29 May
2013
29 May
'13
6:14 p.m.
On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 8:04 PM, Zane H. Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com> wrote:
I've been working on getting shelving installed in
our Garage, and as a
result, I've been digging back to some systems that have been buried.
Right now I'm moving a bunch of Sun hardware and it hit me. What good are
old UNIX systems? I'm curious, what are people using things like Sparc 2's
through 20's for?
Until relatively recently, my home DSL gateway was a SPARCstation LX. Not
too noisy, and a very convenient form factor.
Particularly with multiple heads, older SPARCs could still be useful as X
terminals (the Solaris X server just works, whereas configuring X on random
PC hardware can be frustrating even in these modern times).
Also, if you're writing code where portability is important, it doesn't
hurt to have on hand machines with "weird" (relative to x86) CPU
architectures for testing. (of course, there's always emulators)
But to be honest, I keep mine primarily out of sentimental value, and not
for a practical purpose. I still have this crazy notion of someday
acquiring an Ultra Enterprise 3x00 or 4x00 to run at home for real work,
though.