3 ms·

I had a NeXT Station with monitor and keyboard, Sun SPARCstation 1, 2, and 5. Let them all go for cheap in the mid 00s because I didn’t want them taking up spa

• pm215 4y ago
  There was a period where that kind of kit was usefully usable as (effectively) an X terminal -- you could put Linux on it, and it had a good quality CRT that you would otherwise have to pay a fair amount for. I did that in the late 90s and early 2000s with a SPARCstation 2 starting when I was in university. (I actually submitted a floating-point-emulation patch to the Linux kernel because otherwise the X server had a habit of crashing when it encountered a denormal number...) However, a couple of things made them fall out of that "vintage but still useful" bracket: - they fell off the bottom of the "supported by Linux distros" list, so you were running something that wasn't getting security or bug fix updates any more - LCD monitors got better and cheaper, so running a big 19 or 21 inch trinitron CRT was no longer the best available graphics experience - at least for me personally, my disposable income for buying nice monitors went up ;-) Machines in the "are you running a private museum collection" category are less exciting. My SS2 ended up in in the skip when I had to do a house move, I think.
  • kelp 4y ago
    For a while in the early 00s one of those SPARCstations, I forget if it was the 1 or the 2, was doing NAT and firewalling for my home network. I ran OpenBSD on it. I remember it taking multiple days to do a 'build world' and in those days I ran -current and upgraded from source. But yeah, it's mostly museum stuff now.