Found a HP 712/60

I recently found an old HP 712/60 UNIX workstation in a skip. If I find a UNIX machine in a skip, I am going to take it. Anyway, I took it home and cleaned off the rust which had built up over the course of a few weeks. I'm not actually sure how long it had been there. After opening it up, everything looks clean and dry.

It booted into HP-UX, which was not as surprising as it booting at all. The installation was quite messy and would need some work, since it was looking up NIS domains and trying to connect to NFS exports. It was simply easier to reinstall something… Except it doesn't have a floppy drive, or a CD drive, and I couldn't be bothered setting up a dhcpd and tftpd.

OpenBSD seemed like a good choice, so I took out the hard disk and connected it to my SCSI PCI card in my desktop. I wrote the cd59 iso directly to the disk and surprisingly it booted. The machine picked up an IP address and started installing to the disk. Quite nice how everything was loaded into RAM. Oh, the specs of the machine:

• Some kind of RISC CPU
• 96MB of RAM, of different types, so clearly upgraded at some point.
• 1GB hard disk drive

It is now running OpenBSD 5.9 and I can SSH into it. Everything is wonderful. Here is a photo after I cleaned off the rust.

Tags: oldcomputers