IBM RS/6000 43p Model 150

For today’s entry in my “Zscaler Logo on a Weird, Old or Obsolete Device” series, I’m showcasing a short-lived machine from a successful product line that most normal people never even heard of: The IBM RS/6000 43p Model 150 Desktop UNIX Workstation!

Largely through the RS/6000 series, IBM played a huge role in popularizing the concept of “RISC” (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) processors - essentially, a way for CPU’s to run faster by eliminating unnecessary instructions. IBM’s RS/6000 series was incredibly successful, and spanned the entire range from desktop systems like this all the way up to massive servers and even supercomputers. Even “Deep Blue,” the famous chess-playing supercomputer which made history by defeating Chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, was a modified RS/6000 server.

This machine features an IBM PowerPC 604e CPU running at 250MHz, 256MB of RAM, and a large (and LOUD!) SCSI hard drive. Of course, vintage hard drives are not known for their reliability, and the one in my machine crashed minutes after taking this photo. Fortunately, I was able to replace the dead drive with a modern microSD-to-SCSI adapter board, and now the machine is running beautifully and is much quieter, although definitely not silent - there are 5(!) cooling fans inside.

This machine is running IBM’s AIX operating system, along with the Common Desktop Environment (“CDE”) graphical interface. I find AIX and CDE are pretty pleasant to use, and are quite snappy despite running on such underpowered (by modern standards) hardware. However, I will say that this 1990’s-era version of AIX is *brutally* difficult to get installed properly, because it lacks any meaningful form of dependency management. In other words, everything you want to install requires something else to be installed first, and *those* require something *else* to be installed first, and it’s enough to make my brain turn to mush. You can perhaps imagine my tears of frustration when I finally finished the NINE HOUR installation process for AIX… and then the hard drive crashed. I repeated the NINE HOUR(!!) installation process again onto the microSD-to-SCSI gadget, and now the machine is running smoothly.

In closing, I’ll end with a fun bit of trivia: IBM’s belief in RISC and their own PowerPC processors was well justified. PowerPC chips (and their descendants) were used in the Nintendo GameCube, Wii, and Wii U, Sony’s PlayStation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360. Similarly, the ARM processors found at the heart of virtually every modern Apple product embodies the RISC concept that IBM popularized, with *billions* of devices in use today. This RS/6000 43p Model 150 is hardly a speed-demon by today’s standards, but it is a direct ancestor to an incredible number of modern devices, probably including the one you’re reading this on.

Happy Friday, everyone!