[SunRescue] we're all just spoiled (was: re: IPC)

[BillBradfordmrbill at mrbill.net]

On Mon, Oct 23, 2000 at 05:32:06PM -0400, Sheldon T. Hall wrote:
> Heck-o, even a 3-year-old PC can be a great deal; a 200-MHz Pentium with a 
> 2-gig drive and 64 megs will still do useful work, and lots of it!
> Of course, that statement comes from a guy who made a living with a Compaq 
> Portable II [1] from 1990 to 1993 ....
> -Shel

I gained a new perspective on "enough machine for the job" when I worked
for COMCO (www.comco.com).

The engineers had Dell P2/300s, brand new, 20" monitors, etc - they
*needed* the speed for their engineering/calculation work (we also had
some big HPs, an Origin 2000 from SGI, etc).

I was the sysadmin / "entire IT department".  What did I have on my desk?

A Dell Pentium 120 box.  Overclocked to 133.  64mb RAM, assorted SCSI drives
(about 2.5gig total in 4 drives), external SCSI DLT-IV, SCSI DAT.  The 17"
Dell/Sony monitor that had come with it.  The only "upgrades" from the 
original box were my OmniKey keyboard, my Logitech trackman marble trackball,
and a good (I think it was a #9) video card.

Running RedHat Linux v4 (with updates).  (no, I couldnt run anything else,
they had "legacy code" on this box they didnt want to hav eto move to
another box - this place was king of "if it aint broke dont fix it even
if its almost 10 years old").

Not only was this box my personal workstation (Netscape and SSH mainly),
it also run the company's web server, webstats, MRTG, NOCOL, and some
other network monitoring stuff.

It worked great!  I'm kinda snooty in that I always want my home
boxes to have 128mb, but I was surprised at the performance of that
beast with only 64mb and 120mhz.

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford
mrbill at mrbill.net
Austin, TX