old computer

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > old computer

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

just did that yesterday to inspect a Sun 411 SCSI case I was picking up

it's going to house a SCSISD, so I can have a ton of storage for my SS20

also just found a TurboGX+ so I can get 24-bit color

and hopefully my pair of SM71 CPUs arrive soon to give the system a little more oomph

now I just need to figure out pkgsrc on NetBSD 7 and I can even run reasonably modern software on it!

# ¿ Jan 12, 2016 05:55

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 13:01

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

atomicthumbs posted:

from reddit

fault tolerant nightstand

# ¿ Jan 13, 2016 02:36

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

crusader_complex posted:

im curious, old workstation-havers: how noisy are they? are the hard drives loud?

my SS20 isn't that loud relatively speaking, the first drive was but adding the second drive actually made it quieter

there's still plenty of chunka chunka noise when it's actually touching the disk though, it startled my wife because she'd forgotten what that sounds like

you can get SCSI adapters to more modern storage if you want quiet (and speed and capacity), I have a SCSISD on the way which will do a couple MB/s and let me have a lot of storage emulating several different targets each with exactly the disk geometry I want

there's also the Stratos Technology stuff which is available for SD, CF, and even loving SATA holy poo poo conversion and even supports hot swap and poo poo

and there's even a competitor to Stratos focused primarily on CF-backed SCSI emulation of specific drives, for synthesizers and samplers and (other) industrial equipment

# ¿ Jan 13, 2016 10:10

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

moosemanmoo posted:

did the hardware engineers just really not consider or care about things like variable rpm fans w/ ambient temperature sensors? it's not like they weren't making a stupidly expensive vertically integrated product

why would you ever want it to slow down?

you didn't spend more than an engineer's annual salary on a system just to have it go slow

gotta go fast !!

# ¿ Jan 13, 2016 10:12

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

it can always be adapted into a USB device

# ¿ Jan 14, 2016 21:42

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Doc Block posted:

I thought those adapters just mapped pins and the device still had to know how to speak both PS/2 and USB.

I'm not talking about the adapters that came with mice in 2001

I'm talking about an Arduino with a USB HID stack (like a Leonardo) with its GPIO wired to the keyboard's weird bespoke connector and some software implementing the keyboard's weird bespoke protocol so it can be used with a modern system, people have put these together for all sorts of workstation keyboards and other devices and it's honestly petty awesome

I've been trying to make one for HP Human Interface Link (used on HP 9000/300-400 and early 700 systems) for a couple months so I can twiddle some sweet rear end HP knobs, I've had issues trying to bitbang its weird 12/odd/1 serial protocol since I can't just have a UART do all the work

# ¿ Jan 15, 2016 02:49

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

atomicthumbs posted:

holy poo poo where did you find that my mom needs it

# ¿ Jan 15, 2016 18:13

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

atomicthumbs posted:

"It is electrically incompatible with TTL, so making a converter can be difficult."

it actually seems compatible though, input is 3.0V/0.8V and output is 3.3V/0.4V with VDD=5V

quote:

HP did make an adapter (A4220-62001) according to Wikipedia, but I assume you know that.

I did not! the only ones I've seen are around $200 though

quote:

Have you considered buying something with an HIL host interface and tearing out whatever IC does that and using it instead

considered it but I wouldn't want to do that to HP9000 hardware so it'd have to be old and broken test equipment

the client interface I have plenty of (a bunch of cheap ID modules) but it's not substitutable

# ¿ Jan 15, 2016 18:29

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

my two SCSI2SD adapters arrived a couple days ago and I tried to set one up today

I managed to brick one by attempting to update the bootloader, might be able to use JTAG to reload it though

the other one I didn't touch the bootloader, just the firmware, and put it in a Sun 411 case that I picked up. it appeared to work fine under NetBSD but kept getting parity errors when I tried to install either OPENSTEP 4.2 or Solaris 2.5.1 on it

I may need to get another spinning disk just to test whether it's the case, the cable, or the SCSI2SD board itself

I was really hoping to take advantage of the ability to emulate multiple targets since that's the easier way to run multiple operating systems

