SCO Unix OpenServer 5 install on the Siemens
Vložit
- čas přidán 25. 07. 2024
- In part 1 of the Siemen PCD-5T we went over the hardware and the state of the machine when I got it. ( • Siemens PCD 5T Pentium... )
In this part we're going to be installing SCO Unix on the machine. We're going to be doing some upgrades to the machine, including a CDROM drive and a new hard drive, and see if we can prepare this machine for SCO Unix.
A third and final video will include setting up networking and seeing if we can recuperate some of the data that was on the original hard drive.
Chapters :
0:00 - Introduction
00:40 - Quick overview
02:25 - Finding an ISO file
04:57 - Installation process
07:25 - First boot
08:54 - The video card
10:32 - The desktop
13:38 - The SCSI setup
16:54 - Outro
#SCO #Unix #Siemens - Věda a technologie
Hi, I worked with SCO UNIX in 2007 here in Marabá, Brazil, TOPPPP
It's great to see an old workstation restored and running a non Microsoft OS, that SCO desktop really looks nice for the time!
Non Microsoft isn't true SCO Unix was a Licensed Version on Xenix
A Unix based OS from Microsoft
Man, that SCO Unix OS looks awesome. Would love to try that. Can't wait to see an exploration of the OS.
My only exposure to SCO Unix was at the local library. It was how I first got on the internet in the early 90s.
You applied for a user account with your library card, and in turn got a login that you could use at a bank of Wyse amber screen terminals. There was a neat little text menu system with access to all of the typical early 90s internet tools - usenet, gopher, email, etc. and even limited shell access - I remember the quota being something really low because you would hit it really fast just saving text files to your home dir. There was no way to write anything to floppy to take home either which sucked, but I had BBSes for that.
I remember my E-mail address was insanely long as the library server was nested behind a bunch of different subdomains. You could also dial in to the system from home and access it that way - the library even later on offered very, very basic dialup internet service, but I remember it being insanely slow. I was about 10 at the time and already knew DOS pretty well, and started learning Unix a bit that way. Within a few years I had dialup at home, installed RedHat Linux (remember the thick book and CD combo sold at Costco) and had no use for the library system.
I read some truly horrific stuff on usenet sitting in front of that Wyse terminal, stuff that no ten year old should have been reading, and enjoyed every second of it. Nobody was watching over your shoulder or keeping track of what you were doing - at least as far as I know.
I don't think I ever encountered SCO Unix anywhere else, but it was my first gateway to the internet and Unix as a whole.
Woho! Good job! Being a Linux user since the early 00's I remember SCO as a kind of Voldemort like entity. :) Nowadays it's just good fun to see older *NIX systems. My oldest UNIX book is from 1983.
SCO being considered as "Voldemort" is really sad. The Voldemort-SCO is actually what Caldera renamed itself into. The "original SCO" during the 80's and 90's was actually a very respectable company. Their Xenix and Unix products were very, very good for their time and turned IBM PCs, AT's and later 386 onward into quite capable Unix systems.
That required and obscene amount of clever software engineering and they really did a very good job at it. They were expensive, thou.
@@virtualinfinity6280 iirc SCO UNIX started out life as XENIX with Microsoft doing most of the hard lifting of actually getting the product alive. There was a brief period there where Microsoft could have become the world's largest Unix vendor - and in fact I think for a moment they were - but alas the Windows profit margins were so great, they offloaded that hot potato as quickly as they could.
Looks quite nice, I expected something more... "industrial"
lol that has to be the best CD mounting icon
10/10 solid video. More please
I'm 42 yo and this was the first time ever I saw any kind of UNIX in operation. Up until now it was just a word to me. Thanks :)
That's nice, but I should point out that since macOS is a UNIX-certified OS, if you have ever used (or seen someone use) a mac with macOS or OSX, you have at least technically seen UNIX in operation
@@gregorykhvatsky7668 Thanks. I have very little personal experience with Macs. But yes, have seen it running technically. Just not with UNIX "sticker" on it :D
Yet you have a very UNIX userid here... Ed, man...man ed. Google it up...
It's great to see this piece of history running again. Thanks a lot for the video! :)
Congrats on 25k!
That is one nice UI there! Wow! Great video as always. And, the setup method is perfect... start with and test the peripherals, get a good install, and then install them into the system!
Beautiful look at this old server! Man you would have been rolling in the dough installing a system like SCO back in the day. I used to help support a local municipality that used financial software that ran on OpenServer. It was a rock solid system and ran for 12 years before being discontinued. Couple diehards still out there though that make some good money helping companies virtualize these old boxes! Thanks for sharing man.
I have hazy memories of a few customers running OpenServer as a terminal server for a little known ERP application called „Parity“ if I remember correctly. It was accessed by Telnet or SSH from regular windows boxes and provided an MS-DOS like GUI....those were the days 😁 This is the first time I’ve ever seen the graphical Desktop environment of OpenServer, very interesting mix of CDE with a little bit of Mac/Windows thrown into it!
Oh yeah, this is my jam.. Vintage Unix, and on such a beautiful machine too! Big fan of how that Siemens looks.
I'd love to see you continue working on it. Get networking up and running, try the internet and such. :)
Great video, two thumbs up.
I like how the desktop has a World Wide Web icon.
Nice video mate very interesting, have subscribed.
Very interesting to see the Unix desktop. Ah, Netscape, brings a tear of nostalgia to my eye. My beloved browser. 😊
When I was working for the Ministry of housing back in the late 1980's we had an upgrade of a server. This server tracked all the hazardous waste spill responses for the province of Ontario. It ran a custom application for this purpose. The upgrade involved a $20,000 server a copy of the Informix database and SCO open server along with the custom application. It was used by the department staff of six. It was quite a large database. It was replacing an old server that was at least ten years old and was clunky and prone to hardware failures. It was so old that the hard drive sounded like a howitzer every time the heads moved! Knowing our government, they are still using the same server even today! When I was at the ministry of housing we ran the entire housing allocation system for affordable housing on an ancient system that utilized two-foot wide and 8-inch high disc packs. When I was there they told me it had been running since 1976 and this was in 1985. They were just starting to re-write it for the mainframe on an IBM 370/VM platform using a database system called model 305 I think. It a very BASIC like language and very easy to work in. But not much of transferrable job skill.
I'm impressed the video card was detected automatically!
I remember trying to get the X Window System running for days... finally having the right settings for my CRT lead me through several re-installs of the OS cause of lack of knowledge back in the 90s
this is awesome
Sorry, it really sound funny to me how you say SCO as a word :) I worked with it in 2002~2004 and we called it S.C.O. They where a pain in the ass to instal, and we had a manual for each specific hardare we had to install it. Thanks for the great work man, love the channel!
I installed and administered hundreds of SCO systems for 15 or more years, and everyone always pronounced it "sco" just like in this video. Not just my own company but customers, vendors, other developers and consultants.
This is awesome, have a like and a sub
Novell NE2000 - benchmark standard in the day
The colours on the logic board make it look like it's made of LEGO
If you want a closer look of the motherboard check out my previous video. It is indeed a looker.
@@RetroSpector78 Oh yes I saw it - it just dawned on me watching this one that the colors look like LEGO. Kind of like those LEGO Ideas proposals for the Sound Blaster card, etc. They need one for a motherboard and it may look like Siemens!
Welcome to SCO! I learned to hate that distro and company.
One of my first jobs the company have a box running SCO Openserver.
They didn't know exactly what the box was running but we still have to login on it and run a batch job every night. The box was notorious for not booting and need many tries to restart it.
Almost one year later after they needed to move some servers to another datacenter we tried to discover what the server was running.
Them we discovered he was running the ERP from a company my company bought some years ago and before everything was integrated into SAP the batch process was necessary to move data from one system to another but this wasn't the case for many years but nobody asked it before.
And this wasn't the only server we have no clue what was running one old IBM AS/400 and one IBM P series blade was in production and only after a archeological research we discovered that one server was running Lotus Notes and the other a DB2 database used by a company we bought in the early 2000s.
