2/25/2026 at 9:31:42 PM
Multi-user Unix? What will they think of next?This is cool, though. Gives people a taste of what it used to be like with everyone in the university logged into the big time-sharing machines all together.
by cbm-vic-20
2/25/2026 at 10:25:30 PM
I kinda wish it stayed that way, or rather something better replaced multi-user systems as they aren't well suited to personal computers like we have nowadays. Plus I like the added bonus of not needing to spend much to have access to the kind of compute power needed for a compsci course, it makes compiling a lot fasterby mghackerlady
2/26/2026 at 12:27:58 AM
You apparently never had to share a 3B20 (around 1 MIP) with 200 other CS1401 students desperately trying to get their Pascal project to compile before the midnight deadline. 15m for 'hello world'? If you're lucky.by kjs3
2/26/2026 at 2:53:56 AM
Eeeeeep. I was lucky that my big CS courses were done on a Sequent Balance 8000 equipped with six NS32032 CPUs and room for six more. Yup, SMP in the mid-1980s. That machine positively flew on loads that would bring the neighboring Pyramid 90x to its knees.I had an account on a 3B20, and it did not impress me in the least, but the 3B2/400 boxes in one lab were pretty reasonable for being small systems. What a shame that the WE32000 didn't get any traction.
Before I went down to UIUC, the junior college had a Prime 650, and all compile jobs were run through a queue precisely to avoid having the machine get crushed.
by flyinghamster
2/26/2026 at 7:46:47 PM
That's kinda funny...we musta lived in parallel worlds.The 3B20 might have been slow, but it had a solid I/O subsystem so you could load it up with users, and was generally reliable (it was originally built as a telco switch control processor looking for 5-nines uptime). But by the later 80s the industry had moved on, and we were in the process of migrating those CS classes from the 3B20 to either a Sequent Symmetry (follow-on to the Balance with something like 16x i386) or a Pyramid 90x, depending on the class. The Symmetry was...not reliable. The 90x was worse. The wails of a lab full of undergrads realizing the shared machine had just taken a dirt-nap and all their work with it was a far too common sound. Good times.
We also had a bunch of 3b2s, most with an AT&T 5620 'windowing terminal' attached, which is a really fascinating 'what might have been' if bitmapped workstations and X11 hadn't taken over that niche. I ended up with a Sun 3/160 for most of that time, and the rest is history.
by kjs3
2/26/2026 at 10:01:04 PM
Strange that the Balance was largely reliable. I recall one or two hiccups, but nothing that caused me lost work. There were other machines floating around, but they were pretty much reserved for faculty/staff/grad students, and undergrad plebes weren't welcome to use what passed for the internet at the time (but Usenet was was available, albeit via Ray Essick's "notes" software). Also, any student could get an account on the CDC Cyber 170, but few courses used it for actual coursework by the time I was there. Then there was PLATO, a world unto itself... it also ran on CDC hardware, with bespoke way-ahead-of-its-time touchscreen plasma display terminals, online forums, instant messaging, and multi-player online games.We only had a few of the 5620s in the 3B2 lab, and I remember a wacky mechanical mouse with a metal ball that I can't imagine would have held up in the long run. The PLATO touchscreens were optical, with a grid of infrared beams to pick up touches.
by flyinghamster
2/26/2026 at 1:13:04 AM
> Multi-user Unix?We could call it Multics!
But yeah, I remember those glory days of everybody on the school's Sun 3/280, when an accidental fork bomb would ruin everyone's homework.
by technothrasher