[rescue] Looking for (this list). Home computers, early PC, etc

[Phil Stracchino]

Ray Arachelian wrote:
> The other Voyager is the Sun Voyager, which has an LCD screen and
> sometimes battery. I've got one of these also.
> For speed, I've used a CF card plugged into a PCMCIA tray and have used
> this for swap. Mine still has Solaris 2.6 on it.
> I don't recall if it can boot off the PCMCIA bus, but that might be a
> possibility as you can get 32G CF cards these days.
> (I used a pair of 256M for the swap since the machine has very little
> RAM and uses a weird proprietary interface for memory - something
> similar to a PCMCIA card, but different.)

Yeah, mine has a single 32M card, which should mean 48MB total RAM.
It's basically a Type II PCMCIA card with 120 pins along the long edge.
 I'm given to understand Sun chose this ... distinctive memory format
(designed for them by Mitsubishi) so as to be the sole source for
aftermarket RAM for Voyagers.

I haven't looked at RAM prices at the moment, even assuming the cards
are still available anywhere.  A fast google seems to say it's pure
unobtainium at this point.  Oh, wait ... one hit for a single 32MB card
for $200.  It's 1995 all over again!


I'm actually questioning, after being reminded of how slow it is,
whether to even deploy mine for the purpose we've long intended it.
We'd been planning to use it as a low-footprint kitchen terminal to look
up recipes etc online and pull up our house recipe book, but the truth
is I'd have to run an Ethernet cable down for it and it still wouldn't
do anything a commodity laptop won't do ten times better.



-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.