[rescue] Axil320?

[Dave McGuire]

On 2/9/25 04:51, William Barnett-Lewis via rescue wrote:
> Snooping on Eprey, I saw a listing for an Axil320 Sparcstation 20
> clone. Not a whole lot of info online that I find, apparently Axil was
> a Hyundai subsidiary? And it's supposed to be an exact clone.
> 
> Very little info in the listing: " VERY RARE Complete Axil 320 SUN
> SPARCstation 20 Clone w/Ross TurboGX SCSI Powers
> Please see pictures for condition. Customer Trade-in. Tested to Power
> only and unit does power. Sold as-is due to the nature of this
> product."
> 
> Photos of the motherboard shows a Ross Mbus module a S-bus SCSI card
> (I think) and a TGX video card and 5 sticks of ram. Floppy but no
> drives. Cables are 68 pin narrow SCSI. Dirty but they say it powers
> up. It's somewhat tempting.
> 
> Anyone have experience with this model of clone? Anyway to tell what
> the module is from the part number on it? 323-0014-01. Didn't see
> anything on Axil or Ross at Bitsavers, alas.

   We deployed hundreds of these at Digex, along with Axil 245s.  Both 
are fantastic machines.  They're built like tanks and are very reliable. 
  I am a somewhat large man, and I could literally jump up and down on 
one of those machines.  They also have excellent cooling.

   The Axil 320 is basically an SS20 with 50-pin SCSI instead of 68-pin. 
  The Axil 245 is an SS5 with the same difference, in a smaller enclosure.

   We used these interchangeably with Sun SS20 and SS5 machines, with no 
issues.  We never saw any incompatibilities at all.  We were running 
SunOS4 and NetBSD on them.  (again there's no point to running Solaris 
on these sun4m machines; nobody but the most n00b people did that back 
in the day...it just makes them slow as molasses)

   They made a variant of the 320 called the 420.  It was an enhancement 
to the Sun SS20 that added an additional address bit to the memory 
subsystem, to support 1GB of RAM.  It used a different kvm tree but ran 
otherwise unmodified SunOS.  We had a prototype 420 at Digex, loaded 
with 1GB.  That was practically unheard of in a small computer in 1996. 
It went home with one of the Digexers in the end, but none of them have 
yet admitted to it.

             -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA