mpickering
Experienced Member
Hello All,
I'm not sure if what I am into is considered "vintage". My interest is in early and recently obsoleted Unix workstations. I learned about Unix when MSDOS 3.3 was hot stuff when I was in high school and graphical Unix workstations were like the machines of the Gods. Sun, HP, Symbolics, Silicon Graphics and IBM RS/6000 were machines I dreamt about. In high school, I managed to get my old 286 to run PC-MINIX for a Unix class demo.
During my first year of college, I managed to get my hands on some decent 386 hardware. I bought Mark Williams Coherent (on a million floppies) and later got their 4.2 upgrade with X Windows (sorry I threw it away, had the huge manuals and all and spend a small fortune on it at the time). Very cool. This was back when Windows 3.1 was just becoming hot. Still, I ran Unix. Then Windows 95 came out and I was playing with early versions of Linux. SLS and Yggdrasil. You can't consider yourself a Linux adherent until you've spent two days figuring out monitor and VGA timings to bring X. That was when you *HAD* to know PC hardware to get X to work and the price of failure was a blown monitor. I actually bought my first multifrequency (and expensive) SVGA monitor so I could safely run X. Now been running Linux for 11 years.
I have a strange obsession with the power of workstations. PCs back then couldn't do the 3D graphics and imaging. The slick window systems, multiple processors, massive memory and disk (for the day). A visit to a local University campus computer store caused me to drool. Nested among the Quadras and early Pentiums were machines for the engineers: SGI Indy, NeXT Cube workstation and a few Suns. $5K for the Indy and it was cheapest workstation there. Playing with those made me want to have one.
Time marches on. Generations of machines, each more powerful than the last and soon I was running PCs more powerful than what I dreamed of. Modern hardware has more power than mid-80s supercomputers (another fascination of mine) but still, there was allure of the workstations.
Over the past few years, I've finally indulged myself. On a fluke 3 years ago, I trolled eBay for Suns (we were looking to buy some Suns for developer use on a project I was on) and discovered cheap Sun hardware. SPARCstations. The machines I originally lusted after. So, I did some research and began acquring my first Sun hardware. I settled on SPARCstation 10s for cost and flexibility. I really wanted a SPARCstation 20 but they were much more costly. The SS10s became my first multi-CPU systems.
Now, I am into the true dream machines of my youth: Silicon Graphics. Just got the first of two Octanes up and running and enough spares for both to run them for years. Despite being 8-10 year old technology, one cannot help being impressed by their speed. SGI just screams "cool" with OpenGL in hardware.
My interests are broadening. I'm starting to troll about for things to run Linux on. Older Macs, maybe an Acorn (ARM RISC is nifty), some older PC laptops, a SPARCbook, etc. Not many people can claim to run it on four different hardware architectures at once (x86, SPARC32/64, MIPS and PPC). I like to tinker with hardware mainly and try to live those past dreams of mine.
As I said, not sure it qualifies as vintage. However, I have vintage hardware. An old Apple IIe, a Timex Sinclair 1000 (my first computer ever, paid $32.78 for it), had a VIC-20 and an Atari 800XL (which was sold to fund my first PC, a Bondwell 800 XT laptop).
Unfortunately, I live and breath computers working as a software developer. My co-workers thinks I'm nuts for wanted this old (and to them, useless stuff) but old doesn't not mean useless. Imagine the fun I can have with Linux on an old SPARC 10 running as a honeypot to see who can hack it.
So, just saying "Hi" to everyone and if you're into the old Unix boxen, I'd love to compare notes. And BTW, the ultimate vintage Unix box is a Cray YMP-EL minisupercomputer (since it is a CMOS version of the Cray X-MP architecture and that does qualify as vintage). Someday...
Matt
I'm not sure if what I am into is considered "vintage". My interest is in early and recently obsoleted Unix workstations. I learned about Unix when MSDOS 3.3 was hot stuff when I was in high school and graphical Unix workstations were like the machines of the Gods. Sun, HP, Symbolics, Silicon Graphics and IBM RS/6000 were machines I dreamt about. In high school, I managed to get my old 286 to run PC-MINIX for a Unix class demo.
During my first year of college, I managed to get my hands on some decent 386 hardware. I bought Mark Williams Coherent (on a million floppies) and later got their 4.2 upgrade with X Windows (sorry I threw it away, had the huge manuals and all and spend a small fortune on it at the time). Very cool. This was back when Windows 3.1 was just becoming hot. Still, I ran Unix. Then Windows 95 came out and I was playing with early versions of Linux. SLS and Yggdrasil. You can't consider yourself a Linux adherent until you've spent two days figuring out monitor and VGA timings to bring X. That was when you *HAD* to know PC hardware to get X to work and the price of failure was a blown monitor. I actually bought my first multifrequency (and expensive) SVGA monitor so I could safely run X. Now been running Linux for 11 years.
I have a strange obsession with the power of workstations. PCs back then couldn't do the 3D graphics and imaging. The slick window systems, multiple processors, massive memory and disk (for the day). A visit to a local University campus computer store caused me to drool. Nested among the Quadras and early Pentiums were machines for the engineers: SGI Indy, NeXT Cube workstation and a few Suns. $5K for the Indy and it was cheapest workstation there. Playing with those made me want to have one.
Time marches on. Generations of machines, each more powerful than the last and soon I was running PCs more powerful than what I dreamed of. Modern hardware has more power than mid-80s supercomputers (another fascination of mine) but still, there was allure of the workstations.
Over the past few years, I've finally indulged myself. On a fluke 3 years ago, I trolled eBay for Suns (we were looking to buy some Suns for developer use on a project I was on) and discovered cheap Sun hardware. SPARCstations. The machines I originally lusted after. So, I did some research and began acquring my first Sun hardware. I settled on SPARCstation 10s for cost and flexibility. I really wanted a SPARCstation 20 but they were much more costly. The SS10s became my first multi-CPU systems.
Now, I am into the true dream machines of my youth: Silicon Graphics. Just got the first of two Octanes up and running and enough spares for both to run them for years. Despite being 8-10 year old technology, one cannot help being impressed by their speed. SGI just screams "cool" with OpenGL in hardware.
My interests are broadening. I'm starting to troll about for things to run Linux on. Older Macs, maybe an Acorn (ARM RISC is nifty), some older PC laptops, a SPARCbook, etc. Not many people can claim to run it on four different hardware architectures at once (x86, SPARC32/64, MIPS and PPC). I like to tinker with hardware mainly and try to live those past dreams of mine.
As I said, not sure it qualifies as vintage. However, I have vintage hardware. An old Apple IIe, a Timex Sinclair 1000 (my first computer ever, paid $32.78 for it), had a VIC-20 and an Atari 800XL (which was sold to fund my first PC, a Bondwell 800 XT laptop).
Unfortunately, I live and breath computers working as a software developer. My co-workers thinks I'm nuts for wanted this old (and to them, useless stuff) but old doesn't not mean useless. Imagine the fun I can have with Linux on an old SPARC 10 running as a honeypot to see who can hack it.
So, just saying "Hi" to everyone and if you're into the old Unix boxen, I'd love to compare notes. And BTW, the ultimate vintage Unix box is a Cray YMP-EL minisupercomputer (since it is a CMOS version of the Cray X-MP architecture and that does qualify as vintage). Someday...
Matt
