Tools: Powerful Hands-on With Two Apple Network Server Prototype Roms

stockholm, my own Apple Network Server 500, was a castoff I got in 1998 — practically new — when the University bookstore's vendor wouldn't support the hardware and it got surplused. It was the first Unix server I ever owned personally, over the years I ended up installing nearly every available upgrade, and it ran Floodgap.com just about nonstop until I replaced it with a POWER6 in 2012 (for which it still functions as an emergency reserve). Plus, as the University was still running RS/6000 systems back then, I had ready access to tons of AIX software which the ANS ran flawlessly. It remains one of the jewels of my collection.

So when the mythical ANS MacOS ROM finally surfaced, I was very interested. There had always been interest in getting the ANS to run MacOS back in the day (I remember wasting an afternoon trying with a Mac OS 8 CD) and it was a poorly-kept secret that at various points in its development it could, given its hardware basis as a heavily modified Power Macintosh 9500. Apple itself perceived this interest, even demonstrating it with Mac OS prior to its release, and leading then-CTO Ellen Hancock to later announce that the ANS would get ROM upgrades to allow it to run both regular Mac OS and, in a shock to the industry, Windows NT. This would have made the ANS the first and only Apple machine ever sold to support it.

Well, guess what. This is that pre-production ROM Apple originally used to demonstrate Mac OS, and another individual has stepped up with the NT ROMs which are also now in my possession. However, at that time it wasn't clear what the prototype ROM stick was — just a whole bunch of flash chips on a Power Mac ROM DIMM which my Apple contacts tell me was used to develop many other machines at the time — and there was no way I was sticking it into my beloved production 500. But we have a solution for that. Network Servers came in three sizes: the rackmount ANS 300 ("Deep Dish") which was never released except for a small number of prototypes, the baseline ANS 500 ("Shiner LE"), and the highest tier ANS 700 ("Shiner HE") which added more drive bays and redundant, hot-swappable power supplies.

I'll give you a spoiler now: it turns out the NT ROM isn't enough to install Windows NT by itself, even though it has some interesting attributes. Sadly this was not unexpected. But the pre-production ROM does work to boot Mac OS, albeit with apparent bugs and an injection of extra hardware. Let's get the 700 running again (call it a Refu

Source: HackerNews