When I started to work there, there's a HP Superdome that a company we recently bought used. We have no use for it but the network admin was adamant that the server was useful. After six months we couldn't find any use for it, but at least I could work with HP-UX just for the lolz.
The icons rotated at an angle reminds me of the Indigo Magic desktop on the Sgi systems. Only thing missing is the zoom wheel on the window to shrink and grow the icons.
I feel like I am partially responsible for this mess. Welcome to SCO UNIX. Suffering is part of the experience.
The suffering with UNIX here and the suffering with Linux on your channel. Now our life can be complete.
@@kovacsdavid4362 I actually touch on SCO UNIX on my most recent video which drops in about 20 minutes, but I have a long and painful history with suffering in that department.
@@NCommander I seem to recall that the transition from SCO Xenix to SCO Unix was a real headache. SCO tried keeping as much as they could from Xenix and rolled it into their UNIX, so the applications would continue to work after the transition. I remember them trying to make both termcap and terminfo work together, and the SysV printing was somewhat messed up as well. It's been too many years for me to remember the details, but it was ugly...
That desktop panner thing is kind of like what we have today with smartphones being able to pan between different sets of icons.
This MOBO looks huge
The SCO old school!
Excellent video as usual. The user interface reminds me very much of Silicon Graphics' IRIX operating system (Based on UNIX System V)
What is your profile picture?
@@computeraidedworld1148 It's my SCELBI 8B replica on the left and an Apple 1 replica behind to the right
@@DevilishDesign very cool
Sigh..happy happy joy joy...I installed dozens of them Openserver 5.0.5 servers about 20 years ago, text mode only (no X windows). Ok, powerful for MTA serial networking those days but it could also be a pain in the bum if things backfired or crashed. I didn't miss it changing to the dark side (of Windows/Intel) ;-) Still a very well made review, congrats with that...I'm looking forward to the next part
So solid electronics. It will work for decades, I suppose.
Looking at that "ISO" with a hex editor it says "SCO CD-ROM/TAPE" at the beginning, I can also find content with "strings".
Found a post in a forum saying 'OpenServer CDs didn't switch to an ISO filesystem format until OSR5.0.0' and it also said it 'doesn't contain a mountable filesystem. It contains a series of tar archives separated by "file marks". Under SCO Unix / OpenServer, this format can be accessed via the "cdt"' (CD Tape) driver'.
Couldn’t get it to install using the ISO. Cdrom drive was detected ok, but kept saying “wrong volume” in drive.
But perhaps it was due to the fact that I only have a SCO OpenServer 3.0 serial / activation key. Because based on the serial the installer knows what product you want to install. Perhaps I need a specific serial / activation for System V 3.2v4.2 (not including openserver if there is such a thing).
This is probably correct. SGI IRIX worked the same (XFS filesystem on the CD-ROMs, not ISO9660). You need to use another method to boot the kernel (network, floppy, etc.), and then you can mount the CD-ROM to do the install.
Just seeing the title of this video gave me lawsuit PTSD.
I still think Bill was behind it all and somehow incentivised SCO to sue.
Also, PJ/groklaw was an absolute heroine.
I have a box of sco(santa Cruz operations)Unix cds with different versions including some that mention netware(here somewhere) I had issues like you had where I couldn’t get it to do anything/install/etc. Kinda refreshing seeing someone get it to do something, lol. Those directories of sco cds is they appear when you do directory of cd. (Need to use something like dskimage.exe to extract to a cd and floppy). Also when you system’v’, it’s system five in case someone else didn’t mention this.
My 1st computer XENIX SCO UNIX
This is hardcore nerd fringe. Your retro kung fu is strong. Respect :)
Sometimes the long install times are because decompression is CPU intensive which running on even an early pentium CPU is well... slow :)
Pls make a Video about the Board!
That's one of the most beautiful Motherboards I've ever seen!
And I've seen a lot. Nothing beats German Quality!! :)
See my previous video
I want to retrobrite that yellowed monitor so badly.
But isn't is amazing how the yellow window frames of the SCO desktop match the monitors case color?
The monitor plastics contain fire retardants that evaporate over time and thus make it very brittle. I think a peroxide bath may put it over the threshold to death's door.
@@Breakfast_of_Champions Still wanna retrobrite it badly.
Nice video! SCO OpenServer uses IXI X.desktop desktop environment, lightweight and based upon Motif toolkit.
I would try to run WordPerfect 6.0 (WinWorld has a nice Unix ISO). CorelDraw! also had a Unix version, but the one I found (also from WinWorld) is not compatible with SCO operating systems.
4:44 This is where a GoTek USB floppy drive emulator really comes into its own, though admittedly reading 40 diskette images off a USB stick would still amount to a lengthy install, and wouldn't be very authentic :)
Well I was planning that, and the first couple of disks went fine but when I got to the program disks (the bulk) the software I use to add floppies on the usb stick crashed every time
I must have installed this and earlier versions 500 times or more over the course of 10 or 15 years. Really many more times if you count all the trial & error and research and debugging the quirks of every new motherboard and raid card etc, and hardware migrations etc.
Have you done a Novell 286 install yet - 50 x 5.25 floppies! Novell even made their own 286 servers and something called an NDS4 which a big box with 5.25 full height scsi disks in it. Sadly i tossed all mine in the bin 20 years ago
My first Novell installation was v2.0a, and I received my CNE Netware 2.1 came out, back when the tests were open-book! I eventually became a Master CNE and Master CNI, and kept working with Novell through Netware 6.5. I still miss how easy network and filesystem security was back then, compared to Windows network and file systems security today!
Love it! Yeah, SCO installs are notoriously slow. I want to say the install kernel disables DMA. If you get a chance, check out Merge and WABI. I think they come on the install CD. If not, I'm sure they're on some other CD available at archive.org.
SCO was always a PITA. It's a 300MB ISO but all of the packages have to inflate into RAM Disk then copy to the Hard Drive and then verify it's contents then deletes the RAM Disk. Does this for every package and that is why it took forever.
Winworld, don't get me started. I use to be a Mod in the forums and everything went down hill when a change of hands happened.
nice.... glad you got it working. I have a full scosysv devkit with paper licenses lol one thing i hated about sco sysv was that you had to relink the kernel every time you did anything. which when i started with a 386 was a PITA to say the least. but it should uspport NE2000s without a problem, oh and if you want all the service packs/supplementals they can still be downloaded here:, i'm working on an iso for all of them. of interesting note is the E-1000 network drivers so that you can use proxmox to virtualise it. ftp://ftp.sco.com/pub/openserver5/
😈interesting
@@Riskteven 🤩
@@Riskteven OpenIndiana is arguably the closest thing to a free UnixWare nowadays :p
That's great, I hope you show some Corel Linux or old Red Hat versions or even Mandrake Linux.
I’d be curious to multi-boot this to see which OS performs best on the hardware. Win95? NT? OS/2, perhaps?
"Harddrive graveyard"? I see, more HD repair videos incoming then? :P
Not really sure about that ... too much other stuff to get through
Wasn't SCO the company that got together with microsoft to sue company's that were using linux?
They were trolling [linux] super hard back in the day. I think it was over the C libraries but I could be wrong.
Ha, sound of read the comments before I posted mine. Yeah, I totally remember that. I think it was a news item for The Screen Savers on Tech TV. Those were the days man.
But but but.. I own the rights to SCO Unix! You must pay!!
I noticed this initial install said the video was vesa SVGA and the card you pulled out was only isa with not vesa extension. I grew up messing with this old hardware on dos.
nice vid! I got a similar pc I m trying to fix, Does anybody know what s the hard drive size limit for a Compaq prolinea 5100 ?
Do you have any images of the diskettes? I have an SCO Unix 5 box with the license inside but I can't find the older stuff anywhere online and I'd like to see if my terminal equipment works.
Send me an email or look me up on twitter ...
Why are you never auto-adjusting your lcd screen? You should do it practically every time the resolution changes...
The OSD is locked and don’t know how to reset it. But perhaps the auto-adjust might work :) will check and take a mental note.
Never heard of SCO Unix. DSL is what I use on low-end 586/686 Systems.
My understanding of SCSI is you're terminating the cable, not the drive. The terminator is a resistor bank that makes the cable behave as if it's infinitely long, so signals don't reflect back and cause interference.
When you are done with SCO Unix you can try SIEMENS Nixdorf's SINIX system. I don't know if SINIX would have been an option for this PC back in the days but I find it rather appropriate to run a SIEMENS OS on a SIEMENS machine.
that looks like somewhat the unix flavor that IRIX would be built upon.
Yeah, with the isometric view of the icons, it reminds me of Sgi Indigo Magic.
maybe was the software but try cleaning the ram modules with a gum eraser and maybe they work. dust get onto them speciialy old ones.servers allso were picky on speed modules.
This video Is AWESOME! Greetings from Argentina 🇦🇷🇧🇪🇦🇷🇧🇪🇦🇷🇧🇪🇦🇷🇧🇪🇦🇷🇧🇪🇦🇷🇧🇪
Can I ask you where you managed to find the boot floppy? I need one as I'm trying to install this as well.
Have you considered loading the older Unix floppy images onto a Gotek? It would certainly be easier than actually making and swapping 40 floppies.
I did, but my software wasn’t able to write the program disks to the gotek (the boot disk (n1), and filesystem disk succeeded but not the P** disks.
The new version in the xinuos
System "V" = System 5 :)
I was going to pass the same along, with a bit more:
2:30 Oh, btw, no matter but System V is pronounced "system five" ... it is the very popular AT&T-licensed commercial Unix. The earlier major release of commercial Unix was System III (pronounced "system three"), initially released in 1980. There is no System IV.
@@DrDavesDiversions Exactly... Of course, you've got System III and System V, but then there were also Version 6 and Version 7, both of which came before System V! I taught myself C and Unix from the K&R book, The Unix System by Steven Bourne (the Russian Doll book,) and the Bell Labs Version 7 Programmer's Manuals, v1 and v2.
@@mhlevy very cool - same books I have/use, but I learned C on the K&R edition stamped ANSI C just before c89 was finalized.
the recovery process is impressive as always. but what happens next? what is the fate of these machines? how can they be used today?
They make for cool videos and some software archeology. And some fun. That’s basically it. Not planning on running anything mission critical on it :)
Please where can i find Rmcobol for Unix ?
I wonder if this could still run a current thin Linux?
is there a way to fix Openserver 5 from Boot? Ours keeps failing
4 hour install time... yikes! My Electrical engineering dad had to use Sun workstations in the 90’s / early 2000’s for his work and hated UNIX with a passion. All those cryptic commands. Not user friendly at all. At home he was used to an Acorn Archimedes with a friendly gui. He worked at a radar company (nowerdays known as Thales) and had install some version of UNIX on military / naval consoles. The only application that ran on this expensive Sun workstation was Framemaker from Adobe. Just two years before he retired, they started using Dell PC’s with windows XP which he liked a lot better. He did like Framemaker though. Nowerdays he still prefers friendly gui based IDE’s for his microcontroller programming projects.
I used FrameMaker on Sun workstations back in the late 1990s. When my employer switched to MS Windows it was awful - compared to Unix, NT was slow and would regularly crash. I ended up changing jobs and went to Linux to keep away from Windows.
for floppy installs id suggest a floppy emulator, either an HXC or a generic usb one, just so you could have a bunch of flopppy images and never need to use a floppy, I did this with my kaypro 2x and my commodore 64, I still have the original drives, but I knew these drives are close to 40 years old, so I felt going flash based was good, also the commodore 64 with the fastloader and the sd2iec ive never seen a vintage system function so fast, due to seek time no longer existing
What is bad tracking? Tracking bad blocks?
You seem to have a mixture of SCO Unix and Xenix versions in your SCO box. I noticed at least System V 386 and Xenix 2.2 286 in the mix. Would be nice if you'd create image of them. archive.org or tenox maintain old Unices. They also collect activation keys you need to successfully use your installation.
Unix versions from this time are quite interesting. Having as many of them as possible is important. As you already noticed, you kind of need to have the contemporary Unix to your hardware to gain the required boot/install time driver support. Things where moving fast back then: MFM, RLL, SCSI, IDE, 286/386/486/pentium, ISA, EISA, PCI...
