[rescue] Wanted: 486 desktop

[Derrik Walker v2.0]

On Monday, March 22, 2010, at 08:44AM, "Tom Manos" <tmanos at concursive.com> wrote:
>I'm looking for a working 486 machine for an old version of UNIX. No fancy
>requirements, just something that works and that has some ISA slots in it.
>Happy to pay shipping.
>
>I'm in southeastern Virginia if that helps.
>

Back when I was in college, I ran Mach10 on a Mac Classic II, then Power Mac 10 on a 6100.  It was a kind of odd OS, and was a bit crash prone on the 6100 ( no memory protection on the Power PPC version ), but it worked good enough for me to learn UNIX and become a UNIX systems engineer.

I ran Mach 10 for about four years before I got my first Sparc box.  For a few years, I used the Classic II and Mach10 ( remember the tip command ? )  as a console for my Sparc stations as the monitors were very expensive, big, heavy, and sucked power, and i could just export X to my Mac as needed.

Of course now I have a home built Linux server, but do spend a lot of time in the shell on my MacBook doing that UNIX sh*t as my wife calls it.  

As a kinda funny side note, back when I had my 6100, I had a SLIP connection to the University, and worked there at the time as well, so I was able to leave it up all the time.  I had spent a third of my computer budget getting 40M of ram - which was a LOT for back then, so I had this little script that would collect information about the computer that would run when it was fingered, and I had put in there something like:

echo -n $memory
if [ $memory -gt 16 ] ; then echo " I bet you wish you had that much memory!" ; else echo ; fi

Mach10 made it easy to keep the connection up all the time.  I use to telnet to it from the PC's on campus.  Funny how that was so cool back then.  Now I have a 64-bit UNIX workstation with effectively 2 CPU's and 4 gig of ram, all in a portable system I take just about everywhere with me.

- Derrik