EBHON

When I was 18, I stumbled into stewardship of a server running Novell UnixWare 1.1. It was an i486DX2/66 with a then-reasonable 32MB of RAM and a 2GB SCSI hard drive, and it supported a collection of surplus DEC VT220 terminals through dozens of Digi serial ports, hardware that looked more or less like this:

The system had been built by others who came before me, who had wired up a second floor dorm room for those terminals, and had also strung cable down to the first floor to put terminals in some faculty offices and one or two study lounges:

I don’t think I have a picture of “original EBHON,” but here it is (next to Paradigm, the server I built my first Interim (January) semester, to learn enough about Linux / UNIX to be not completely useless; I eventually merged the two machines with IP aliasing, Apache virtual hosts, etc):

The old XT-looking thing on the right was a 386 with a floppy drive, an Ethernet NIC, and a serial port, connected via a 19.2 Kbps ROLM dataphone to a local serial server (something running DECnet, don’t recall the details, probably also ROLM), running KA9Q, to connect the dorm room “lab” with the campus network. (I later moved that to a dedicated analog modem connection, 33.6 Kbps, and was in the process of planning a move to Tut Systems equipment when I graduated; less than a year later, the campus was wired with 100 megabit and all of this was basically obsolete.)

Anyway. I show up my freshman year with a PowerBook 180 and a Performa 550 (a 68030/33 machine that might have had a Performa 575 [68LC040/33] swapped in); basically, this:

I was already a “computer geek,” but I knew almost nothing about UNIX. The University of Redlands had an “interim” semester (4:1:4) the month of January, and Johnston Center had a robust independent study program, so I contracted to build the “Paradigm” server around a Pentium 60. My starting point was one of those phonebook-thick Linux books (Bible? Unleashed?) that came with a CD-ROM containing Slackware Linux. This would have been 1996, so, pre-Slackware 3.0; probably Slackware 2.3? (Later, I bought CD-ROMs from Cheapbytes mostly.)

Anyway, I’m repeating a lot of what I put into a write-up I did for Johnston’s 50th Anniversary. Why is this percolating up now?

I have several Raspberry Pi builds:

• A Retro Pie;
• A Stratux;
• An OpenVPN server at the office;
• A now-redundant box that was running Slirp over an FTDI serial port providing SLIP network access to my IIgs before I got an Uthernet II card.

So as I was setting up the “redundant” box with a desktop environment, it occurred to me ... This little box has a 1.4GHz processor (ARM Cortex-A53), a gigabyte of RAM, and a 32GB microSD card for storage:

From the IIgs integration, I have it running getty software to support logins over serial port connections, and it has a single DB9 RS-232 port connected via that FTDI USB adapter. In almost all respects, this thing blows that ~$7,000 UNIX server setup we had in the mid-90s, totally out of the water.

The only thing it can’t do is support the old Digi multi-port serial devices. (Neither could Linux, when we migrated off of UnixWare; I got around that by slapping in four 16550 UART serial ports (COM1-4), to support three DEC VT-220 terminals and the ROLM dataphone (later modem), and moving the rest of the lab over to 386/486/etc. PCs and an old Mac LC 475, running Windows / Mac OS 7.x.)

But then I got to thinking and spending a few seconds with Google. The maximum number of USB ports a PC can support is 127. (I think we had 32 Digi ports.) So, at least in theory, EBHON could be completely recreated using $70 in CPU hardware, some USB hubs, and a bunch of $20 USB serial port adapters. (And maybe some custom fabrication to keep it all organized and protected. Ah, who am I kidding, 18-year-old me would have left it a rat’s nest in a cabinet in that dorm room.)

The march of technology ... This thing is smaller than just the (full-height, IIRC, 50-pin interface) hard drive in the original EBHON...