Big Old HP Server from 1996!

hey everyone it's colin how's it going check this thing out you may recognize this backdrop if you've been watching my channel for a while yes i'm out at free geek twin cities again this thing was donated not too long ago and they got in touch and said hey you might want to come out here and take a look at this thing while you can this is an hp 9000 series model k250 it's a server this model launched in august of 1996 so this is probably the oldest server we've looked at on this channel and compared to what we know of from modern servers this thing is in some ways very different so obviously like even modern servers you can custom configure this thing when you ordered it kind of however you wanted this particular model came with up to four cpus this unit has three of them in there and they probably went with three specifically because of price and we'll get to price towards the end those cpus aren't necessarily what you would expect if you don't know anything about this particular series of computers you may expect oh it's a pentium or a xeon or something like that no it's a completely different architecture this series of machine ran what are called pa risk cpus specifically this unit has the pa 8000 model of chip that's a 160 megahertz processor and it was the first 64-bit pa risk cpu that hp ever launched pa risk was the cpu architecture that hp designed risk obviously is something we are familiar with even today with other chip architectures like arm but risk actually goes way back and we'll get to this a little little later but there were some other manufacturers that dabbled with risk in the 80s and 90s and did their own kind of integrated server setups like this one and pa risk happened to be hp's i guess you could say flavor of hardware for some of their bigger servers this unit came with a default of 128 megabytes of ram and that's what this one has apparently it was never upgraded but it could support up to four gigabytes of memory which is kind of a crazy number when you think about it like this was 1996 early 97 when most of this model was sold and your average desktop computer had what 16 or 32 megabytes of ram this thing came out of the box with 128 which is pretty generous amount for the time but i don't even want to know how much it would have cost to spec one of these out to its maximum four gigabytes that's just a crazy number alright so behind the front we've got access to a couple of drive bays cd-rom obviously and then dds2 this is a tape backup drive dds was actually based on dat technology digital audio tape but apparently found kind of a second life as it were for data storage and it was a very popular data format for many years it went through a few different flavors they kept managing to increase the amount of storage that you could fit on a tape that sort of thing and in fact this particular unit even came with a tape in the drive what's crazy is the date written on the label of the tape is 2008 and i guess that just goes to speak for how long systems like these really were in use for they weren't just you know for a couple of years and then companies moved on part of it was these were very expensive and the companies wanted to get their money's worth but they also often had custom applications written for systems like this and it'd be very expensive to move on and redevelop that application for a different platform so these just kept getting used and they were absolute workhorses pretty reliable so it's not surprising to see something like this still have been in production through the early 2000s and then just below those two drives you can kind of see them through the the plexiglas window here where hard drive bays this machine could support up to six hard drives they were all scuzzy too so actually fairly fast for the time and there was also further expansion on the back which we'll look at for if you needed to connect more scuzzy devices so obviously this thing's pretty big and it's what they call a pedestal style server it's actually on wheels you can wheel it around though it is just narrow enough that if you wanted you could mount this in a standard 19-inch server rack it's a little unwieldy when you do it because you're effectively just putting it on a shelf in there there's no provision for putting rack rails on either side so it's it ends up kind of kind of goofy looking and i don't think too many people actually did that i think a lot of times these just got stuck in the corner of a network closet or something like that and that's probably for good reason because like i said these things were a bit unwieldy to move they were very heavy as well you generally need help moving one of these around at least other than just kind of wheeling it the specifications for this thing say that it weighs about 60 kilograms that's like 130 pounds yeah they definitely don't make servers like they used to all right so on the back panel you've got the power supply module here on the right this thing is rated for like 1200 watts which yeah we've definitely also come a long way in terms of server power efficiency you may be wondering like if this is a server why is there only one power supply i mean a lot of modern servers have two for redundancy and i think there's only one probably for a couple of reasons the first one is this entire thing is the power supply like this entire cage so it's pretty big and if they were to try and cram two of them in here it would make the entire chassis just so much bigger and also the power supplies themselves have just gone up dramatically in efficiency like that whole thing is 1200 watts and it extends into the chassis a fair bit but they've got modern server power supplies that you can hold in your hand that are the same wattage so i think maybe yeah there were definitely some space and efficiency constraints at the time when they kind of designed the power system on this the other thing is this was in the 90s when let's just say companies weren't quite as reliant on computing to keep the businesses