First post, by liqmat
- Rank
- l33t
I am starting this thread with the hope that this becomes a good exchange of information about the Pentium Pro monster server referred to as the ALR Revolution 6x6 and in this case five Unisys Aquanta HS/6 systems. As some of you know five new old stock ALR Revolution 6x6 servers and many extra new old stock ALR 6x6 parts were acquired back in October 2018 along with a truckload of various other new old stock Pentium Pro gear. It has taken a lot of effort to sort and organize through it all, but now it is time to power up these beasts from the past and get them breathing for the first time since rolling off the factory floor so many decades ago. Two of these HS/6 systems are now owned by Luckybob and three HS/6 systems are in my possession in which two will be prepared for their new owners. The last one I will be keeping, for a short time, to run some tests of my own. As Luckybob and I bring these units online we want to share our journey with these machines whether there are pitfalls or triumphs and hopefully it becomes a good learning experience overall. I know some of you are 6x6 owners yourselves so please chime in with any knowledge or experiences you have with these powerful Socket 8 systems. Eventually we hope to have some decent video footage of setting up these systems in the near future.
˜Edit: Luckybob informed me even though he has a few rackmount versions of the ALR 6x6 motherboard his rackmount case turned out to be an empty Tandem S1000RM server chassis and not a HS/6U. He might try fitting one of the ALR 6x6 boards into it at some point.
I want to thank two Vogons members, Gbeirn and Hard1k, for supplying a large amount of software and drivers for these systems as many websites that used to have those resources have now gone dark. I went ahead and spent a few hours combining those two file dumps into an organized folder system that could be easily navigated. Also thanks to Stiletto for posting the ALR driver and software archive over at VOGONSDrivers which you can find here:
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1472
I'll go ahead and start with some photos of my HS/6 systems and the parts that I will be dealing with during these three builds.
My three Unisys Aquanta HS/6 barebone floor model systems. These systems contain a motherboard, one triple Socket 8 CPU board, a CPU dummy board, 1.44MB floppy drive, PS/2 keyboard/mouse/parallel/serial port I/O board, LCD panel controller board, touchscreen LCD panel, power supply mounting cage, three power supplies with room for one more, 50-pin SCSI cables zip tied at the top of the case and of course some very powerful front-to-back case cooling fans. The case is on wheels for easy movement, but not on standard caster wheels. This means the case can roll forward or backward easily, but not in all directions so it can be difficult to turn the case.
Here is a spare ALR motherboard that I have for the HS/6 and a 486 motherboard next to it for scale. I have to be careful how I store this motherboard as it bends very easily because of its length and weight.
Here is the Unisys Aquanta HS/6 inside panel sticker that shows the layout of the motherboard and even has a parts list below. Notice the top slot labeled "I/O Card Slot". The next photo will show that part.
The I/O card that goes into that slot. You can see the parallel port connection on the left.
Triple Socket 8 CPU board.