OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices | Hacker News Reader

OpenBSD Stories: Strange Medieval Devices

miod.online.fr

92 pointszdw21 comments

> SMD disks were first using 11" platters, later 8"; and with a nominal speed of 3600 rpm, thus 60 rotations per second (although Fujitsu later deviated from the norm and had a few drives spinning even faster, at 3961rpm), it took a noticeable amount of power to spin these disks up (and a smaller one to keep them spinning, which one would notice when receiving the bill from the electricity company).

I wouldn't mind having a few of these to act as backup flywheel batteries. Maybe if civilization crashes these will make a comeback as dual use power & data storage devices. ;)

I worked on replacing some PLCs a number of years ago that used drives like these and used the energy from the spin down when power was lost to write anything important to a short 8-track like infinite tape loop, gracefully-ish shutdown, and send messages to the monitoring gear.

The OpenBSD maintainers are heroes for keeping hardware like this running. This is about the time Greg KH might say "yeah, there are like five of these left, zero in actual production, and the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel."

I'd more bet that they are the critical infrastructure pillar everyone is scared to replace in a super important system, lol.

Maybe one of it saves the earth rotation control algorithm which the Earth Rotation Service requires for shooting their hidden ion cannons to keep it spinning.

> the code to support them is gumming up the LLMs. I'm just going to take it out of the kernel

Ouch.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2026/8/3/1312

Very True, and one thing people forget, we need to keep the ability to read these old devices.

I was a operator (now admin) on a few minis in the early 80s that had these drives. The drive pack on the ones we had were removable and we used 256MB packs.

We would backup data from one drive to another on third shift, at the same time to reel tapes. The reel tapes back then where used for long term backup off site, the drives for short term on site. But who knows how many of these packs are out there just sitting around waiting to be read :)

Do we really need the latest kernel on them, though? As in, is it worth it?

In 100 years, if we need to run kernel 6.12 to use a 3c509, is that all that bad? It's not like being "stuck" on an old IRIX without the proprietary dev CD where you have a catch 22 problem.

An old system version that's completely open is whatever the sysadmin version of "turning complete".

Sure, port the open system to the hardware that does not have an open system. But I question the value of keeping it up to date.

All else being equal, sure it'd be cool. But all else is not equal. So yes, ripping out old code is the right move for Linux, in my opinion.

I'd prefer a 3c905B-TX, because PCI. And because I have written a driver for it, on my own, to reverse engineer it, about 30+ years ago :-)

The other open question is, will there still be operational 3c509s 100 years from now?

Another way I put it, with a heavy sigh, is: "There will come a day—and odds are, it's not far off now—when the last working real Amiga will stop working for the last time."

I wonder how NetBSD would work with the hardware, if the mentioned bugs were already fixed there maybe?

NetBSD has wide old/obscure platform, with a wider community using it somewhat more actively on those.

I really like to see those old dmesgs, quite amazing work supporting this in OpenBSD (at the time)

You still see interesting efforts today. Here is a dmesg from a Tadpole SPARCbook 6500 booting 7.9 (released in May this year) that appeared on bugs@ just a few weeks ago (also, note who the person is that responds to that message):

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-bugs&m=178663407424547

You of course also have the absolutely insane luna88k support [1] and I have myself been looking into getting my hands on a landisk [2] box as the Hitachi SuperH CPU is fascinating (I only knew of it from old arcade boards and the Sega Dreamcast).

[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html

[2]: https://www.openbsd.org/landisk.html

This page looks quite simple, just plain text and a few photos. why does it render so tiny on an iPhone then?

Because browsers, especially phone browsers, are broken.

A lot of older websites will look like this on a phone, because they don't have the viewport meta tag, which wasn't a thing until mobile phones became sophisticated web browsers.

Firefox reader mode will probably render it OK.

Chrome reader mode works fine too

The site is using an obsolete version of XHTML. So it's probably using out of date other things, too, and not targeting phones.

EDIT: I just checked. There are 77 HTML errors and warnings alone.

It's missing

   <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Not sure why we need to add that but mobile sites look like ass without it.

(Or more precisely, not sure why "make the site look like ass" was chosen as the default, and making it look good is opt-in!)

Because it's assumed that it's for desktop. The first iPhone demo had (if I recall correctly) the browser zoom into the NYT website. Which can work well.

I'd rather this than what I often see nowadays: sites with fixed width tables that overflow out of the mobile viewport with no way to view the info.

Another oddly interesting interface related to SMD was IPI. Sun used it for a bit as their high end disks.

hug of death

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