going i mean we were definitely getting to the point where companies were having computers as an essential part of their operations but it wasn't so bad at that time where it's like oh no the server's down we can't do anything we're all floundering completely useless like they'd be like oh well the server's down okay well you know we still have paper forms to fill out and analog processes and all that sort of thing it wasn't as critical of a deal at the time if the server failed for some reason now that said these were built to a very high standard so failures weren't terribly common but you know there was just kind of a more a more accepting attitude of some down time just because it wasn't quite as critical now all of that said hp also did sell a matching ups you could buy and mount like alongside this thing and it could connect to the server itself through a serial cable kind of like you can with modern ups's and if the power were to go out in the battery and the ups were to start to drain it could basically instruct the server to do a clean safe shutdown you know when appropriate so hp didn't just kind of say well you know just plug it into the wall and you're good i mean they offered you solutions if you needed better uptime but maybe the thinking was you know if having absolute reliability out of one of these servers was just critical for your operations you'd just buy more than one so you can see there are multiple expansion card slots in the back of this unit and there were like different combinations of cards you could have based on the capabilities and like bandwidth of the motherboard and the system there's only one actual expansion card in here and we'll talk about that later this one running vertical down the middle though is like the main io card so even though the motherboard is mounted kind of vertically in the back flat like this all the cards slot in straight into it and then this one is actually how you interface with the computer itself all right so let's go through some of those ports this one's probably familiar this is ethernet it's 10 base t ethernet which was pretty fancy during the time of the mid 90s because networking was going through kind of a big transition in the 90s standards were finally starting to get adopted and people were starting to gravitate towards them compared to the relative mess that networking was previously so having a built-in 10 base t port on here was a major convenience that said below it is an aui port this is also for ethernet networking you could get a dongle they call them a transceiver that plugged into here and could convert to a different kind of media whether that's like coax or something like that so if your your network at work still used a different or older standard you didn't necessarily have to buy a special card in order to support it you would just buy the correct transceiver for that this port is labeled internal modem this thing actually has a built-in modem in it and it's kind of like the aui where this is a connector that would go into a separate transceiver module that would connect into your phone line so right off the bat if you wanted to make this thing remotely accessible maybe to remote employees who need to dial in and get something done like you've got a sales rep who travels around a lot and they need to dial in from a laptop in a hotel room you know halfway around the world or whatever in order to book the sale that they just made you know you could plug it into the built-in modem and they can just dial into the server and you know and input all the information also speaking of modems this port's kind of interesting it's labeled mdp it's for the modem distribution panel if you had a bunch of modems that you needed to hook up to this server maybe you had a whole bunch of remote employees that needed to dial in and access the system you could connect that distribution panel to this port and then that panel allowed to connect eight external modems so you could have like a whole bank of modems for people to use to dial in and it would all kind of get muxed down and go through this one port i'm pretty sure this is just some flavor of cereal and the modem distribution panel hardware did kind of the magic of managing all eight modems but you can definitely tell what era this thing is from just by how much dial-up telephony support it's got built-in i couldn't find a ton of information about the audio in and out jacks obviously they're blanked off it's not on this hardware not quite sure what they would have been used for maybe again part of the telephony capability of this server but if you've got experience running one of these servers way back in the day and you know what these ports are for uh definitely let me know down in the comments okay so this port with this plug in it is for external scuzzy 2 so if you have additional hard drives or other scuzzy peripherals that you wanted to add on you'd plug it into here this device itself is actually a terminator that's something you had to do with scuzzy buses if you didn't have an external device you needed to plug one of these in in order to keep things working correctly thankfully this unit still has it because trying to find one of these these days would be a little bit tougher this port here is for the console and this is where it starts to get kind of interesting with a server like this compared to how we deal with computers and servers today you're used to having a keyboard and video like a monitor and mouse hooked up to your computer and modern servers also have you know monitor and keyboard mouse ports on them for if you need to physically interact with the server and you can't do so remotely servers like this one never did that in general to get access to a console session on one of these you'd actually use a dumb terminal basically a serial port and interact with the server that way remember this is a server you don't generally need a graphical user interface to do much stuff most of the time especially servers from this era were all managed through a