VOGONS

A Glutton For Punishment. Not Exactly A Conventional PC Project.

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First post, by Vox

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I picked up this gem this weekend. IBM RS/6000 Workstation 43P-150. It has a PowerPC 604e Processor @ 375MHz with 128 MB of RAM. SCSI HDD and CD ROM. Currently, it is running AIX 5.3. I have been researching alterative OS's to install. My best bet is NetBSD 10.1. I hoped to get NT4.0 PPC Edition running on it or maybe OS2/Warp. I don't think that is in the cards. What is interesting is the video card. According to the IBM FRU#, this is an IBM GXT120P / 2D Accelerator card. Clearly, it is a Matrox Mystique 220 / 4MB. The MGA chip is MGA1164SG. I wonder if there is a flashable BIOS on the card to make it work with the CHRP platform. Or would PCI video cards of that era "just work" with proper drivers?

Outside of needing a good cleaning and re-applying some thermal paste, the unit seems to be in really nice shape.

Any other ideas on what to do with this little odd piece of history?

Reply 1 of 3, by legodude

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I have one and run AIX. I do not believe NT will work. You can get more exotic video cards on ebay from time to time

Reply 3 of 3, by Unknown_K

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IBM PPC hardware is the last somewhat modern non-Apple non x86/64 exotic gear you can still play around with. I remember looking at some old IBM server gear at the recycler and if it wasn't missing parts (and I had a clue how to work on them) I might have snagged some.

Collector of old computers, hardware, and software

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