Hello Charles,
Am 06.09.2024 um 00:33 schrieb Charles Wilt <charles.wilt@xxxxxxxxx>:
That's your real problem...
I don't see this as a problem but a challenge to reasonably squeeze as much useful performance out of a 50 MHz (!) Cobra PowerPC AS CPU — with a luxurious amount of 192MB RAM, though. Somewhat in the spirit of the people who tried to make the /360 run their computing work as efficiently as possible. I'll definitely not go to the extremes those people have been, though. :-) For me, this is a hobby, not something professional to pay my bills by improving a million dollar computer's ROI.
Did you know the 150 has a PPC 603e as MFIOP on the main planar? It's labelled 83 MHz, but I wasn't able to unequivocally determine it's true clock speed.
Not to mention how small a 150 is to begin with.
I hear that all the time. And yet, for my rather small databases and everyday subfile applications I use, I'm positively surprised by its sub-second answer times in 5250 sessions. This is also because at one point I exchanged the default 6607 with 6717 which are AFAIK 10k drives. Gave a nice boost in I/O performance. Rarely, the concurrent user count exceeds 1, almost never 2. Program compilation taking at most a minute for very large ones is okay for me.
I own a 9406-800 as well as I do have remote access to 8203-E4A which both run circles around my 150. But then, the 150 draws considerably less than 100W from mains. Even the stripped-down-to-two-disk 800 sucks 170W, and the 8203 around 400W (with all disk slots filled). The latter generating so much noise that I would rather not even have it in my basement. Power is very expensive here in Germany. And even I have my limits how much money I want to spend for a hobby.
On the other side, I also own a 9401-P03 running V3R2. It uses only around 30W, would require rewriting my V4'ish applications for more traditional ways of catching file errors, is considerably slower, only accepts two kinds of tape drives (the prices for those tapes are skyrocketing) and lacks Ethernet/Token Ring because it's a Twinax machine. Only connection to the outside world is SDLC, and the serial port in it is maxed out at 19200 bps. Enough for terminal use, but too little for shoving actual data back and forth for more than testing purposes.
Cloud is not an option. My data, my privacy, my responsibility.
Hope this helps to have you understand my motivation a bit?
:wq! PoC
midrange.com
