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As someone who mostly gets my retrocomputing kick from running modern software on old RISC hardware, I'll try to explain why that's my thing. Typically, these
by avhception 4mo ago
As someone who mostly gets my retrocomputing kick from running modern software on old RISC hardware, I'll try to explain why that's my thing.
Typically, these venerable beasts come from a more "civilized" era of computing, at least that's how I feel. I wasn't around to actually experience it, coming up when real UNIX™ was already pushed to the fringes.
I'm completely aware that I'm romanticizing, but for me, there is something about these machines that a PC just still can't exactly match. Trying to move a mouse and typing with broken keyboard layouts through a buggy-as-hell IPMI interface that was somehow bolted to a machine that, from it's inception, never was meant to be operated remotely, just feels like a hack. It might get the job done, and it's cheap, but it most certainly isn't elegant. The PC as a whole just isn't elegant.
But these old SUN and IBM machines, they're something different. Tools from professionals, for professionals. With remote management built into the machine from the inception! No stupid GUI with whacky translations in sight!
Of course I'm also fascinated by Solaris, AIX and HP-UX and whatnot. But running modern software on these machines has it's own appeal to me.
My retrocomputing itch is to show off these machines, experience them. And what better way to do that than to actually use them to host modern software, impress people by showing how capable they still are, maybe as a glimpse into a future that never was.
- lstodd 4mo agoMirrors the Amiga experience. PC architecture still is a hack compared to 1200.
- spijdar 4mo agoI felt this way in my late teens and early 20, when I spent a lot of time e.g. finding a pipeline for playing YouTube videos on sun4m machines running NetBSD. I'm now in my late 20s, and my impression is these machines were largely always hacked together piles of garbage, they had just cost a lot more ;) There were highs of elegance, yeah. The OpenBoot PROMs introduced with the SPARCstation were marvelously functional and beautifully elegant, especially compared to the previous pre-boot environment. But when you look under the cover, you find a million patches of duck tape, like Sun having to force their compilers to avoid using the o7 register due to speculative instruction prefetching sometimes triggering DMA activity on a peripheral card and causing an unintended side effect. This was due to one buggy CPU (the 80 MHz Weitek upgrade CPU for the SS2), but the bug required changes for all sun4c kernels (at an minimum). Or how the ILOM on newer SPARC servers are just embedded PowerPC chips running RedHat Linux. At least in the late 2000s :) At the end of the day, NetBSD on my SPARCstation 2 is cool, super cool even -- there's even EXA acceleration support for the CG6 framebuffers in X! But ultimate NetBSD/sparc is basically identical to NetBSD on my raspberry pi. I can even run the big endian port if I want a BE system! On the other hand, running a contemporary OS like SunOS 4, or something exotic like Sprite, gives a very different experience. And honestly, these 80s OSes themselves feel more "elegant" in a hacker sort of way. (I'd agree that most mid/late 90s+ Unix systems mostly just feel like worse versions of modern Linux/Unix, though)
- segmondy 4mo agosame here, I feel all sorts of sadness since this sort of thing use to bring so much joy but now bring a bunch of yawn. i had sun 3s, earlier sparcs, IPX, IPC, decstation, HPs, SGI and you are right, it took getting older to feel the same. but then again, even modern systems software/hardware are surprisingly hacked together piles of garbage too. it all depends on how you define garbage.
- hparadiz 4mo agoI got paid by my university to decommission and throw out a bunch of Sun SPARC rack mounts. Like anything else these machines had to be maintained except due to licensing issues they were always susceptible to exploits, were woefully out of date, and were missing major utilities that existed on Linux by this point due to again licensing issues. And because no one bothered to compile for SPARC pretty much installing anything modern required very slowly compiling everything and hoping you didn't get a weird SPARC only machine error in the compiler which actually happened quite a bit. Even worse I remember at the time my gaming laptop that I used for university coding work was already much faster. The one benefit from the experience was that it really drove home just how hard it is to maintain a cpu arch that isn't popular.