29 May
2013
29 May
'13
10 p.m.
> I'm curious, what are people using things like
Sparc 2's through
> 20's for? Or even Ultra 60's and older?
Pretty much anything they did when they were new, with
the exception
of web browsing.
Even that, provided you stick to the parts of the Web that could have
existed back then (ie, avoid all the stupid "we're damn well going to
look slick no matter how much it impairs usability" crap). I use lynx,
often on a '20 - but to me, the Web is generally unpleasant and
difficult to use, and when I do use it it is never for anything that I
can't just shrug off with "oh well, too bad" if it doesn't work.
(Exception: when I'm paid to, ie, for work - but then it's on a
work-provided, -administered, and -maintained system, usually a peecee
of one stripe or another, not relevant to this list, and still
relatively difficult and unpleasant.)
Part of the
problem I'm looking at is that you can get something
like a Raspberry Pi that will cost a fraction of what a Sun system
costs to run.
The Raspberry Pi, while awesome for many reasons, is a fairly wimpy
machine when you come right down to it, CPU-wise. And they seem awfully fragile, at least compared to
non-PeeCee real
computers like SPARCstation-20s or Ultra60s.
Yes. They're throwaway devices in that sense - but they're priced like
it, too.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B