# ¿ Jan 17, 2016 00:54

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Doc Block posted:

SE graphics hardware. No texture memory

certainly you can max it out for cheap these days

# ¿ Jan 17, 2016 05:40

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

moosemanmoo posted:

this is how you end up buying a second old Mac with a SuperDrive + Ethernet

also then you can set up a LocalTalk network and play Netrek with a friend

and run file sharing on that second Mac so your Mac Plus doesn't have to use floppies (or a SCSI HD of its own) for everything

# ¿ Jan 17, 2016 20:43

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

they figured if they put engineering into Windows NT hardware the way they did their proprietary unix stuff, they could sell Windows NT at the prices the old machines commanded.

result: a $15,000 windows NT workstation that performs about as well as a $5,000 system with a wildcat card in it

this sold exactly as well as you think it did

and they did this after a few other vendors had already tried and failed miserably at it like Intergraph

"it'll be completely different for us, especially since Microsoft has told us they're entirely committed to OpenGL thanks to partners like us!" - a thing Silicon Graphics actually believed

say what you will about Sun and their "leadership," none of them ever fell for Microsoft's bullshit

# ¿ Jan 19, 2016 09:00

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Solaris 9 installed without a hitch on my SS20 and feels pretty quick too

I installed it because I figured I'd give it a try since I had to reinstall anyway (I didn't partition 2.5.1 correctly to put everything I wanted on it, like a compiler)

also even though SunFreeware shut down in favor of a paid service, there are still some SunFreeware mirrors around so I don't have to hunt down a copy of Solaris Studio 9 just to build stuff, though it might be interesting to try

also it turns out that the official llvm & clang distribution includes support for SPARCv8 codegen�for NetBSD, Solaris, and even SunOS!�so just -isysroot plus GNU binutils could let me build for the machine from my Linux box using a truly modern compiler

(maybe I'll build llvm & clang for it first)

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 04:12

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

openCSW still has archive snapshots of their solaris 8 and solaris 9 package trees. i know this because i have been trying to get solaris 8 working on an old sun

thanks!

why not 9 for your sun? and what model sun?

quote:

also almost any version of sun studio from the past ten years will work on solaris 9, you don't need specifically 9.x

I thought it was like 8-9 that run on Solaris 9

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 04:20

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

openCSW still has archive snapshots of their solaris 8 and solaris 9 package trees. i know this because i have been trying to get solaris 8 working on an old sun

what about patches? I have the Solaris 9 recommended patches from 2006 which are all currently failing with error 5, and one of the things I saw online referenced Patch Check Advanced which seems worth checking out�

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 06:16

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

99% of the time, error 5 means you didn't go to single user mode before applying the patch

i find old-timey solaris refreshing because it's so drat simple. but simple is a knife that cuts both ways. simple is also crude. lol @ shutting down the system to apply patches.

that was the hint I needed, rather than installing from an NFS mount I copied the patch set locally and rebooted single-user and it appears to be installing fine now

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 08:43

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

a v good book, bought it at Stacey's in Cupertino

still have my UNIX barf bag

# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 09:04

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

today Weird Stuff had a big rack outside saying "FREE SUN SOFTWARE" so I picked up a complete Sun Developer Essentials for Enterprise package that includes media for Solaris 8 for both SPARC and Intel, as well as the Sun developer tools with a license code that doesn't need to access Sun's old licensing server to be used

also it includes CodeWarrior for Java for Solaris, which should be fun

nB.S.D. (or anyone else) let me know if you want like a Solaris 2.6 or 7 or 8 media set for SPARC, they have a few and I could pick one up to ship you

# ¿ Jan 24, 2016 04:44

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

surprisingly many hoops to jump through to get Solaris to recognize my SS20's new 147GB SCA disk

had to boot NetBSD 7 from CD, partition the disk with it, and only then would the Solaris 8 (2/02) installer do something besides crash when examining the disk

repartitioning etc. during the install went fine though, and everything is now happily running and building a more modern GCC (4.2.1, last GPLv2) than the 3.x I can get from a SunFreeware archive

