altos

(Machine, Hungary)

Acer's server. The first pentium we ever saw live (as someone on sezam said „in nature“, to which the reply was „and where are the largest deposits and mines of pentium in nature?“).

It ran Novell 4.02 under DR Dos, which meant booting from a floppy. Novell was the only serious network at the time, which could match the number of workstations (i.e. networked peesees) which we needed for the Gemenc. The version 3.12 or 3.5 (I'm really bad at memorizing names...) was battle tested, some cusomers of DBA ran it, Bangro had one, Avai installed a 3.12 in MXM on some jerkoff 386 ess ex, and that one had downtime only once, when the whole place was without power for the whole day.

Altos, no matter how impressive it may have been for the time, couldn't be better than the operating system it ran. What we thought that the 4.02 was a mature version with neonatal diseases taken care of, and that the infinite number of crashes was due to hardware (and the parity error, which it reported, look like a hardware error, but we know how many times the error reporting is in error, i.e. how many times it may report wrong error). Szoftex's hardware guy had loads of trouble with it and... nothing, it worked while it worked, and then it'd crash and report the same error.

Few weeks and kilometers of nerves later a fresh version of Novell did arrive, a 4.10 (or was it 4.07, I said I was bad with names, didn't I). All of a sudden the error vanished, everything works like a dragon, just rings.

Altos was set up, by the way, in some kind of „system hall“, which was some crummy room in the basement, a three by four and not quite well ventillated. Though, considering its load, it didn't heat much, so this wasn't a problem. There was a weaker pee see nearby, so the admin wouldn't sit straight at the server (Novell itself recommends to do absolutely nothing directly on the server) and perhaps an Oki printer sometimes. Two chairs, desks (both computers were on desks, come high water, though, the whole hospital was at a slope of a hill, and even here the street is a few meters above the level of the Pannonian flats, which begins with the parking lot across the street, at least three meters lower than the hospital entrance.


Mentions: 24-X-1994., 31-X-1994., 22-II-1995., 27-II-1995., Avai, Bangro, DBA, Gemenc Polyclinic, MXM, PolC, sezam, Szoftex, in serbian