Unix on old-ish machines - advice sought

At 7:53 PM -0500 4/7/05, Scott Stevens wrote: Shoot, systems a lot better than those are free or almost free. I got my Sun Ultra 60/2300 basically for free from a friend. Take a look on eBay and see what low-end Sun Ultra systems, or a SGI system goes for these days! A sizable portion of these systems price is the shipping. Either a Sun or SGI dual CPU system with a decent amount of RAM and a good framebuffer makes a *very* nice system (though I only have a single CPU SGI O2). Even a bottom-end SGI O2 180Mhz R5000 (the model with no CPU cache to speak of) is amazingly responsive under a *heavy* load. While I *really* like SGI systems, I'd have to recommend a similarly configured Sun system. I'm guessing older IBM RS/6000's and HP PA-RISC systems are available dirt cheap as well, I've not looked into either, as I'm not interested in collecting Unix systems. Where you might end up paying some serious money is on specific options (especially SCSI adapters faster than UW-SCSI, or Gigabit Ethernet). Also in the case of SGI systems, OS Kit's cost a serious amount (I tend to suspect the same is true for IBM and HP systems). Zane -- -- | Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator | | healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast | | | Classic Computer Collector | +----------------------------------+----------------------------+ | Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, | | PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum. | | http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |