IBM RS6000

Hey guys, it's Mackey Jinora. Today is a video on a very old computer that I just found in my basement that runs Unix. I'm going to do a full overview on it.

So, as I said, this machine runs Unix. As you can see, it is very large; it's a very huge computer. It's actually like the size of a tower, except that it goes on its side. Right here on the side, we have a key that you can turn to lock the computer so it won't boot at all. Right here, you have a floppy drive; so this does support floppies, and it supports CDs as well. This is a CD drive.

Here's the reboot button and the shutdown button. There's a power button to turn it on and shut it down. Right here is a little LCD display that will display a number; that's how far into the boot process it is. Here's the keyboard I'm using with it. It weighs more than my laptop; it's a very heavy IBM keyboard. Very old, makes a little sound whenever you press a key.

Um, and as you can see, the monitor I plugged into this is a 22-inch large monitor. It's LCD. Now, why would I use this? This is the only monitor I have that actually supports this computer. Okay, I've tried other older monitors and they don't work with it. Only this monitor supports sync on green, which is what this computer needs. So I have this monitor hooked up with this computer.

So when I press the power button, you'll see the lights here start changing and the numbers start changing, and eventually, a login screen will come up. So I'm going to turn it on, do a cut, and when the cut's over, I'll have the camera pointed at my screen so you'll be able to see it better.

So here's the power button, pressing it, and here's the number right there. You can also close this display if you want. This machine is really built like a tank; its chassis is as hard as rock. So I'll turn on the monitor. Even though it's a high-quality monitor, the actual picture is going to be low quality.

So here I go doing a cut while it boots. As you see, here's the login window. It says a nice AIX logo. It says, "Welcome to..." and then the hostname. Mine happens to be localhost. Um, this is a networking computer, so it can go on TCP/IP and go to websites such as Google; ping works perfectly.

So there are four buttons right here: okay, start over, options, and help. So when you type your username in its box, then you hit enter, then you type your password. If you want to start over, then you click start over. It's very similar to the Ubuntu login, so I appreciate that. Help just brings up a list of options, and if you click options, you can set the language, you can set the session to be regular or fail-safe, you can do a command-line login, and you can reset the login window.

So for now, I'm going to do a command-line login to show you some of the command line features on this computer. So I login as root. There we go. So I'm logged in as root; it says, "Welcome to AIX." That's the MOTD.

So this is a green-on-grey terminal; it's actually what terminals used to look like. Now, there are a few interesting things about this that are pretty cool. First of all, root's home directory is /, not /bar/root. Not /south/route; it's just /. Second of all, /etc/password is what's used to store all the passwords and everything.

So here's the root password hash; here's my password down here. All these users are actually disabled, and then the shells, everything's in /etc/password. Um, if you take a look, /bin is where a bunch of the commands are; you're a ton of them. Um, there is no /proc; it's somewhere else, I assume. Um, there is, you know, on old Unix systems, the actual operating system itself was stored in /unix, and there's a file in / called unix. That is the case on this; there's a file in / called unix.

Then, all the home directories are located in /home; that's the same on a bunch of versions of Ubuntu as well. But it's interesting that /home is what they use on this version of Unix. So there are a few home directories here; I'll just get out of this. Um, so that's kind of how it works. Um, there's no add user or user add command; you have to do that manually through /etc/passwd and the console.

Other than that, it is a normal console. I have GCC installed on this computer, so I can compile C and C++ files, and I have Java installed on this computer. I believe it's Java 1.1, so it's a very old, wrinkly, in my opinion, version of Java. That's very, um, no, it doesn't have a lot of stuff. It has AWT, which is nice.

If you check Java, it'll show you java -version; it'll say 1.1.6. Okay, so now I'll get out of this and go into the GUI because I'm sure you're all very interested to see what the GUI looks like. Now, I will warn you now; a lot of things on this machine do not work. You can't do much on the GUI right now; none of the apps work.

Um, so I'll log in right here. Login as root. Okay, here, yeah, so here's my mouse; I'll be using it for the first time. Right here it says, "Starting the Common Desktop Environment." That is very important; just remember that. And then here's an error message about the DT messaging system because I'm not really connected to any domain that it's been set up, so I can just close this window.

And the interesting thing about this is that it uses something called "MOTIF" for its windowing system, so the windows look a lot similar to OS 9. So there's one button in the top left-hand corner that brings down the drop-down menu—like almost everything—that has move, size, lower, close. And on the right, normally there's a maximize button and a put away button or something like that.

Moving a window around actually displays the coordinates in the center of the window once you're moving; that's pretty nice. So when you click this button, click close; it closes that window. Here are my applications; I'm not sure you can see it too well, but I'll read it to you.

Desktop apps, my calculator, there's Java right there, and xcustom is what lets you customize your interface. System admin is very cool, and here's a terminal window right there. They embrace terminal very much. But anyway, here, most of these things, like I say, don't really work too well. If I opened Desktop apps, here's the calculator; it's actually a very nice scientific calculator.

Um, you can also make it a financial calculator, and it's pretty cool. Pretty calculator-like. Um, there is something called workspaces, which is kind of like spaces on the Mac, except no cool animation while switching, and you can switch between them down here.

Okay, there's a dock, as you see right here; this is pretty neat. The dock has a clock, calendar, file manager, text editor. You can put any app down on the dock and say, "I want to put a calculator on my desktop." I can just drag it to my desktop, and here it is on my desktop right here.

Um, so if I just do ls, like I said before, most of the apps don't work on this because they were set to run on another machine, because this was one of many machines at this office place that my dad was using it at. But ultimately, this is still pretty cool; it's pretty UNIX-y.

Instead of Interface Builder and Xcode, it has its own thing called Application Builder, and maybe I'll show that to you later, but definitely not today. And it is very cool and nice because it is very similar to Interface Builder and Xcode.

He said it's all one app; still drag and drop, except C++. So that's one of the cool things it comes on this computer. Ultimately, if there are any commands you'd like me to run in terminal just to check on old UNIX authenticity, or if you just want to see more about this computer, just give me a message if you want to see how it works.

But this is ultimately, I think, it's a pretty nice old computer. The specs are: it has 128 megabytes of RAM, 4 gigabytes of hard drive space, and the PowerPC processor. Now, it's a very old PowerPC processor—not like the modern ones you have—but its clock speed is much worse than it would be for you on your PowerPC if you have one.

So this was IBM's machine, the RS/6000. I finally got it to work; it was like six thousand dollars. It runs UNIX, AIX to be specific, and yeah, that's pretty much it. If you want to ask me more about this, like I said before, just IM me. I thought I'd make this video because I got this, and I figured maybe I want to share this with other geeks and people who actually care about this stuff.

So anyway, um, thanks for watching. Mackey Jinora, and one, subscribe, and goodbye!