4.

I've got a Worldmark 5100. huge-fridge sized chassis, two "nodes" in one 
package, each has 32 processors, 4GB ram, and a pair of 8-slot microchannel 
busses.  I've got one "cabinet", with a maxed out processor/memory config in 
my friend's garage.

> All of this stuff was superceeded by the Worldmark line, which was pretty
> much standard multiproc Intel stuff with an NCR badge.

The worldmark I've got ISNT at all standard.  I'm not sure it'll run DOS, and 
it definately won't run Windows.  I booted Linux on it once, but it couldn't 
see one of the (4-way) processor boards, or see more then one SCSI 
controller.  Later Worldmark systems may be more standard.

Pat
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