MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150 • Hacker News Board

Re: MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150

#21

Post by icedchai » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

lproven wrote: post #20

icedchai wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at an early ISP with a web development department. A couple of the guys had Macs with System 7.x. The things would lock up or crash on a daily basis and require near daily reboots. Some of that early software, especially Netscape Navigator, was incredibly unstable. Fortunately, we had Sun Sparc and SGI boxes for the servers.

> require near daily reboots. This is true, but the thing is that was normal then . It was the stuff of jokes: "You know what the best thing about owning a Mac is? Something in your life will go down on you every single day." Windows 3.x was the same, or even worse. Windows 3.0 called them Unrecoverable Application Errors and I saw a T-shirt that read: "I thought U.A.E. was a country in Arabia until I got Windows 3.0…

Yes, it was normal, for sure. I had an Amiga and it was also bad. Visits to the Guru ("Guru Meditation Error", equivalent of Windows UAEs) were common.

Around 1994, I moved to Linux and later Solaris, where crashes were rare.

Re: MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150

#22

Post by lproven » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 12:54 PM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #21

lproven wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> require near daily reboots. This is true, but the thing is that was normal then . It was the stuff of jokes: "You know what the best thing about owning a Mac is? Something in your life will go down on you every single day." Windows 3.x was the same, or even worse. Windows 3.0 called them Unrecoverable Application Errors and I saw a T-shirt that read: "I thought U.A.E. was a country in Arabia until I got Windows 3.0…

Yes, it was normal, for sure. I had an Amiga and it was also bad. Visits to the Guru ("Guru Meditation Error", equivalent of Windows UAEs) were common. Around 1994, I moved to Linux and later Solaris, where crashes were rare.

I didn't get an Amiga until a decade after their peak but yes, even I knew about guru meditations. :-)

And bombs on the ST. Macs got a hardware button to drop into a debugger and you could try to continue, but it rarely worked.

When a Mac app died, a message told you that the OS had become unstable and it might crash soon and you should save your work in all other programs and reboot as soon as possible.

Since Mac OS X fixed that, the message was specifically and carefully reworded, to say that an app had died and your OS and all other apps were unaffected and there was no need to reboot. Few noticed this but it was clever and funny.

Re: MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150

#23

Post by spankibalt » Tue, Aug 04, 2026, 3:23 PM UTC

lproven wrote: post #20

icedchai wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at an early ISP with a web development department. A couple of the guys had Macs with System 7.x. The things would lock up or crash on a daily basis and require near daily reboots. Some of that early software, especially Netscape Navigator, was incredibly unstable. Fortunately, we had Sun Sparc and SGI boxes for the servers.

> require near daily reboots. This is true, but the thing is that was normal then . It was the stuff of jokes: "You know what the best thing about owning a Mac is? Something in your life will go down on you every single day." Windows 3.x was the same, or even worse. Windows 3.0 called them Unrecoverable Application Errors and I saw a T-shirt that read: "I thought U.A.E. was a country in Arabia until I got Windows 3.0…

> [...] and it required a massive PC to run at all -- a Pentium with 16MB was entry level [...].

Minimum was a 386 (12 MB RAM, 16 MB RAM for the ASE); seems the recommended minimum for NT 3.5 (Workstation/Server) according to German trade press of the time (c't, 1994) was a 486. If that made sense given NT's widely reported sluggish performance is another story.

Re: MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150

#24

Post by lproven » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 7:09 AM UTC

spankibalt wrote: post #23

lproven wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> require near daily reboots. This is true, but the thing is that was normal then . It was the stuff of jokes: "You know what the best thing about owning a Mac is? Something in your life will go down on you every single day." Windows 3.x was the same, or even worse. Windows 3.0 called them Unrecoverable Application Errors and I saw a T-shirt that read: "I thought U.A.E. was a country in Arabia until I got Windows 3.0…

> [...] and it required a massive PC to run at all -- a Pentium with 16MB was entry level [...]. Minimum was a 386 (12 MB RAM, 16 MB RAM for the ASE); seems the recommended minimum for NT 3.5 (Workstation/Server) according to German trade press of the time ( c't , 1994) was a 486. If that made sense given NT's widely reported sluggish performance is another story.

Back in the mid-1990s, my personal home file server was an IBM PS/2 Model 80, the highest end 80386DX IBM offered: 25MHz, and a tiny bit of L1 cache on the motherboard. I ran NT Server 3.51 on it.

Yes, it worked. As a server, it was perfectly usable and rock solid. I used it for years and it never ever crashed.

But I never logged into the console. NT 3.x ran on a 386 but you would not want to use it as a desktop computer.