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Booted up in 1993, this server still runs – but not for much longer (2017)

193 points · 110 comments · doener

nineteen999 · 1790669756 · focus · HN ↗
We use to run Stratus VOS on Continuum series hardware at a lottery/poker machine company I worked at in the mid 2000's. It handled the jackpot system which decided which of 13,500 poker machines in our state would jackpot at any given time.
A reliable beast - never failed once in the entire time I worked there. Based on PA-RISC if I recall correctly.
1. jll29 · 1790670754 · focus · HN ↗
  Great story, thanks. I wish it said more about the architecture and also VOS.
  Speaking of reliable beasts, I own(ed) a HP PA-RISC workstation that never crashed in six years, and it was even purchased refurbished (second hand, and educational rebate, and still the cost of a car in 1996 - but worth every penny).
  I'd add "R.I.P. HP 9000 715/75" but of course she is STILL working now, twenty years later, and she is sitting right next to me (also got a second 715/100XC for spare parts in case on day they are needed).
  1. sdcfgy · 1790675769 · focus · HN ↗
    The old workstations were always pretty damn reliable. I’ve got a Sun Ultra 30 in storage. I may grab it and boot it up and see if it still works. Suspect the NVRAM and power supply caps are duff though.
  2. iberator · 1790719417 · focus · HN ↗
    what are you using it with? hp unix? netbsd?
  3. jdboyd · 1790929053 · focus · HN ↗
    What is she doing next to you?
2. mech422 · 1790676254 · focus · HN ↗
  IIRC, Stratus was M68K (like 12 per cpu board organized into 3 logical cpu's for fault checking)
  1. kjs3 · 1790686905 · focus · HN ↗
    The OG Stratus FT was mc68k; what a beast. They moved to Intel i860 in the early 90s (XA series...I had a processor board from one hanging in my conference room back in the day), then HP-PA (Continuum series) in the 2000s and these days it's apparently virtualized on x86. Still very popular in the credit card processing world.
    Nursie · 1790687433 · focus · HN ↗
    That's where I came across them in around 03/04, though the company was moving away from them at the time. Two intel processors somehow kept in lockstep, allowing either one (or its RAM) to fail and be replaced with no interruption to the system.
    mech422 · 1790702424 · focus · HN ↗
    the originals ran like 3 'cpu groups' or whatever they called it... all instructions ran on all 3 and the results were compared - one of the cool things done with this was taking faulty 'cpu groups' out of service without down time
    kjs3 · 1790714478 · focus · HN ↗
    This 'voting' strategy is used a lot in hi-rel aerospace and military computers as well.
    rurban · 1790747683 · focus · HN ↗
    And in space. Eg shuttle used 3 main dSpace controllers, instead of hardening the hardware. Still cheaper, and much faster.
    kjs3 · 1790777433 · focus · HN ↗
    'Aerospace' usually covers 'space'. The shuttle used 5 IBM AP-101 flight computers (4 synch'ed voters for the core avionics software, 1 for independently written backup software). The AP-101 was designed to be a hi-rel computer for military use, so it's very much 'hardened' (including EMP protections), but not internally redundant. They were not cheap. Ken Shiriff has several articles about the hardware: <a href="https://www.righto.com/2026/03/ibm-4-pi-computer-history.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.righto.com/2026/03/ibm-4-pi-computer-history.htm...
    mech422 · 1790702323 · focus · HN ↗
    Ohh...I guess I had moved off them before cpu switches. I heard they ported Unix to Stratus as well - Did you ever get a chance to play with it ? was it any good ?
    I think VOS being PL/1 based pretty cool - Stratus (and Intel fab PL/M stuff) was the only time I've ever gotten to work with PL/1...
    kjs3 · 1790714404 · focus · HN ↗
    The Stratus shops I was at (one financial, one transportation, one communications) considered the Stratus platform to be the holy of holies and mere mortals not on the Stratus group didn't get stick time on the actual systems. I was doing GRC type work with those guys, so I was definitely not on the Cool Kids Team.
    That said, from what I gather from working with those guys, there are a couple of generations of unix-y things on Stratus:
    1) The older FTX Unix was apparently a pretty bog standard SVR4 port from the user perspective, with the machdep stuff and scaffolding to deal with the fault tolerance layered on a VOS based abstraction layer in the kernel. I knew a lot about SVR4 at one time, long ago, so they chatted me up quite a bit about that.
    2) Later they added a POSIX layer to VOS and ported a bunch of Unix tools (e.g. GCC). I dunno exactly what the business case is here or why people who want Unix wouldn't just live in the Unix environment. Neither did anyone else I talked to.
    3) These days, I understand people are running Linux (RHEL) as well as windows as on top of VOS. All the worlds virtualized these days.
    I obviously didn't get to code anything on the Stratus, but agree PL/1 is interesting as a systems language (the other big user being IBM of course). I understand 'Stratus PL/1' is a lot like 'Burroughs Large Systems Algol': they started out there and have kept adding vendor specific extensions to the point it's not really the base language any more. At least IBM gives it new names when what the programmers use drifts far enough from the base language definition (e.g. PL.8).
    mech422 · 1790730620 · focus · HN ↗
    IIRC correctly, the stratus PL/1 thing went back to the main hardware designer being big on PL/1 at IBM (PL/1 compiler group maybe?). Also, fun trivia - the Stratus was apparently the first (only?) mini/mainframe that IBM rebadged (they sold it as the model 88)
    nineteen999 · 1790824351 · focus · HN ↗
    We were lucky on our site, our team leader was a Stratus guru, and was a great teacher, so we had plenty of time on there if we wanted to practice. We were lucky enough to do just about everything in midrange - Solaris, OpenVMS, Stratus and a bit of Linux here and there in the latter days.
    And some ancient lottery processing machines the size of fridges that ran some ancient V7 UNIX variant.
3. zorked · 1790678891 · focus · HN ↗
  The poker machines are connected? Why wouldn't they just jackpot locally and indepdendently?
  1. rafaelvasco · 1790680358 · focus · HN ↗
    Can't have several machines "jackpotting" at the same time or similar time. The prizing algorithm is very strict.
    andyjohnson0 · 1790681919 · focus · HN ↗
    Is this widely known? Presumably the jackpots are sufficiently geographically distributed so that a player who observes one wouldn't be incentivised to pause playing?
    freeopinion · 1790687786 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think it is widely known how much casino gaming machines are allowed to control outcome. Indeed, in some cases they are required by law to control outcome.
    wildzzz · 1790690216 · focus · HN ↗
    These are probably the kind of machines you sometimes see in gas stations and bars, there's only a few of them in any location at most so there's never too many players nearby to be dissuaded from playing. Plus, a jackpot isn't the only way to win money.
  2. toast0 · 1790691855 · focus · HN ↗
    Networked jackpots are a user visible and aparently user desirable feature.
    When the jackpot is fed by all the machine in the state, they can grow much faster.
  3. nineteen999 · 1790824679 · focus · HN ↗
    toast0's answer below is the correct one. Plus in Australia, gaming/gambling is heavily regulated - my state government didn't even allow poker machines until 1991.
    So we never started with a network of disconnected poker machines, the whole thing was built from the ground up with a centralised jackpot system. I don't know what hardware the original jackpot platform ran on but I know it used hardware RNG units. By the time I started there ~2003 it had been migrated to Stratus.

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