When they were discontinued, I was allowed to take some of them home. Had to give them up, though, because I lacked the room to keep the boxes around, and at the time I also lacked the time to maintain software or investigate hardware upgrades.
The saddest thing for me is that today I would love to have kept the enclosures and PSUs (I’d likely have stuffed them full of Raspberry Pi compute modules, or Celeron mini PC motherboards, and hooked up an MCU to the display and buttons…)
But some of them were online and running at my former employer until 2018 or so, which is nothing short of amazing.
Thanks for unlocking a memory for me. I used to drool over that hardware, not even for the specs but just how cool it looked. I'm sure it's prohibitively expensive but maybe I'll find a good deal on ebay.
In the early 2000s I worked for a streaming media company where most of the desktops were AMD K6-2 450s. Except mine, because I splashed out and bought a Duron 700 with 256MB of RAM which I soon upgraded to 512MB, and fitted an ATI Rage 128 Pro, with the thick purple dangly-dongle for AV connections, and a FireWire card for capturing DV. Quite the beast for running Adobe Premiere 4!
Something about the sticker placement and black lettering directly applied to the metal cover, I've never seen another hard drive with a similar aesthetic.
Those drives worked well, I still have a 40gb IDE PATA Quantum Fireball out in the garage and about 3 years ago I tested it and this baby still worked!
Funny how my brain latches onto the seemingly randomest things and patterns, but for stuff I want to actually remember, it can be a struggle..
These machines have several things that we don't see much these days: "Made in USA", which the author mentions, a CPU that takes so little power that it doesn't require a heat sink, and a low power design that means the whole system doesn't even need a fan at all. Some have fans, and some come without fans.
The hardware is incredibly reliable. I've been running one RaQ for two decades now, and it has compiled continuously for years. It compiles all of the NetBSD binary packages for mipsel found here:
Another RaQ had a power supply that failed. I took a power supply from an old external drive enclosure, connected +5 and +12 volts, and everything worked. It's amazing how much can be done with so little power.
Probably. As a general rule, though, we use actual hardware where possible. There have been differences between real hardware and emulated machines, such as floating point issues with m68k in qemu, for instance.
At some point, though, some of these kinds of builds will move to qemu and friends.
As a former Cobalt employee, it made my day to see someone resurrecting old RaQs! What a fantastic piece of equipment for its time. I worked there in 1999 through the Sun acquisition and then at Sun for a little while before I started my own business—a web hosting company, started with a glorious rack of RaQs, of course. :)
Hi Erica! I was there as a Sales Engineer serving the southwest region around the same time you were there too (2000-2002), based in San Diego. I wish I had kept the RaQ and Qube units I had at home (I had pretty much one of everything from Qube2 through RaQ 550).
Cobalt was an awesome place to work and had amazingly skilled employees. Too bad the Sun acquisition was the death knell for the products...
Okay. Now I feel old.
I ran some hosting using these and the raq3’s over here in Ireland.
Such a bang for your buck. Comparable gear from compaq with the right kind of management tools to do the same hosting ran in six figures. And the raq rolled over them for feature sets and stability and most especially security. Loved those 1u’s. They were awesome. Even ran a radio station’s streaming via Real that was installed on one of them. Cobalt able to compile their own RPMs for the win.
A friend of mine had an early access Qube that we ran qmail on (back then I was an anti-Windows activist and a djb cultist.) The machine worked pretty well.
It fell down during the "Love Letter" virus attack and to get it back up I had to write a script that scanned the logs and inserted firewall rules to block virus-infected machines.
The worst problem it had was that the system clock ran 15% slow so it had to be resynced frequently with ntp.
I wish I had marked the calendar to commemorate the day we turned off the last of the Cobalts at a data center I worked in from 2003-2010. We had a suite that was almost entirely dedicated to them, rows of racks with nothing but Cobalt, thousands of them. Customers were so attached to them that they were happy to continue paying 1999 prices for hosting, so it was difficult letting go of those fat margins.
This brings back a lot of memories. Back before home labs or home automation were a big thing, I had a Cobalt RaQ I used to raise up my monitor an extra inch. With a few scripts I got the LCD to display alerts from our monitoring system at work, and wired one of the buttons to telnet to the timeclock system and clock me in/out so I didn't have to do paper time cards when I fixed stuff after hours.
This bought back a lot of memories for me as well, I used to work for a hosting provider in the early 2000's and we had dozens of these things both in our data centre and internally for development purposes. I hadn't thought about them for years but the second I saw this article title I had flashbacks!
Readit News
When they were discontinued, I was allowed to take some of them home. Had to give them up, though, because I lacked the room to keep the boxes around, and at the time I also lacked the time to maintain software or investigate hardware upgrades.
The saddest thing for me is that today I would love to have kept the enclosures and PSUs (I’d likely have stuffed them full of Raspberry Pi compute modules, or Celeron mini PC motherboards, and hooked up an MCU to the display and buttons…)
But some of them were online and running at my former employer until 2018 or so, which is nothing short of amazing.
In case someone is interested, I have a bunch of old resources here: https://taoofmac.com/space/com/cobalt
I also kept a copy of the hacking FAQ: https://taoofmac.com/space/com/cobalt/faq
Edit: found this company that retrofits them into a NAS and I'm really tempted to get one: https://mycherrytree.com/products/cherrynas-cobalt-qube
send me an email (this username at cy384.com) if you're interested!
In the early 2000s I worked for a streaming media company where most of the desktops were AMD K6-2 450s. Except mine, because I splashed out and bought a Duron 700 with 256MB of RAM which I soon upgraded to 512MB, and fitted an ATI Rage 128 Pro, with the thick purple dangly-dongle for AV connections, and a FireWire card for capturing DV. Quite the beast for running Adobe Premiere 4!
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
A Quantum Fireball.
Full-size image: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...
Something about the sticker placement and black lettering directly applied to the metal cover, I've never seen another hard drive with a similar aesthetic.
Those drives worked well, I still have a 40gb IDE PATA Quantum Fireball out in the garage and about 3 years ago I tested it and this baby still worked!
Funny how my brain latches onto the seemingly randomest things and patterns, but for stuff I want to actually remember, it can be a struggle..
Along with a P3 box which I don't have a slightest idea when and how I acquired it, except what I did bought Edison Gold 16 for it.
If anyone one who wants to indulge in a bout of nostalgia (and annoy everyone around you): https://youtu.be/k6xXihb8hv8?t=817
The hardware is incredibly reliable. I've been running one RaQ for two decades now, and it has compiled continuously for years. It compiles all of the NetBSD binary packages for mipsel found here:
https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/mipsel/9.0...
Another RaQ had a power supply that failed. I took a power supply from an old external drive enclosure, connected +5 and +12 volts, and everything worked. It's amazing how much can be done with so little power.
At some point, though, some of these kinds of builds will move to qemu and friends.
Cobalt was an awesome place to work and had amazingly skilled employees. Too bad the Sun acquisition was the death knell for the products...
It fell down during the "Love Letter" virus attack and to get it back up I had to write a script that scanned the logs and inserted firewall rules to block virus-infected machines.
The worst problem it had was that the system clock ran 15% slow so it had to be resynced frequently with ntp.