5 ms·

I have a bad habit where instead of doing something relevant I play with old stuff I read about but didn't have access to as a kid. VMS always interested me si

• laurentdc 10y ago
  Nothing wrong with that, you simply suffer from retrocomputing. Careful about the power bill though. Large SGI stuff (e.g. Onyx) can go in the kilowatt range under load, and an AlphaServer idles at around 200W last time I checked. IT was no green back then :)
  • trentnelson 10y ago
    My ES40 (4 x 667MHz 21264s) consumes 16A @ 110V. Most 110V US circuits are 10A. I blew at least three fuses between that and the RX5670 (4 x Itanium), which consumed a similar amount of power @ 110V.
    • krylon 10y ago
      On the upside, depending on where you live, you probably save a lot of money on heating... ;-)
      • mtanski 10y ago
        Is there a EnergyGuide heating furnace efficiency score for the ES40?
        • lfowles 10y ago
          Resistance heating is pretty poor compared to heat pumps.
          • mtanski 10y ago
            That's the joke that I was trying to make.
            • krylon 10y ago
              I think I remember reading or overhearing that Intel's chips somewhere in the Pentium 4 era were more efficient at converting electricity to heat than a typical hotplate. (Ratio-wise, at least.)
    • ams6110 10y ago
      Household circuits are generally 15A or 20A AFAIK. Never seen one as low as 10.
      • trentnelson 10y ago
        Hmmm. Maybe it was 15A. A 16A ES40 plus other stuff plugged in to the same circuit would have happily blown 15A under load, I guess.
  • krylon 10y ago
    > you simply suffer from retrocomputing I love the way you phrase that! (I do suffer from that condition, too, in a way, if "suffer" is the word I want - but in my case it is select pieces of obsolete equipment sitting on my bookshelf. My favorite is an ancient IBM ISDN adapter (it still says 1TR6 instead of EDSS1 somewhere on the case) that once hooked up a mainframe to the outside world... ;-)
  • djsumdog 10y ago
    A friend of mine had an old Alpha years ago; was running NT4 on it. You'd watch the lights dim slightly when it turned on. I don't know the model, but the thing was huge.
• trentnelson 10y ago
  You would have liked Snakebite. (http://web.archive.org/web/20121031190851/http://www.snakebite.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/20121031190851/http://www.snakebi...)
  • sedachv 10y ago
    AFAIK Theo de Raadt still has a bunch of racks of vintage hardware working as an OpenBSD build cluster in his basement (old photo circa 2009: http://www.openbsd.org/images/rack2009.jpg http://www.openbsd.org/images/rack2009.jpg). VMS-related, OpenBSD discontinued the VAX port in the 6.0 release this year. Never touched a VAX but from what I read the OpenBSD 5.8 VAX port is a lot more recent and better maintained than the NetBSD port.
    • trentnelson 10y ago
      We had very similar setups :-)
• agumonkey 10y ago
  I just bought an 1989 HP48SX, hi.
• planteen 10y ago
  > An octane running irix is another expression of this problem I dreamed of having a SGI after watching Jurassic Park as a child. I also remember my dad bringing me home a VHS of SIGGRAPH circa 1995 and dreaming about time on a SGI. Time to check Craigslist, I think. :)
• unixhero 10y ago
  Then you will like this YouTube channel https://m.youtube.com/user/jpkiwigeek https://m.youtube.com/user/jpkiwigeek?