The MIPS RS2030 - GeekDot

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Intro: The sleeping beauty

Well, the MIPS RS2030 isn’t really a beauty – but it slept quite a while in my basement. Actually, it’s a mediocre UNIX workstation at best… but there are many things about it, making it a special piece of my collection – and as an returning reader of GeekDot you may know I have a soft spot for those whacky things from back then… and as often with my posts, this one will be the most detailed you’ll be able to find. The RS2030 is yet another lonely system.

Well, if you look like this, you’re not the hottest thing in the Workstation-Discotheque 😉

First things first

MIPS… Even if you have just a dim knowledge about processor history, this name will ring a bell… Founded in 1982 MIPS created the first commercially available RISC CPU and until 1992, they were system manufacturers, too.

The RS2030 had many "firsts": It was one of their first models, featuring their first CPU, the R2000, and somewhat paved their way into the market while immediately hurting MIPS’ reputation… more about that later. And last but not least, the used OS was one of the first 32-bit operating systems (1985) for RISC-based workstation-class computers.

So here are the specs:

Insane 12 (VAX)MIPS squeezed out of an 16.6MHz R2000 CPU and R2010 FPU. 32KB external Cache should speed things up a bit…

Up to 16MB (yes, that’s the max) RAM

10Mbps ethernet… that’s 10base2 or an AUI transceiver.

4MB/s synchronous SCSI interface (internal space for one 3.5″ HD)

Two RS232 ports controlled by an NEC V50.

Optional monochrome or color frame-buffer

Optional 3.5″ floppy drive

Just for the record: There was a 2nd model called RC2030, which only differed by not having the frame-buffer. It was sold as server… that’s why the put the "C" in the name. Errr, no, it’s… not… logical. So I’ll forget about this and move on.

The official brochure pictured all these parts like this:

Nice, but missing the power-supply and stuff… in reality, my RS2030 looks like this from the top:

Yeah, I’m missing the the hard-drive carrier – but the same goes for the front bezel, so what the heck… OTOH I have the mighty color frame-buffer, which you can see to the right of the huge power-supply in the middle. It is capable of 1280x1024x8bits/pixel at 60Hz. Here it is in more detail:

Here’s my mainboard having the PSU and frame-buffer removed, revealing the glorious R2000 and his math-bro’ R2010 as well as the V50 "I/O processor" and 4 mysterious MIPS custom chips :

Right behind where the frame-buffer sat, above the CPU/FPU you’ll find the L2 caches and RAM slots. These are SIPP modules and the maximum supported are 16x1MB.

Back in 1989 that was many… not much, but enough for a serious workstation:

Looking closely you’ll notice the cut cables for the 2nd fan (wasn’t me!). A small but very loud one meant to cool the RAM and most important the CPU/FPU underneath the frame-buffer.

Because I currently run the RS2030 without lid, it’s OK. But after some hours it gets quite hot in that region.

To the left of the power-supply (which has another very loud fan) are supposed two carriers for the hard-drive and the floppy-drive. Both were absent when I got this little beast.

Underneath the drives are the ethernet and SCSI controllers as well as the 4 EPROMs containing the "BIOS", aka monitor.

Like all workstations back then, the RS2030 boots into a monitor, a basic software which gives you some means of setup and options to boot from HD, tape or network. More about this in the next chapter about setting things up.

To round things up, here’s the back side – connectors are from left-to-right:

Keyboard (DIN), 10base2 & AUI ethernet, SCSI, one parallel, two serial connectors and on top the frame-buffer. Mind the uncommon "0W3" RGB connector.

The OS with the many names

Finally, the RS2030 -like all MIPS workstations- ran a strange flavour of UNIX called UMIPS or MIPS OS or RISC/os or RISCos (not to be confused with Acorn Ltd.’s RiscOS)… all tree names/notations are used randomly across documents and mails from those times. So Googling stuff is a drag, 99% of the hits are Acorns RiscOS pages.

It seems MIPS’ operating system started out as UMIPS (UnixMIPS) and settled to RISCos around 1990.

As said, in 1992 MIPS gave up making computers… and was sold to Silicon Graphics (SGI). And playing around with early IRIX versions you smell RISCos all over the place – it’s definitely the mother (or father) of IRIX.

Anyhow, like other Unices of those times, RISCos is hard to get used to it as it misses all those comfortable things we got used to in these Linux days. No bash, no editor but vi etc… To make things short, here’s the Wikipedia roundup:

RISC/os was based largely on UNIX System V with additions from 4.3BSD UNIX, ported to the MIPS architecture. It was a "dual-universe" operating system, meaning that it had separate, switchable runtime environments providing compatibility with either System V Release 3 or...