[rescue] WTB: Good 'antique' computer for education

[BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak]

> >   But even worse, I have upwards of THIRTY DECstation-3100 boxes.  And a
> > few DECstation-5000s.  I would like to find new homes for the majority
> > of them.  For the uninitiated, they are early MIPS R2000/R3000 based
> > RISC workstations.  The run Ultrix or NetBSD quite well, and make
> > decent light-duty servers (running headless) or somewhat usable
> > workstations with a bitmapped console.
> > 
> There seem to be a lot of these kicking around. Will they run VMS?
> If so, is getting one up and running as simple as acquiring an OpenVMS
> license and media from Compaq?

VMS does not run on any of them AFIK.  NetBSD is your friend on these
boxes.  Ultrix is good in a pinch..... to get NetBSD up.

DS5000/200 crates make great machines.  Rock solid, and mostly never
break.  I run two with a stack of storage expansion boxes, a 19 ''
color monitor, and NetBSD-1.5.1, serving web pages, and acting as
a reserve ftp crate, and they just run and run and run.  I would
consider them much more utilitarian than the usual SS1/SS2/lunchboxish
suntoyz, in my hands.  Mine have 120mb of ram in them, and are good
with that.  They can hold up to 500mb of ram, with the right boards.
These are larger than the usual sun pizza box, sizewise.

The 5000/25 is not good for much, and is rougly equivalent to an SS2.
It can only hold 40mb of ram, and runs at 25mhz.  It is usable but
slow as a workstation, ok as a small server.  Some consider them a
PITA, more than anything useful.  But, the ones I have run across,
if you stuff them full of ram, are fair at what they do.  They are
about the size of a sun pizza box.

The 3100 boxes are mostly equivalent to an SS1, but quite a bit more
rugged, and equally as slow.  They make usable servers, but slow
workstations.  These are larger than the usual sun pizza box, sizewise.

But, NetBSD or Ultrix 4.x run great on any of them.

Bob