command line interface so why would you need fancy graphics and all that kind of stuff like a discrete video output would provide so you would just hook up a dumb terminal or some other console to this port in order to access the system what's crazy is this is just a standard serial port so when we had a volunteer testing this thing out they were actually able to just hook up to that using a usb to serial adapter on their modern laptop running a tool like putty in windows and it worked just great obviously you can also use dumb terminals and there is one with this we'll take a look at that in a second but yeah that's kind of the way you would normally interact with this thing if you were the server admin managing this system now that said this blanked off spot was for an optional add-in card that could give you color graphical bitmapped video output so if there was an let's just say enhanced usage of this server basically your application depended on a graphical user interface for some reason you could get the add-in card and plug in a color console in order to manage the server that way but like you can see this one's blanked off clearly they never used that this whole server was just managed through the command line and when they needed to get on console to interact with the hardware itself well just plug into the serial port this is that ups dedicated serial port so if you bought the optional external battery backup you could plug it into here and the two could talk to each other down here you've got what's basically just a standard parallel port you could plug in a printer i think is normally what people would have plugged in in case there's like reports that automatically need to get printed out every day or something like that and then over here you can see again with the modem external modem is how this one's labeled and it's just another 25 pin serial port so like how many modems you need to hook up to this thing all of them you can hook up all the modems to this thing if you need to there's ps2 keyboard and mouse ports on here again normally i don't think these would have gotten used because you'd just use the keyboard connected to your dumb terminal through that console port but these would get used if you had bought into the optional graphics you know add-in card for the color bitmap display okay and the only expansion card in this whole thing is only used for networking this is what's called an fddi card this is before 100 megabit ethernet really became a thing if you need to go faster than something like 10 base t fddi was the way you would do it it's a fiber optic protocol so you've got your fiber port connector in here you'd stick your fiber cable in there it used multi-mode fiber back then and this thing would get you 100 megabit access to the network now right at the time this server launched what's called now fast ethernet 100 megabit ethernet was brand new but there were still a lot of companies and places who had built kind of the the core of their network where they needed faster than 10 megabit speeds around fddi so offering cards like this gave those companies that backward compatibility that they would need so they could feel confident buying one of these servers hooking it up to their existing network and then no doubt by the time they were willing to upgrade the network to a newer standard like fast ethernet or gigabit ethernet they could just get a different card and you know expand the server on that way so i know the os has been reinstalled on this thing and i'm pretty sure y'all would give me a really bad time if i didn't at least try to boot it up and show you what it looked like so yeah why not um the power switch on this thing is the key because you know they that's the best you can lock it on lock it off that sort of thing so let's just turn the key and see what we get it's kind of loud i mean you definitely hear it and you'll want to you wouldn't want to leave this running like out in an office especially as it's ramping up its fans like that but a lot of servers these days have very like high-pitched whining kind of kind of fans this thing it just it actually doesn't sound bad going through a whole bunch of self tests here it's testing out like every component in the system for you know obvious reasons this is not the sort of thing that you'd be turning on and off regularly back when it was in production you'd generally start it up and you'd leave it running unless you needed to shut it down for maintenance purposes this thing came with its matching terminal which is really nice i'm pretty sure this is actually the terminal and keyboard that just stayed with this system the entire time and like pretty much as they are right now right this thing they basically just wheeled this thing straight out of whatever server room it was in before and donated it to freegeek obviously it's not running windows and in the mid 90s linux relatively speaking from an enterprise perspective was still pretty new so that leaves the question what os is this thing running it's a custom semi-custom os i should say from hp and hp isn't the only company in the 90s who have done this sort of thing where they built their own silicon and had their own operating system so that they could sell a server as a complete package like the complete ecosystem you could get from hp the os that this thing runs is called hp ux and it's based on unix two other notable companies that did a very similar arrangement was ibm with its os called aix and its own risk implementation cpus and then of course also sun microsystems with spark cpus running the solaris operating system so i mean there are obviously still places out there running these systems but kind of like with mainframes and stuff the people who have lots of experience installing and fixing and running systems like this they're getting older and they're wanting to retire so you're just going to start to see a lot of these drop out of service if they haven't already that's the few that still remain and then for the companies i do still