Date: Sat, 7 Dec 1996 23:49:50 -0800 (PST) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: Rob Misiak-Rishaw <rob@arpa.com> Cc: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, chat@freebsd.org, softweyr@xmission.com Subject: Re: Slowest machine [Was: TCP/IP ick!] Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.95.961207234047.223A-100000@hamby1> In-Reply-To: <199612080711.CAA03370@vienna.arpa.com>
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On Sun, 8 Dec 1996, Rob Misiak-Rishaw wrote: > The slowest machine that I have at my house, besides the Windows machine :) > is a Sun 3/60. It has 20MB RAM in it (had to use 20 1 meg SIMMs!), and it > makes more noise than my microwave oven. I'm not planning on replacing > it any time soon, though. People collect old stamps, old coins, old > furniture... why not old computers? ;) What OS are you running on it? If SunOS, maybe you should try NetBSD? As for collecting old computers, I agree completely! I still have my Commodore 64 and Amiga, and I still fire them up every so often! My computer club at university has an old Sun386i, which is kind of funny. For those of you who haven't heard of it, it's a 20MHz 386DX with ISA and some proprietary bus, which runs SunOS (the latest version is 4.0.2 and comes on floppies), and can run DOS 3.3 programs with an old version of Merge. Ours has 8MB RAM and a HUGE 340MB internal SCSI disk. All of the devices are Sun, not PC-standard (Sun keyboard, optical mouse, bwtwo framebuffer, etc.) It's in a heavy, but otherwise PC-shaped tower case. Apparently Sun was working on a 486i when they cancelled the project to focus all their efforts on SPARC. They probably shouldn't have, since they moved back to supporting x86 with Solaris later on. As for SunOS on the 386i, Sun tested some experimental things with it, that you won't find on SPARC or Sun-3. For example, there's a graphical login prompt (in SunView), and a forerunner to admintool. The annoying think about the OS is they went crazy with loopback mounts, just like e.g. SCO went crazy with symlinks, so you never really know where something should go. The other annoying thing is that they moved from a.out to COFF, but somehow brought along their Sun shared library format. This means that GCC can't be used to generate shared libraries, and the bundled cc is totally non-optimizing. I spent some time trying to figure out whether to upgrade gas to generate compatible GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLES for Sun's ld, or patch GCC to generate compatible assembly for Sun's assembler. In the end, I wasn't able to get either working (I was trying to compile, of all things, X11R6 with shared libraries!), and the thing was SO damn slow, I just gave it to somebody else to play with. -- Jake
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