19 Apr
2001
19 Apr
'01
12:46 p.m.
" We still have Sparc Station 2, HP730's and Decstation
5000/'s colour and mono X-terms.
The sale is over and the room is closed but if you're
serious, make us an
offer and we can arrange to meet. "
I just received this in an email. I hate having to make a
first offer on machines that I'm not real familiar with.
They Came form a University Physics department.
What would be a fair price for these machines?
What should I look for?
Which one is the most interesting?
Sparc 2's are no longer supported by the lastest version of Solaris. Unless
they've got the SBUS Ram expansion card they suck at modern versions of
Solaris anyway. If they've got a Framebuffer the odds are it's a slow 8-bit
one. They'll run OpenBSD and make a decent firewall. Maybe $50 with full
SIMM slots and HD's. More if they've got something interesting like a
100Mbit ethernet or SCSI S-BUS cards. If they do have the 100Mbit ethernet
it will be a card that won't be supported past Solaris 2.6.
DECstation 5000's. Only really good for running NetBSD. They're a
TurboChannel system. I'd recommend looking at http://www.netbsd.org under
the PMAX port for more info. Depending on how well they're loaded, I'd
guess $25-100.
HP730? Is that an HP 9000/730 or what? If so they might even make the 10
year rule. If you don't get HP-UX media with them, I'd say pass. Look at
them from the value of thier RAM and HD's. They're not a bad machine, but
getting stuff for them could be troublesome.
X-Terminals? I'd say pass.
The most interesting thing there would be either the Sparc 2's and the
DECstation 5000's (especially if they've got interesting TurboChannel
cards).
Zane