obsolete gear going nowhere
I guess everyone has projects that take months, if not years to complete (well, everyone who does a project once in a while). And of course, I’ve got them too. Actually, I’ve got several of those and almost all of them have to do with obsolete hardware. Maybe that’s the problem right there actually. Because they’re obsolote hardware projects, there’s no barrier or such. Once I’m finished, even if it takes me 10 years, it’ll still be an obsolete hardware project! ^_^
Anyway, not long ago I started thinking it’s a shame that I’ve collected so much stuff over the years and have it all hidden away on my topfloor (weeeell, in my bedroom actually). Then I started to *hachoo* ‘envision’ a room full of obsolete but once great gear and that thought somehow stuck.
So, I’m not sure when I will have it all in up&running condition, but this afternoon I made a start and started putting everything in the right place. Somehow I’m looking forward to spend a great deal of time there but you probably know how these things go, even if you plan it or such, there’s always more current stuff to do which seems a good enough reason to delay projects with stuff like this even more.
I could actually still use an extra reason or motivation for this although some plans already have popped to my mind…
there’s a small list of what’s what in my hinv (hardware inventory) section of this site
We’ll just see where it goes from here. This gear isn’t going anywhere, that’s for sure! ^_^
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pretty cool, I always wanted to see all of your collection
Maybe this one will inspire you, if you don’t know it already: http://vaxman.de/museum/museum.html – this guy installed a complete vintage data centre into an old warehouse. That’s what I call dedication. Very nice.
Those old Suns of yours are pretty much useless nowadays, there’s nothing any cheap PC coulnd’t do way faster. Yet, they’re from a time when PC users crippled along with 8MB RAM and Win95 or worse. So, if you want to setup a university’s computer science lab from the mid to late 90s in your bedroom just to show how it once was, I think there’s nothing wrong with it.
Oh, the Vaxman is great! Really, each obsolete system should have at least one such a dedicated preserver.
>So, if you want to setup a university’s computer science lab from the mid to late 90s in your bedroom just to show how it once was
Yeah well, I’m not sure actually what my main attraction is here. Of course, I don’t plan on doing any current stuff on those machines. Although, I’ve got one Ultra1 with quad HME left in my network which is running 24/7 just fine, only keeping six spares of that one machine is a little over-the-top…
Anyway, I still do want to make the Suns, even if it would be only once, into a cluster. And I really don’t care what I’m gonna compute on that. One idea I’ve got now is making all the stuff in my bedroom some old-school studio with some old SGI as a main computer and an abillity to render some stuff on the cluster, which of course will be very limited, but somehow it’s also for my own understanding of things why I like this stuff so much.
you know i was about to say that you should make a cluster out of all of those machines.