HP 9000 Visualize C3000

Posted by thejpster@reddit | retrobattlestations | View on Reddit | 39 comments

Here’s my latest acquisition, dating from 1999. I got it as a pair with a Visualize B132L+.

It has 2.5 GB RAM, a 64 MB Visualize FXPro5 3D card, and a 400 MHz 64 bit PA-RISC PA-8500 CPU. It’s booting from a 9 GB 7200 rpm Ultra2-Wide SCSI drive with SCA interface. I installed 64 bit HP-UX 11.00, which comes with CDE.

There’s a write-up and more photos at https://thejpster.org.uk/blog.

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biffa_bacon@reddit

An early version of gnome was ported to hpux by a company called ximian. Think I got it going way back when, nice alternative to cde if you can find it

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BackToPlebbit69@reddit

So were these Unix machines for visual 3D render farms like the SGI machines?

Or meant to be productive machines that had Unix?

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thejpster@reddit (OP)

I think if you had an SGI render farm you probably used SGI machines as the workstations. These HP boxes were more likely to be used for CAD/CAM applications - although this particular one spent its 25 year production life as a server for Virgin Media (and whoever came before).

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BackToPlebbit69@reddit

Woah cool, thanks for the background on this

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thickener@reddit

What a beast, holy shit those specs. Thanks for sharing, I’m old to be around back then but never encountered this line.

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fuzzmonkey35@reddit

I have one of these. There was a time when Craigslist had all manner of workstations at grad student prices. I had amassed a fine collection back in 2005

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inaccurateTempedesc@reddit

Old workstations will never not be fun :)

When I was in high school, anything Westmere or Sandy Bridge was absurdly cheap for the performance. You could get an HP Z820 along with a couple 8 core Xeons and 64gb of ECC DDR3 for ~$500, the only real downside was that it's obscenely power hungry.

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fuzzmonkey35@reddit

These beasts are loud too

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team_fondue@reddit

This is my kind of retro. I really want to get the full set of late-90s/early-2000s Unix workstations (Sun, SGI, HP PA-RISC, IBM, DEC/Compaq Alpha) at some point just for kicks...

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thejpster@reddit (OP)

I also have a Power Indigo 2, a RiscPC, an Ultra 80 and an AlphaStation 500. Sadly the Alpha is dead. And I don’t have an RS/6000. Yet.

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iVirtualZero@reddit

Can always check to see if the caps are good or not, replacing the caps and or the PSU may get it working again.

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thejpster@reddit (OP)

Have you worked on an AlphaStation 500?

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iVirtualZero@reddit

No I just worked on some Socket 370 Motherboards.

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lrochfort@reddit

Ah, the RiscPC.

RiscOS is grossly underrated

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OldschoolSysadmin@reddit

I’ve got a Sparcstation Classic I’m working on.

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grateparm@reddit

Now that I've seen the real thing, I see now that the Thermaltake Orb and Titan Majesty are just cheap imitations

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hamutaro@reddit

Agilent made a smaller version of that heatsink called the ArctiCooler that could be used in Socket A/370 systems. IIRC, it wasn't easy to get a hold of but it performed really well.

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grateparm@reddit

That looks like the real deal! That will look cool 😎 on a dual P3 board!

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masamarr@reddit

I'm curious, what's that next to the power button, is it the screen?

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thejpster@reddit (OP)

That’s a two line character LCD that shows POST results before the graphics card is initialised. The POST takes about 30 seconds.

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Background_Yam9524@reddit

HP's 90s workstations look so kickass! I have a. HP Kayak with a similar aesthetic.

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aedinius@reddit

I had a B2000. I miss it. Caught fire.

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lrochfort@reddit

HPs were far superior to the Sun equivalents in my opinion

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thejpster@reddit (OP)

A 400 MHz PA-8500 is faster than a 450 MHz UltraSPARC II on my Mandelbrot tests. Plus the Ultra 80 is made of plastic inside - on mine both the plastic RAM board holder and the plastic CPU holder have snapped.

No such nonsense in the HP.

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Morty_A2666@reddit

Post some pictures with OS running and maybe some tech demos on it.

Man I love workstations, have few SUN and SGI ones at home.

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Brilliant_Date8967@reddit

I love the idea of these so mich. I have several hp 9000s buy why bother when theyre slower than a raspberry pi.

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pinksystems@reddit

did you forget that we're in a retro computing subreddit?

regardless, the rpi of any generation is outclassed and less performant than the PA-8500 and especially through the final spec in the PA-8900, with the workloads for which these were designed.

maybe you aren't aware of this specific chip architecture and its capabilities, in which case there are many very enjoyable resources online to read about the design, use cases, metrics, expandability, and all the rest of the fun.

if you had said the Snapdragon X1E arm64 chip instead of the tragedy of the Broadcom CPUs in rpi series, then I'd certainly agree on the performance aspects. still, the vintage is what's important here.

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thejpster@reddit (OP)

Because it says VISUALIZE on it in big letters and Raspberry Pi’s do not.

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Brilliant_Date8967@reddit

Nothing wrong with that. They're cool machines!

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JViel90@reddit

I love the CPU heatsink!

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octahexxer@reddit

So sexy

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I_Zeig_I@reddit

What am I looking at on slide 3?

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thejpster@reddit (OP)

The PSU sits at the bottom of the case and it’s in the way if you want to access the RAM. So pop the case flat on its side, remove the cover, and lift the PSU like a car bonnet / hood.

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I_Zeig_I@reddit

The white part is a PSU? I thought bottom screen left was PSU

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thejpster@reddit (OP)

The steel box with the round holes and the cables? That’s the drive bay. It takes two SCA drives on sleds.

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