Useless features: IBM x342 and Netfinity 5500 (PWJ169)

Cleaning up old stock.... IBM eServer x342 (ca. 2004) and Netfinity 5500 (ca. 2000) are to be scrapped. These servers have some interesting features and some of them are pretty useless.

[JRBlood]

Oh boy do those being back memories. :D That 5500 was a beast! Don't miss them one bit :D
ISA - Good old-fashioned 16-bit slot.

[anomaly]

Hotswap PCI was used elsewhere for quite a few years after IBM dropped their support. The vast majority of CompactPCI was hotswap (PICMG 2.1 and later).

[ExStaticBass]

The soft power switch on the power supply is so that you can swap them while the machine is on. It's simply a way to deactivate that supply so it can be safely removed without causing a fault/error code in the machine. Yeah, IBM ~ Infernal Bowel Movement...

[DavidDHahn]

Adaptec, now that brings back memories!

[Slartibartfas]

@Play with Junk: at 9:50 The "strange plastic cards inbetween the PCI Slots" are in fact insulators but IIRC there were holes in the front subframe-carrier that did enable airflow getting in from the front fans and did provide proper airflow over each one of the PCI cards, regardless how many of them were populated or not.
at 12:45: The thermal design of servers of that time was quite good - you don't have an air throughput of cubic-meters per second on that devices, so the more little holes you have, the better the air will come from all different directions.
at 12:55: The CPU form factor is a "Intel Slot 1". That form factor was shared IIRC inbetween Intel P II CPU's and Intel Pentium III Processors, normally ranging from 233MHz up to the P III-500. There were some very rare P III Slot-CPUs with clock frequencies up to even 1000 MHz (=1 GHz) clock speed, I don't know if these were only evaluation samples from Intel or if they were used out in the wild. I think usually there were the P II 233 MHz and P II 450 MHz, then most customers would have chosen the P III 500 MHz models.
at 28:48: that must be the Network-management controller that can power off/ on, reset and what not the mainboard. I guess it has it's own battery as RTC has limited space for permanent storage of informations and that module did store all informations about installed cards, network setup for management and so on.

[gummansgubbe]

My brain project a Dilbert movie into my ears while watching this.

[wulliest]

Used to run a realtime database on one of these at a pharma plant. Built like a tank.

[laptop]

I remember those netfinity 5500's, had some deployed. The other crazy hot-swap feature from not long after was hot-swap RAM. Then hot-swap CPUs. Both old things on mainframe designs, but then got ported to x86.

[denniseldridge]

I have to say, before continuing watching this fine video, that I have always thought of the PII MMX as one of those solid workhorses I'd be proud to use today in certain applications (running Linux of course!). Cheers!

[stevenspasstime]

Id love to have a old server like the 5500 or even something older to place into my retro computer museum

[krylouviktar]

Thank You so much for Your videos! Really like!

[TheBarretNL]

If you would create a museum with these old server beauty's, id pay for it to come and see them all. They are history of the digital age in the making. never forget that.

[gglovato]

Hot plug pci was a fiasco, I never saw it being used at all, the software support was also really iffy( I mean, even today hotplugging pcie is hard, back with nt4/win2k it's laughable), I remember Compaq servers had a special app/driver for pci hotswap and you also needed good driver support, almost impossible

[douro]

I believe that PowerPC processor is just for the IMM (Integrated Management Module).

[semifavorableuncircle]

These Snaphat Battery modules sometimes also contain a 32Khz quartz. So you would need to bodge on one as well.

[stuartcastle]

Hot swap-able PCI? Nice idea, just a shame it didn't take off. I can see it would be good in an environment that requires high availability servers if an engineer can go in and replace a card without downing the entire machine. The swap-able CPU board also seems like a nice idea that IBM have unnecessarily over engineered. I would have thought in a case like that, you shouldn't have to strip out half the case and all the disk drives just to replace the CPU(s).

[ewansbuzz]

Those computers are awesome I wish I could have one

[NickNorton]

07:38 Just take a moment to appreciate the "Insert disk and press F1 animation"
Sure you could just say the same thing in written word. But how many languages would you have to cater for!
The minimal resource character set graphics speak a 1000 words. (It's probably Code page 437)

[gabest]

Ah, good old Deathstar, Made in Hungary.

[madbstard]

Bed or PWJ? It's been a long and difficult day so far. And I still have at least two hours work before I can quit for the night :(
Dammit - PWJ wins by a landslide lol. It's time to kick back and relax!