Re(2): [SunRescue] a sad, sad day

BSD Bob bsdbob at weedcon1.cropsci.ncsu.edu
Thu Dec 16 12:33:38 CST 1999


Macs and PeeCees aside..... with tongue in cheek.....
 
> Yes I am ranting, but honestly, Allwrite on a TRS-80 Model 4 would do all
> the word processing I need, and if I make a document that won't fit on a
> 180K disk then I have probably said more than I needed to.  

Hey, I ran a Cromemco s-100 bus crate up until a few days ago, when I
stripped it down for parts, with a VT52, a TTY40 chain printer, and
4 HD AT drives (clones of defunct 8 inchers).  Running a simple
editor and a tiny nroff, it actually worked quite well.  But, after
20 years, it was time to retire it in favor of the Sun3 toyz.
It was even Y2K compliant!  I needed the drives back for an RT project.

> The same question applies to Sun3's, where are they?  they only end up in
> dumpsters when some suit discovers that they are no longer manufacturer
> supported, and they don't have a shiny holographic sticker on the front,
> and that's the fate that kills all good computers.  If it were left to
> Sysadmins, when a machine actually died it would become spare parts, and
> when it was outgrown it would do some task he wanted to do, but didn't
> have a machine to do it. 

Well, mine got rolled of the back of a truck onto the concrete...OUCH!
It took a lot of hammering and parts reconnoitering to get it functional.
But, hey, it purrs like a kitten, now.  As a single user box, my typing
input speed is the bottleneck, not a 16mhz cpu.   It talks etherlingo
with the bigboyz, so that is not a limit either.  Makeing the world
builds are a little slow.....but you can't have everything with the
old toyz.

> Example: Macintosh LCII, a basically useless machine.  Why buy a big fancy
> mail server so you can support several little domains, with the hassles of
> virtual domains, when you have LCIIs sitting around that can run Eudora
> Internet mail server for free?  I have uptimes approaching a year on boxes
> like this.

NetBSD runs fair on them, but Real Suntoyz are much more fun, and, they
keep the table firmly in place in a tornado.....(:+}}   (I mean that for
real!).   Macs are not heavyweightironmongermaterialenough to do that!

> Old hardware plus old software equals stability, especially for low volume
> tasks.  Weren't DOS bulletin boards pretty solid before the death of the
> BB?

If they do what you need them to do... age is irrelevant!  The knowledge
to keep them purring fades a little with time.....(:+{{.....   Parts get
a little dicy to find, sometimes....(:+{{....  But, the price is usually
right!

> OK, there's my Nickel

And my Disme....!

Who gots da Quater's worth?
 
> Tim

Bob







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