Daniel Kosack asks:
>   The S/930 was the first PA-RISC 3000 marketed, right?  Does someone
> have a benchmark?  Also, I take it these beasties are getting on just
> like the Classic systems.  Are they attainable relatively inexpensively
> so that those of us who still use Classic systems, but don't need mega
> power, may be able to get MPE/iX 5.0 compatibility for not so much money?
 
The Series 930 wasn't really intended to be a customer system I believe,
it was more of a development system. Its CPU was implemented in discrete
TTL logic (there was no PA-RISC CPU chip then!). It was also released as
the HP9000/840, and there are probably a couple of these still around.
 
HP later quietly upgraded all 930 sites to 950s (for free).
 
For a long time HP kept a few 930s around because it was the only system
that supported a performance measurement card that could actually tell you
very low-level information like cache misses, register interlocks, etc.
 
A year or two ago I was at the Mountain View Response Center and they still
had one running. I saw one just the other day in an HP computer room, but
it was turned off and someone made a comment of the sort: "What's that
thing doing there I thought it was going to be hauled away for scrap?"
 
Denys may have had the first 950 shipped to a customer site (actually I
thought it was Compaq who got the first one), but *I* had the first HPPA
system running outside of HP (first 930 beta machine). Nyeah. :-)
 
G.