need to use these like it's just proven too expensive for them to rewrite their custom software for another platform if you can gain knowledge in systems like this there is the potential to make a ton of money like my understanding is that people who know how to program and cobol and work with mainframes they can make a ton of money working in i.t for an organization like a bank you know some some company that just for one reason or another usually financial they just haven't moved on to a newer better more commodity platform okay so after way too long trying to troubleshoot why i wasn't getting any output on the screen i realize you need to put a null modem adapter on that serial cable going between the uh the console and the server itself so yeah now we've got a login prompt um and because it's unix um there we go um it should actually be somewhat familiar like if you've got experience with other flavors of unix or even linux a lot of the command syntax is very similar you're not going to be an expert in this from day one of course but getting around the shell should be fairly familiar and i'm not going to really go far into this because this thing has a brand new os install on it there's really nothing cool to look at like you don't want to watch me just screw around typing in the command prompt right and frankly i'm tired of yelling so i'm going to turn this thing off and we'll wrap it up there we go since there's no soft power on this thing the console says it's safe to do so and uh yeah it just got a lot quieter in there this thing uh certainly makes some noise and what's neat is because that's actually just a dumb terminal it still shows what was last left on screen so anyway um there are a couple of other operating system options that you have for this hardware most customers obviously we're going to run hp ux but there are apparently also versions of open bsd and netbsd for some models of this 9000 series k family netbsd of course it runs netbsd there also apparently are some linux distributions for this as well i did find some notes that even next step had gotten ported to some of the 9000 series machines but isn't compatible with this one which actually would have been really cool i think but yeah oh well um the big question though of course cost yeah so in the 90s servers were not cheap especially not kind of complete turnkey systems literally turnkey systems like this one where you'd get everything you need basically you know it's a all you need is software on top of this thing to run your business more or less otherwise you've got all the hardware you need aside from maybe some other dumb terminals for people to connect into it this thing when it was launched at the end of 1996 this specific model the k250 in its basic configuration list price was about fifty thousand dollars u.s and that's nineteen ninety six dollars apparently in early ninety seven hp they say in a press release they were able to like bring down the cost of manufacturing whether that's true or if they were just blowing smoke because people were blocking it paying that much money i don't know but in early 97 it saw a price drop down to 40 000 us dollars which is still a lot of money but at the same time you know you'd you'd be running your business off of one of these and forty thousand dollars for a server today is still actually pretty common like depending on the kind of specifications that you need and everything like we're so used to seeing cheap computers now we sit there and think oh thousands of dollars for a server like really why are they so expensive well part of it's because they've got custom hardware in them in the case of this thing i mean pa risk was hp's cpu design so obviously they had cost they had to recoup plus all the r d of building the system itself and all of that so they were going to be spendy and upgrades were spending for this thing as well i couldn't find a complete price list for all of the options in this thing but to give you an idea as to how much some of the upgrades were apparently adding an additional 256 megabytes of ram to this thing still far shy of the maximum four gigs it could support an additional 256 megs was 12 000 it's it's like the numbers are kind of comical but at the same time 256 megabytes was a ton of ram in 1996. so you know some of these prices plus it's for business it kind of makes sense see i'm a bit bummed to not take this thing apart and show you more of the hardware inside it i'm sure it's fascinating but i just i've never worked on one of these before and even with the service manual i'm worried about damaging something and that's especially since free geek twin cities has decided to put this thing up for auction on ebay that just seemed like the most fair way to find this thing a new home because there's been a lot of interest in it even just amongst the volunteers who come to free geek twin cities and help out let alone the general public who has heard about this thing as i'm filming this that auction is still going on so i'll leave a comment below with how much it ends up selling for i'm curious as to what that amount will be but either way this thing is just completely from a different time right we're so used to commodity hardware with very familiar operating systems like linux or windows running on x86 cpus and arm of course is you know up and coming in the computing world for servers and desktops and stuff but it's been a very long time since we've seen any sort of like complete ecosystem like one of these where one manufacturer provides not just the server hardware but even the silicon inside it and the operating system to tie it all together anyway if you like this video i would appreciate a thumbs up be sure to subscribe you can follow me on social media at thisdoesnotcomp and as always thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: This Does Not Compute

Views: 159,316

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Id: s-03V_lCJRc

Length: 27min 49sec (1669 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021