The Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island

It's really cool to see that Cray J90 with the SparcStation 5 control workstation and software.

I do a fair bit of retro computing, and assembling a fully operation platform like that can take years of sleuthing.

Often disk drives are destroyed, which is somewhat understandable. But the media kits are often binned before e-waste companies come to pick up the hardware. So you're left with really interesting hardware and a hunt to make it usable.

And the gray zone where people that do have it don't necessarily want to share the bits because it's still copyrighted including the companies or current rights holders that otherwise don't care.

Assuming you have base OS, it's then very hard to find COTS applications that showcase the platform. SGI IRIX is one exception because there's a somewhat large hobbyist following.

Website not responding at present (for me). Google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eck8H7O...

I can't tell if the webpage being down is the joke or if we killed site. Which is too bad because I would be very down with some retro computing!

Founded in 1994. How am I just now hearing about this? I'll have to head down to the open house next month.