[SunRescue] MP3 collections

[James Lockwood]

On 23 Feb 2001 jwbirdsa at picarefy.picarefy.com wrote:

>    Other questions: did anybody out there ever actually *use* the TAAC?
> What about the GT? What's the most obscure Sun hardware you ever actually
> used?

I actually _bought_ a GT used in '95.  Spent $20 on the GT itself at a
swapmeet (guy didn't know what it was) and $100 on the sbus card & cable
from a reseller. 

This wasn't too bad back when a cg6 would command $200+.  I ran the GT on
my SS2 for over a year as a second (sometimes third) head, hooked up to an
IBM 6091/19.  Having a 24bpp screen was a godsend, even if it was
obscenely slow.  With 64MB RAM, Solaris 2.4 and 3 heads I was the hot kid
on the block.  :)

I ran it on my SS10 for a little while and was even able to run some of
the Ultra PlusPack demos which used XGL.  It wasn't fast compared with the
Ultras around but it absolutely buried the cg6 and anything else which
used a software 3D rendering pipeline.  Pity it had so many firmware bugs
and no OpenGL support.

Finally upgraded my last sbus Solaris 2.4 box, got an SX for the new SS20
and gave the GT to a friend of mine who collects weird graphics (mostly
SGI and Pixar) gear.  It was big, noisy and slow, but I still liked it.

-James