International Business Machines RS/6000 POWERserver 930

    This is representative of one of the earliest models in IBM's RS/6000 linueup, and one of the most powerful for the time. It is based upon the POWER (Performance Optimised With Enhanced RISC) architecture which at one point held the record for the world's fastest microprocessor.

    IBM announced the machine on 15 February, 1990 and they became available in July of that year. IBM withdrew the machine from marketing on 15 July, 1992; there was no successor system.

    This particular machine is configured with 96Mo of mainstore (on 2Mo and 4Mo SIMMs), an eight- port RS-232 interface, a single SCSI controller, and the basic I/O capabilities of two RS-232 lines, a floppy drive, a keyboard port, a mouse port, and a tablet port. The machine communicates with my LAN via a 16 megabit/second token- ring network interface. The system also includes an 870Mo SCSI disk, a 1Go SCSI disk, an internal CD/ROM drive, a 1.44Mo floppy drive, and a pair of 2.3Go 8mm tape drives.

    The two black- faced units above the 930's I/O bay are a 14-port Starlan Multiple Access Unit (MAU) for my Token- Ring LAN segment and a Chrono-log time- reference, respectively.

    The I/O backplane, or "planar" in IBM terminology, uses an RS/6000- specific Microchannel architecture which is an enhanced PC Microchannel. The memory resides on a separate backplane and is installed on two 16Mo and two 32Mo "riser" cards which sport eight 2Mo SIMMs and eight 4Mo SIMMs, respectively, each. The "riser cards" need to be installed in pairs.

    This example was previously used as a developmental network router for the NSF before it was retired and made its way here. It runs IBM's AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) operating system at version 4.1.5 and gets used as a learning tool and general- purpose play system.

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