MacOS Extensions pack for the Apple Network Server v1.0

By now regular readers of this blog are quite familiar with my affection for the 1996 Apple Network Server, Apple's Unix-through-and-through $10,000+ server that only shipped with, and only officially ran, Harpoon, its unique superset of IBM AIX. An ANS 500, the lower tier of this dorm fridge-sized computer, was the first server I ever personally owned, a nearly-new hand-me-down after Steve Jobs convinced Gil Amelio to cancel the machine and the bookstore's vendor at the University I worked for wouldn't support it anymore. There are several fascinating features present in Harpoon that were never implemented in any other Apple product. Currently I have three, that original ANS 500, this ANS 700 here which I use for testing, and a battery-bombed EVT prototype (a so-called "Shiner ESB" that used to be at Netscape).

The ANS was strongly based on the Power Macintosh 9500 and Apple was known to have demonstrated the ANS with Mac OS during development, but this confused potential buyers, causing the ability to boot Mac OS to be stripped from production systems. While then-CTO Ellen Hancock claimed in 1997 a ROM swap would enable the ANS to boot Mac OS again and Windows NT, these ROMs were believed to be vapourware until a former Apple employee presented a working dump of both the preproduction ROM and the later ANS Mac OS ROM. A prototype Windows NT ROM also emerged from another former employee, though there are pieces missing and booting Windows NT natively on the ANS is still a work in progress (hopefully to be the subject of a future article).

It turned out I had one of the preproduction ROMs myself and didn't realize what it was. Because the later Mac OS ROM was apparently unfinished, it doesn't properly support the L2 cache and consequently runs substantially slower, and it can't boot AIX. The preproduction ROM does boot both operating systems and does support the cache. On the other hand, in MacOS it doesn't support the on-board video or the front Fast Wide SCSI-2 controller, the on-board MACE Ethernet doesn't work there either, and after MacOS first boots, the next restart without zapping the PRAM will come up with a black screen.

The good news is, many of the issues with the preproduction ROM in Mac OS can be fixed or worked around in software. So I've fixed or worked around many of them in software: the MACE Ethernet is fixed, the on-board video is now supported, and the ANS can restart properly back into Mac OS. Plus, because it's the preproduction ROM, you can still boot AIX, thus preserving the entire historical reason for Shiner's existence. Here's the first cut of that software and how it was developed.

Refurb weekend II: Alpha Micro Eagle 300 and friends

This Refurb Weekend is a sequel in two ways.

Six years ago I fixed the power supply and case fan in my 68EC030-based Alpha Microsystems Eagle 300, a more modernized and substantially faster Alpha Micro running AMOS, their unique DEC-inspired multiuser operating system. These blue-collar boxes were very common in many vertical markets due to their tightly integrated business-specific software packages, and are especially unusual for running their big-endian 68000-series processors little-endian (for data file backwards compatibility with their WD-16 ancestors). The 1990s-era Alpha Micro Eagle family improves on the originals with later 68K and even ColdFire CPUs, plus Ethernet and faster SCSI.

The second way it's a sequel is to our previous Alpha Micro refurb weekend, a double header restoring an Alpha Micro AM-1000 and AM-1200, two members of Alpha Micro's most popular series of computers and some of the closest things they made in the early '80s to desktop workstations.

From the outside, the Eagle comes in a PC-style case, but it's not a PC:

This particular Eagle 300, with a 40MHz 68EC030 CPU, runs ampm.floodgap.com using the webserver provided with AlphaTCP — yes, Alpha Micros can be networked — and its own on-board Ethernet. At the time the cooling fan failure was putting a lot of strain on the hard disk because it was overheating, and since this was my first Alpha Micro and I wanted to keep it in good nick, I decided I would put a SCSI2SD in it after the repair and get rid of the spinning disk entirely. Fast-forward to last fall, a little over a year ago, when I tried to do exactly that with a ZuluSCSI.

And then it wouldn't start.

It would power on, but it wouldn't enter the boot sequence, not even with the old hard disk back in it, not even to run the internal self-test. I was worried I'd negligently blown one of its two main system boards and that meant I needed another. This entry took as long as it did to come to fruition because Eagles in general aren't easy to find, and on top of that I was looking for a specific one. Through a couple of referrals I managed to get what I thought was a replacement unit I could raid for parts, but it turned out to be something rather more special — and then I was even more fortunate when I got the Eagle 300 back out of storage to make one last attempt at reviving it.

To cap it off we'll go stick ZuluSCSIs in everybody else, including my Motorola ColdFire-based Eagle 450, the first ColdFire server ever produced and what used to be the fastest Eagle in the house until the new hotness came. I even converted the external BlueSCSI the AM-1200 was using to an internal ZuluSCSI too. Now nearly everybody's got a solid-state boot disk and they're all a good bit more zippy, so we'll gawk at the internals, compare 68K CPU and storage benchmarks and most importantly learn from my mistakes, because as my late father always said, "I'd rather be lucky than good." On a more solemn note, we'll also observe a moment of silence for one of the line's creators who passed away last year. It's time for a Refurb Multi-Weekend Sequel.