As we celebrate the milestones of the Frankie III build (Read more in Dr. Franken's Frankie III build log, and see a photo collection of the build) we take a moment to remember where it all started. By the time you read this the original Frankie will likely have completed his final road trip, a pilgrimage back to meet his original maker. It's unlikely he will ever consume another KWH of electricity, spin another disk unit, or execute another line of code. He was a great machine and took a ton of abuse in our hands.
Frankie started life as a Lab machine for COMMON. After a tour of lab duty doing that he was used to Beta V5R2 and V5R3 for the certification team to learn much of the new stuff those releases provided. He then debuted as the original 'Frankie' taking a road trip in the Big Red Dodge to COMMON in Indianapolis replete with 'disk expansion' units and stuff basically hanging out. During the unloading there one of the appendages pierced a cold beer in my pocket. Bad Frankie! He survived that trip and upon his return he continued to grow from 13 drives to 45.
You can still see our photos of Frankie in his photo gallery.
During his life as Frankie he took a lot of abuse. Too much memory, cards in wrong slots, crashed IOPs, sudden power outages, and enough yellow lights to make him think he was a traffic light at times. Additional stuff was also added over the years and every single slot is crammed full of something often something IBM said not to put there. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. Every time we blew him up he came right back.
In 2006 the original Frankie was replaced with Frankie II a larger and faster model 170. Frankie I took up a place in the FrankenLab under the name Lily and ran for over a year hiding under a workbench. With the arrival of Frankie III MrsFranken said something had to go...
Frankie II with his faster processor and more memory really hung in there! He ran the website until 2014! That's an incredible life span for a server these days, well except for an AS/400, these things just don't want to quit. He was our primary FTP server too and help various folks around the world test things on OS/400 especially those older versions.
As time wore on his O/S went from being the latest and greatest to just average then 'old' and finally to no longer supported. So his usefulness for testing and whatnot simply wasn't there any longer. Then given his massive number of drives and older technology the server punch for the dollar simply wasn't there any longer. Finally the data-center in which he lived was being decommissioned which was the final blow. Frankie Retired.
... or did he!? You see Frankie II lived right on the early edge of Power System software releases that could be virtualized, perhaps not fully but mostly! So he lives on in spirit and like a dog with an old familiar bone one last hardware bit lives on as well, his QIC tape drive made the move with him. (Yeah exactly how else would I get him migrated?? :-) )
Like many many tons of other computer gear that has rolled through my garage the majority of Frankies parts have been recycled, properly so, and are on their way to becoming some other useful bit, perhaps part of your next toaster or automobile. But Frankie's Frame went to COMMON in the spring of 2014! Along with little brother Frankie III they hung out in the booth with Fresche Legacy. Who knows maybe they'll be back in 2015?
Frankie, thanks for the memory and the disks and all those I/Os. RIP.
-- DrFranken
