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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. 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...

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