Hi,
The most alarming thing I used to enjoy about an 030 cube is that
you can boot and run NeXTStep, a Windows-NT counterpart, in 4
megabytes of RAM.
Not that you'd want to... though you can set one up as a stable
lightweight network file server and such. I ran Windows Networking
(Samba), Columbia Appletalk, NFS and web server, perl and CGI
effectively on a 16 mb machine for quite awhile. There are also
various cron-based things you can do with the DSP chip and audio that
take up only moderate amounts CPU bandwidth that I did. All in all
these machines are a heck of a lot of fun not only as a hobbyist
machine but also in various useful roles.
While my TRS-80 Model 16 sits in the corner, the NeXT machines both
at office and at home are working hard and are on the net.
And it looks like I'll be picking up another cube on Monday.
Joy of joys! YIPPEEEE!
BTW... about hooking older machines to the net. I've heard that
someone has crammed UDP, IP and ARP into a tiny PIC microcontroller.
Does anyone know anything about this? I would kind of like to set
up my Trs-80 Mod 4 on the net for various reasons.
Thomas