6 Oct
2007
6 Oct
'07
5:48 a.m.
"Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
Certainly for now, and for the past few years, Sun
S-bus-era hardware
is plentiful and cost more to ship than to buy (thus the importance of
local acquisition). 10 years from now, though, it might not be as
easy to find on the ground - like mid-1970s micros are already.
Suns, being a rather hardware-closed, high-speed (for their time),
highly-integrated platform, were never routinely hacked-on or repaired
by the folks running them (NVRAM replacements aside).
Maybe not the later S-bus Suns themselves, but I worked in many many labs
where either VME-bus Suns or S-bus-to-VME-bus adapters were used
and all sorts of interesting things hooked on to them.
OTOH, lots of
Apples, S-100 boxes, PETs, TRS-80s, etc., were.
Peripheral-wise, the biggest things I ever heard most of those
boxes being hooked to was a SMD disk. Kinda puny compared to what
was hung off the Suns :-). And of course that's puny compared to
Will's DASD chains!
Tim.