# ¿ Jan 26, 2016 02:39

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

oh yeah, I'm confused by OpenCSW because I wasn't able to easily find a "this is what we have for Solaris 8" listing, and they talk about 8 being deprecated, it really seems to be for people who are running the latest Solaris

so I'll probably use the SunFreeware bits to bootstrap my own set of packages, which means I should probably learn how to build packages for Solaris� right now I'm just configuring the stuff I build myself with --prefix=/opt/gnu for expedience, once I figure out how to build real packages I can do it right and maybe target a different location

# ¿ Jan 26, 2016 02:45

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

just helped a coworker resurrect a Fujitsu S-4/Leia2

it was running OPENSTEP 4.2J

eschaton fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Jan 27, 2016

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 04:42

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

you found the only japanese openstep user

i didn't even know there was a japanese localization

dude I work at NeXT

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 04:51

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

here�s another user of NeXT software on that SPARC laptop

(sorry if your OS is a POS and can�t just show you a PostScript document)

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 04:54

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

well now i understand the bizarre defenses for xnu's crimes

I think you mean Mach's superiority to a traditional UNIX design approach

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 05:44

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Olivil posted:

get an amiga 500 or 1200 to run demos/listed to modules/play games

don't invest yourself in the "modern" amiga scene and you'll be fine

but what about that new FPGA implementation of the 68K that's insanely fast and plugs right in to an A600?

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 11:04

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Jim Silly-Balls posted:

want this for my se/30.

speaking of which, can old rear end macs like the se/30 boot and install the os from CD-ROM, or does that have to be done via floppy? my se/30 has the caddy CD-ROM unit and a lan card and is v. baller

yes, of course it can

also you can put 128MB of RAM in it

unless it only has 4 slots in which case it only supports 64

# ¿ Jan 28, 2016 04:22

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Silver Alicorn posted:

this thread is inspiring me to either get an Atari 8-bit again, or one of those clamshell iBooks

I had a tangerine one but one of the rev. 2 iBooks would be almost usable

my parents still have their old clamshell iBook, and it still works. may even still have the packaging and stuff

I could see if they want to part with it

# ¿ Jan 29, 2016 08:50

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Doc Block posted:

edit: in fairness, NextStep/OpenStep was a far better operating system and was actually complete instead of being a work in progress like BeOS.

it was also the system with the best overall architecture including kernel out of anything that was being considered

especially since Mach 3.0 and extensions and 4.4 BSD were available to greatly improve the implementation without really affecting the design

Mach ports rule

# ¿ Jan 30, 2016 06:38

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

~Coxy posted:

next was also a "real company" with $50m in revenues and had WebObjects which seemed like a good idea at the time

and turns out it was, since even shaggar's favorite framework implements basically the same architecture

# ¿ Jan 30, 2016 07:08

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

i wonder why the graphing calculators didn't end up in the agilent side of the business

if they had, they would probably still be in production. and $500 apiece

by Keysight

and they'd be worth every goddamn penny

(still have and use the HP48SX I got in 1991 or so)

# ¿ Jan 30, 2016 20:06

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Doc Block posted:

WebObjects was a descendent of Enterprise Objects, an Objective-C framework meant to make it easy for enterprise desktop apps to connect to databases and such.

p close, WebObjects is actually a peer to AppKit, a couple people at NeXT realized in 1992-3 that the same techniques used to interact with databases and bind objects to native UI could be used for request-response web stuff too

quote:

WebObjects kept the Objective-C stuff initially but also added Java support.

this was feasible as of Java 1.1, which added the necessary support to the runtime to instantiated classes and invoke methods by name

quote:

Supposedly, a lot of the things that made WebObjects great for the time were made possible by Objective-C's dynamism, and apparently when they made it Java from top to bottom they removed things even Java WebObjects people liked. Or so I've been told, I never used WebObjects.

that's what a lot of ObjC partisans were afraid of and claimed quite loudly but it's not actually the case

in the ground-up WO5 reimplementation in Java, all of the dynamism was retained, new dynamic stuff like the awesome rule system was added, and we got the huge advantage of being able to deploy without any sort of special runtime beyond a couple jar or war files (no native libraries required)

quote:

According to Wikipedia, Federighi was head of Enterprise Objects at NeXT, and stayed on after the Apple buyout until 99.