PC Unix is a field massively underrated. However it saw tons of development, many, many vendors and versions between 1983 and the appearance 386BSD and Linux.
I have SCO Open Desktop Development System floppy disk release version 3.0.0, total volume 7. Kindly let me know if you have an idea of the selling price ?
I think I have a tape you can use in it.
Could it be that the images for the old versions are from tape :D?
Man why does everything on the pc world look like crap? This Unix computer looks so good and the os is so nice!
ugh... 40 floppies? I might try that once... with OS/2! today I might use a ahci sata ssd and pci to sata card that does proper LBA48h translations and set it all up on a win 10 machine. creating partitions in win10 will do that partition alignment thing ssd's like. maybe setup a virtual way and raw map that ssd and virtually loadup those 40 floppies.
I look at storage as a consumable now. If it's important, use new storage! and ssd's (and sata 2 pci) are a great way of kicking an ol' system into todays age! Make old NEW again,
SCO ... SCO ... Now I seem to recall in their death throws that they decided to sue everyone. What was that? 2005?
Remember when Darl tried to sue everyone? Didn't go well for them did it!
WTH is "Bad Tracking"? An initial surface scan? Some kind of ongoing verification? Was this SCO-specific? Did SCO use the Berkeley Fast File System?
Seaman's PC? :p
I hear ya on not wanting to do 45 floppies. Get a GoTek instead. Put all 45 floppy images onto a USB stick and the GoTek will emulate a floppy drive for you. Easy.
Was going to do that but the software I use to put the images on the usb drive crashed when I tried copying the "P" disks
Isn't it "System Five?"
Generally spoken "sys v" pronounced "sis vee". The "5" is no longer really a version number like it was initially, so it's really not a number but a name. There are 100 or more things that are all "sysv" by now and they all have different names and version numbers and release numbers on the version numbers... "sysv" is really just a sort of family name for a whole branch of the family tree vs BSD which is another main branch with it's own another 100 or more descendents and versions.
SCO from the era when they were the most-hated tech company in the world
very windows 3.1 looking OS
I always thought you'd spell SCO. Like "ess see o".
It's a Siemens machine so you should install SINIX on it
Input not supported probably means keyboard, or more likely mouse not found.
What happened to these beautiful user interfaces from the 90's? Now all we have are boring flat designs. Even this SCO Unix desktop is more comfy looking than Windows 10.
I have classic shell on my W10, i made it look like W2000. The last good desktop M$ had, i switched to Linux after Windows XP and had good times for 7+ years. :D
It's one of my main points of contempt that I have for Win10. After the beautiful windows 7 Aero UI it was an absolute slap in the face. Any depth, gone, glowing UI elements gone, transparency, gone, loads of adjustability options, gone. It's a bloody insult. Windows 3.1 looked better.
@@catriona_drummond YES! Windows 3.11 looked better, they propably made all of the useless "eye candy" because OSX looked like futuristic ass.
@@catriona_drummond I remember when OSX came and my friend had to learn "unix" to disable all of the effects, it took over 90mb of ram to have all those animations.....
The GUI resembles OS/2 2.1 or Warp 3.0.
Who would have been using this OS back in the day?
Uni, industrial, scientific, military...
Tandberg != Tandon
Oops ;)
Gotek Floppy Emulators are your friend when you need lots of floppies on real hardware.
PS: you want the Flasfloppy firmware, so you just copy/paste a folder full of floppy image files to the USB stick.
Tried that. But the software I used crashed on disk P1 and upwards. Other disks did work.
Who decides SCO is pronounced SCO but API is pronounced A P I? Or DOS instead of D O S? Or I S O instead of ISO?
I really hate english for this kind of random acronym pronunciation...
Thanks for the videos, I really love your channel!
Meh, all languages have that problem afaik.
@@bsdjunkie1805 Hmm, is that right - I thought they were Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs)?
SQL is an interesting one. People with a Microsoft background usually say "sequel", whereas non-Microsoft users are more likely to say S-Q-L.
It probably only accepts parity FPM RAM.