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Comment by crmd | Hacker News Reader

This is painful to read because I'm guilty of it. I left an SGI Onyx, a Sun Ultra 80, a Sun Ultra 1E, and a Sun A1000 JBOD in the basement of a house I was renting in 2003 because I couldn't be bothered to hump the gear up a flight of stairs.

I would love to have some of these in my office now, and once in a while hear the Onyx starting up and see that "Welcome to Reality" boot screen. Good times.

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I got the pangs back in 2003 and managed to snag a SPARCserver 1000E with full disk array. After spending 2 days getting it up and then a 3 months using it as a workstation, I got the electricity bill.

That ended my interest in running vintage kit...

The big stuff definitely can't run full-time if you actually pay for your electricity/care about use levels! A friend acquired a Sun Enterprise...4500? back when they were merely obsolete and not collector stuff, and attempted to run it as his home fileserver (he had several disk shelves). The $400 increase in electric bill put him off that!

On the other hand, something like a SPARCstation IPX can run all day for not too much money, and runs the best Sun operating system, SunOS 4.1.4 :P

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 space.

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.

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.

You should disclose this address, I could be the next tenant, they are likely still there.

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