So about the time Apple stopped caring about WebObjects.

Craig left to start a company that basically created "B2B," based on WO, and it was rather successful

I believe we shipped WebObjects through Snow Leopard and Xcode 3.2 in 2009 (if not then we last shipped it in Leopard and Xcode 3.0 in 2007, maybe with Xcode 3.1 in 2008)

# ¿ Jan 30, 2016 20:19

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Doc Block posted:

what I meant was that Apple stopped caring about selling it to people

there were two stages of this

first was the price drop to $699/license from around that for development and Oracle-scale prices for deployment

then we stopped selling it entirely as of Xcode 2, the dev tools were just included with Xcode and deployment included with Mac OS X Server

I don't recall if there was a period where you had to pay for a deployment license on another platform if you didn't want to deploy on Server, I think once we made it free-with-Xcode you could actually deploy for free too

you can actually still download and use Xcode 3.0 or 3.1 free and get WebObjects and do whatever with it, there's a whole community still even publishing bug fixes and enhancements (since it's not obfuscated), it's just no longer supported

e: looks like the last public release was WebObjects 5.4.3 for Xcode 3.1 and Mac OS X 10.5, and which can be downloaded separately without having to grab all of Xcode too (it says it's an update but it has the full frameworks)

eschaton fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Jan 30, 2016

# ¿ Jan 30, 2016 20:25

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Silver Alicorn posted:

should I run mac os 8 or 9 when I get this ibook

or X I guess

the latest classic OS, it'll be nicer at 800�600

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 05:18

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Spectre

Glider, which John Calhoun just made Open Source, along with motherfuckin Pararena

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 09:09

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

the DECstation 5000 running Ultrix was a p nice MIPS R3000 system for its time, the R2000-based DECstation 3100 ("pmax") was a bit of a dog though

# ¿ Jan 31, 2016 22:32

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

error1 posted:

Meanwhile the N64 had lots of bells and whistles in the gpu like perspective correct texture mapping, texture filtering, mipmapping, z-buffering etc that completely gimped performance. Holy crap the N64 CPU ran at 90mhz compared to the PSX 33mhz and Zelda still couldn't achieve 30fps. It ran at 17fps on PAL systems

on the other hand I've heard playing N64 games on the SGI workstations used for development was an awesome experience, 1280�1024@60fps�possibly in stereo 3D!�and some devs added network code just for their own amusement

# ¿ Feb 1, 2016 19:06

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

the only sgi / n64 combinations i've ever seen or heard of were indy-based, so there wasn't gonna be anything 3d @ 1280x1024, too drat slow

ah, the Indy, the Indigo without the "go"

quote:

the n64 graphics hardware would have been considerably more capable than the 'newport' graphics in an indy. practically no hardware accleration for 3d operations

I've heard of people doing dev with other hardware besides devkit hardware, eg they had a couple Indy-based dev kits or something but most devs had Indigos or whatever and built natively for much of their work

not cheap but quite efficient

e: that was it, the original devkit was Onyx-based and the tale I heard did involve using full RealityEngine hardware

eschaton fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Feb 2, 2016

# ¿ Feb 2, 2016 08:55

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

Doc Block posted:

Guess I'll try my hand a SMT soldering and see if I can repair it.

everybody needs a hot air rework station

# ¿ Feb 5, 2016 06:43

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

trilljester posted:

I found a couple of old Sun Fire v440's at work in storage the other day. Anything fun I can do with them, or are they trash?

this made me look for what SPARC hardware would still run Solaris 11

a T5240 is like $400 these days with 128GB of RAM and no drives

maybe I'll build a storage cluster�

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 01:33

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 13:01

eschaton: Mar 7, 2007; Don't you just hate when you wind up in a store with people who are in a socioeconomic class that is pretty obviously about two levels lower than your own?

yeah, everyone knows that working out on games makes one a fungineer

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 02:22

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > old computer

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