A SPARC makes a little fire

I owned a couple of Sparc 1s back when Sparc 10s were cool and they were ancient, then! I'm talking like 1996? I don't even remember now. I had scrounged up a bunch of cast off Sparc hardware because I was obsessed with UNIX at the time and UNIX machines were hard to get near unless you worked at a big company or a university. Linux was in its infancy but was already making fast inroads to the UNIX market, particularly SCO, which was pretty much already out of business by then (kept alive for lawsuit purposes). HP-UX was huge, along with Solaris, which the Sparc 1 could run with a little effort (as opposed to SunOS, which was already pretty much obsolete).

Anyways, I had the Sparc box going for quite awhile and a friend at the time who worked in the campus switch room hatched a plan where we would hide it under the drop floor and make it into a DNS-less (IP only) pirate Ftp site, complete with a, um, ok, STOLEN, 1GB SCSI drive, which at the time, was a fairly expensive item. We operated the pirate ftp site for a couple of years. I don't know what happened to that box because I subsequently moved many states away and I think my friend just kind of lost interest and turned it off, probably scrapped it in the end. Linux killed off all the desktop UNIX platforms shortly thereafter. I doubt anyone could get away with adding some random node to a university network these days due to all the monitoring, but back then nobody gave a damn. It was truly an amazing time of discovery and quasi-illegal (and totally illegal) behavior.

Other than that it's very nice for a console font. Why don't we have PC BIOSes with that font, eh?

And whenever I give a presentation at a venue that has a projector with VGA input, I'll do the presentation from the same SPARCbook.

At least it wasn't as bad as someone at my high school (c. 1995) who plugged a Centronics printer into a Mac SE external SCSI connector and released the magic smoke™ of both.