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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

I had a 3B2 in the 1980s; it was an okay Unix machine that AT&T had no idea how to market. The development tools (C compiler, etc.) cost extra, and came on about 30 floppy disks that you had to load in a very fussy order. The machine's black-and-white user interface was, well, terrible, and the documentation had been written by out of control PM/marketing types (you didn't press a button, you "touched" it. You "touched" everything in the UI; this oddball wording, and affectations, permeated the manuals and dialog boxes).

Right: But hey, real Unix!

I got Emacs and GCC and uucp/netnews/email working, but when it came to developing something on the 3B2, it turned out that programming Macintoshes was a lot more fun, and certainly paid better.

One day its 67MB hard drive made a groaning noise and a thin, straight trail of smoke rose up from it. I walked across my office and turned the 3B2 off, and didn't shed a tear.

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The "touch" button thing was a big deal back then - Apple and others kept reminding devs that is was not a good idea to tell users to "hit" keys as sometimes this was taken a little too literally :-)

What's wrong with "press"?

That's what everybody else uses. If you want to write edgy, hip and modern documentation you need to use words that other people don't. "Touch" implies a friendly, approachable and non-threatening user interface. It lets your boss know that you're all-in with this edgy new Unix UI stuff.

tl;dr: It's marketing bullshit.

The UI on the 3B1 was definitely nothing to write home about . . .

Or to ask users to "dolt" [1].

[1] https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

Sounds more like a 3B1 (UNIX PC) to me.

Bleargh, you're right. </blush>

The 3B1, like most things Convergent Technologies built, was an engineering wonder.

The phone and note handling were amazing demos of what multitasking really offered. At the time it was still the domain of IBM's Top View and similar character-based pseudo mutitasking extensions to MS/DOS.

Doing a demo where the phone rang and a notepad window popped up on its own was just short of voodoo. It didn't make any sense but I always privately fantasized Bell and Control Data would decide to get married and make a Plato terminal out of 7300s.

What amazes me more than anything else is the fact I'm still UNIXing for food nearly 40 years later.

> What amazes me more than anything else is the fact I'm still UNIXing for food nearly 40 years later.

It's both amazing and disappointing. It's amazing Unix is still used after almost 50 years. It's disappointing we never managed to come up with something better that was also viable.

The 3B series was an odd assortment.

The 3B1 AKA "UNIX PC" AKA "PC 7300" wasn't even Intel inside, it was Motorola 680x0. The true 3Bs (3B2/3B5/3B20) had WECO processors. (The first UNIX machine I used daily was a 3B20, in fact -- dog slow compared to the 680x0-based Sun 2s and 3s the cool kids got to use.)

The actual first UNIX PC (Intel processor) was the 6300 series, which were rebadged Olivettis. I ported a product line to the 6300 Plus, which at least had extended memory capability.

There was a time "PC" stood for "personal computer", not "poorly architected computer with off-the-shelf parts and the cheapest CPU that could do the job", also known as IBM PC.

May the one that never had to deal with the A20 line or ask the keyboard controller for the favor of resetting the system throw the first stone.

I learned C on a 3B2, and for a while had access to a 3B20S at UIUC. You were right about the 3B20; UIUC had a pair of them that were originally called "shark" and "tornado", but were quickly nicknamed "snail" and "turtle" in honor of their performance. They were the size of refrigerators, and, IIRC, they were roughly equivalent to a VAX 750 (maybe a 780 at best).

To the best of my knowledge, the 3B20D, a dual-processor fault-tolerant system running a UNIX variant called DMERT, was only used in the #5 ESS telephone switch - and was eventually replaced by an emulator running on a Sun system.

Real 3B20/3B21's live on - as far as I know, the emulator was only used with the 5ESS VCDX (very compact digital exchange) - essentially a baby 5E that lives in a single rack.

(I've seen a 3B21 living in a real running 5E within the last three years)

Interesting. I had a Unix PC - the 7300.

When the mother board went bad AT&T sent a technician to my house to diagnose and replace it. For free.

Those were the old days of the lingering legacy of the way Bell did things.

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