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Comment by johndoe0815 | Hacker News Reader

The BS2000 series is fascinating since Fujitsu-Siemens made the transition from S370-compatible hardware over MIPS- (Siemens also produced a series of MIPS-based workstations in the 1990s) and SPARC-based systems (based on Fujitsu SPARC silicon) to x86-64 today, staying binary compatible (using emulation/binary translation) all the way.

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Siemens used to make lots of computing hardware like RF modems, MIPS processors, DRAM, even their own custom design CPU architecture (Tri-Core) for use in automotive and such.

Some of them still live on today in various spin-offs like Tri-Core is now part of Infineon, DRAM used to be Qimonda which went under and part of the RF modem division is now Apple.

They even made one of the few Windows NT on MIPS workstations. The RM 300 could run either SINIX (a Unix variant) or Windows NT/MIPS.

http://www.katalog.iser.fau.de/index.php?ort_id=322&inventar...

and Linux (https://www.linuxsecrets.com/linux-mips-wiki/RM_200.html).

SINIX and Linux used the R4000 in big endian mode, whereas NT was running in little endian. You had to flash a different firmware to switch between the systems...

I had swiss made EDO-Ram with insane(low) latencies from Siemens. Sixteen MEGABYTES of it! Looooong before Quimonda ;-)

You know? I had to work with the Siemens Mipsen(RM400/600 with Sinix/Reliant Unix) for some time. They were built like a tank, with massive cases, and usually almost silent because of that.

Thinking about that now, they could have been featured in some post-apocalyptic game like Fallout, or similar :-)

Anyways, the mainboard was from Silicon Graphics(said so on the board, made me smile at the time), and they had a different firmware/bootloader and usually lacked the graphics option, apart from a simple framebuffer.

Siemens also sold relabeled R3000/R4000 Indigos (RW3xx/4xx), we had a number of these donated to our student Unix workgroup by a local company back in the 90s. These machines ran IRIX instead of SINIX, of course.

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