Just curious. What motivates someone to collect old
minis and
mainframes??? I can see it being nice to look at for a while, but
something as big as a mini is very cumbersome to have around the house
(let alone an apartment). And what pratical use does it serve running it
at home anyway??? I see a lot of posts about collectors having paper
tapes, reels, card readers, etc, but how often does one really use it or
even turn it on. I would imagine that it probably sets idle for about
95-99% of the time and most people would turn on a PC instead. I have a
SUN IPX and a PC. I rarely turn the SUN on, but I keep it around to do
some practical UNIX programming on a real UNIX box instead of linux,
freebsd, etc. As I said, I dont want to start a flame war or anything,
just curious thats all......
Ram
PS: If I started to collect stuff like that, my wife will throw me out of
the house. She already complains about my transputer equipment...
The best answer is probably a question, why do you collect Transputer
equipment?
The main reason I'm collecting Mini's is to be able to play with their
Operating Systems. Besides I'm actually getting my OpenVMS cluster set up
as a fileserver for my other systems. The hardware is also fun to work
with. Some people spend a lot of thier time on the Computer Games, me I
find Mini Computers and their OS's to be the ultimate in computer games.
Zane
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Adminstrator |
| healyzh(a)aracnet.com (primary) | Linux Enthusiast |
| healyzh(a)holonet.net (alternate) | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
| Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing, |
| and Zane's Computer Museum. |
|
http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/ |