[cctalk] Old UNIX Systems

On Mon, 3 Jun 2013 15:13:15 -0400 (EDT) Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote: The i80386 is shit because it is PeeCee stuff. PeeCee stuff is shit by definition. Regardless of age. PeeCee shit is not worth any brain cycles. I prefere to spend these on real computers. Be they old VAXen or newish ARMs. I even don't care about i80486 or Pentiums. I _do_ care about a MicroVAX 2000. I own six PeeCees. The one I am sitting in front of right now. It is a four years old, quad 3.0 GHz amd64 running NetBSD 6-stable. An old laptop with 1.8 GHz Pentium M that I rarely use when "on the road". There is an old Pentium II. I'll take it apart at occation to reuse its enclosure to mount a Sun AXi board in it. There is a dual Pentium III waiting to be scraped. Last but not least there is an IBM PS/2 80. Actually a i80386 machine! And a PS/2 95, a i80486. Most likely I'll keep these for ever. Besides the shitty CPU these machines are very well engineered computers. I've lost track about how many VAXen and Suns I own. It's over a dozend each, at least! Add several Alphas, HP700, SGIs, RS/6000, ... and some oddities like a MVME 68k or Sony NeWS. Not to forget a PDP-11/34A, a PDP 11/73, some calculators and terminals, including a Tektronix 4012. You see: I care about anything, but not about the cheap consumer shit that is soled in mass-market computer stores today. Problem is today: If you really need the compute power, a PeeCee is the only afordable and practical way to get it. (Aforementioned quad AMD builds NetBSD/vax in less then half an hour.) Have a look at the current so called "super computers". Most of them are just a huge bunch of glorified PeeCees glued together in some sort of network. :-( -- \end{Jochen} \ref{http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/}