[geeks] nerd reading for a Friday night ... old-skool waxed

[Bill Bradford]

On Sun, Jan 28, 2007 at 07:56:11PM -0500, Sandwich Maker wrote:
> now i'm getting all nostalgic.  3b2s were what i first moved to
> sysadminship on, and a unixpc was the first personal computer i
> actually used much.  i was at bell labs and got one on employee
> discount when they were discontinued, and pissed as hell when i saw a
> major reseller offering them later for $200 -less-, but att had their
> comeuppance - centrex services on one of their small pbxes, based on
> the unixpc, were much more popular than they expected and they had to
> buy lots of machines back.
> one was my main machine for 7 years.  it's still parked in my basement
> somewhere.

The first system I ever owned that ran a proper UNIX (not Linux, which
was in the 0.99.13 kernel era at the time; 1995) was a UnixPC.  

I thought it was so cool that I could plug in its (1200 baud) modem, then
dial out from the modem bank at work (an ISP) and log in remotely to my 
system at home.

I went looking for one a few months ago, and managed to rescue one 
from Peter Da Silva (maintainer of the UnixPC FAQ), but it had some
hardware issues that I didn't have the time to fix - so the system
went to a friend of mine in Plano.

What I'd *really* love to find would be an AT&T 6386 WGS, with some 
proper AT&T dumb terminals, and run SVR4 on it.  One of my first exposures
to "big iron" was in (junior high I think) I took a tour of the local
electric co-operative [0], and got a glance at their huge DEC/VAX setup
along with a few 6386 boxes in their "control room".  

(I don't know if AT&T made/rebranded any further x86 systems...)

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford 
Houston, Texas