RetroComputing talk at CircleCityCon

When I started out retrocomputing I was a very heavy NetBSD user because oftentimes it was the only operating system available for the equipment in question (as a high schooler, who never got media with the equipment, and wasn't about to shell out for a license). As well, a lot of the equipment was "still good" as far as I was concerned, for server duties, and if you're going to put a machine out there on the public Internet and you're just focused on using it to provide services: HTTP, FTP, SMTP, IRC, DNS, etc. or maybe local services like NFS/SMB/Appletalk file and print, you really want as a new a UNIX as you can get; it's nice to have something that isn't vulnerable to 20+ year old security holes, you can get the kernel source; you don't have to hack free software as much just to get it to build as on an ancient UNIX. As time has gone on (and I've become more concerned about the electric bill, as well as more cognizant of making the most of each power-on hour of this equipment) I've moved completely towards using commodity Intel Atom gear to provide services, and keep the old stuff just to run "for fun" in a sort of "retrocomputing playpen". I've been fortunate to acquire a lot of the proprietary operating systems over the years as I picked up more equipment or as manufacturers were doing various hobbyist licensing specials... I've Solaris 2.5 thru 10, Tru64, NeXTstep, IRIX, OpenVMS 7.2 and 7.3, A/UX (lol), etc. Now, it's true, for most of the hardware I run, I generally use the "vintage" operating system in concert, since I have it, the machines are isolated from malicious folks, etc. Although I will permit that some operating systems are more interesting than others (to me); I'd rather see a NeXT running NeXTstep, a SGI running IRIX and a VAX running VMS; those are fun & interesting to play with because they are a little different (esp. VMS, of course). I'm less attached to Solaris/SunOS, Ultrix/Tru64, etc. I don't really have any HP-UX or AIX stuff tho on those platforms free software support is a little limited anyway. Christian is right, SGI machines can still make very nice UNIX desktops, and they probably "age the best" out of all their contemporaries. My R10k/175 Indigo2, R5000/150 Indy and R4400/150 Indigo are all very quick, relatively speaking :) Best, Sean On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 1:48 PM, Christian Liendo < christian_liendo at yahoo.com> wrote: