a little more compucolor rant; sgi

Courtesy ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell): Yup. With a great big hammer and a nearby dumpster. If I want warts, fun, and interesting, I'll spend my time on the MCS-4 or even one of my old DG Novas. They had their strengths and their weaknesses, but they were both well-built and historically significant. A badly-designed machine was a waste of time the first time around - you insult your own short lifespan by wasting yet more. If you don't agree with me, I'll be happy to send you a box of assorted unreliable S-100 DRAM boards that will keep you busy well into your retirement. As for fun vs. usable, who the hell says you should have to choose? Why not have both? That's why we're after our first Cray, why we maintain the NetBSD Build Lab (a single location in which we're trying to assemble one example of each machine supported). Normally I couldn't give half a shit for Amigas, but it's fun to rackmount one and help get unix running on it. Maybe that's the primary philosophical divergence here: I consider few obsolete machines to be inherently interesting, when there are so many others that are merely _thought_ to be obsolete but are still utterly useful given a current, robust OS. Well, this is just silly. How much more luck have you had getting parts for that Compucolor? SGIs are just like anything else - if you've got enough bits you can maintain them yourself. And I'll tell you one thing for sure: Gathering enough spares to do the support is easy, seeing as how there aren't (yet) any collector scum driving the prices of Indigos to 20 times their original price. Jonathan