[ale] geezer notice with meeting idea

[Brian Pitts]

On 04/30/2010 09:36 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> Excellent extension idea! Some of the old gear I have was actually used in
> the creation of art (My SGI Octane was used animating Scooby-Doo in the
> first live movie with Sara MG of Buffy fame). Another SGI I had was used in
> the operation of another kind of art - high energy physics (Brian Pitts has
> it?). I also have some of the (then) high end software (Lightwave, other
> goodies) that I _may_ be able to hack into a running order (at least show
> scenes from Babylon 5).
> 

I've still got this. It has IRIX on it, but I think it's supported by
kernels post 2.6.25 [0].

Sometimes old x86, Sun and Apple equipment flows through Free IT Athens.
Usually, we're able to find a volunteer or local collector who'll take
it; otherwise, it's get recycled. The oldest thing I've seen show up at
Free IT was an IBM clone from 1984. The neatest thing I've seen was a
fully working Macintosh SE. Either that, or a Toshiba laptop with a 286
processor and a nice keyboard with mechanical keyswitches; we gave that
to a guy who planned to turn it into a serial console.

I personally don't have a lot of old equipment due to space constraints
and self-restraint. I'm trying to limit myself to one computer per
architecture. When I find a nicer specimen to add to my collection, I
give my current one away. I snapped a picture of what I have earlier
this week. [1]

HARDWARE
----------------
PowerPC - Apple Mac Mini G4
SPARC -Sun Ultra 10
M68K - Macintosh Quadra 660av
Alpha -Digital Alphastation 200 4/166
VAX - Digital Vaxstation 4000 96
MIPS (big endian) - SGI Indigo2 10000 Impact
MIPS (little endian) - Asus WL-500G Premium
PARISC - HP Workstation c3700

Other than the VAX, I believe these can all run Debian. The Alphastation
is the only one I've found the time to install it on.

WISHLIST
----------------
If anyone has Itanium or S/390 gear they could send my way, that would
be excellent.

For the Ultra, it would be nice to have a 13W3 to VGA adapter so I can
use the video card that came with it rather than the onboard vdeo.

For that Quadra, I need to get an ADB keyboard and mouse. Finding a
CD-ROM drive with a DB-25 SCSI connector and a PDS Ethernet card would
be nice too.

For the VAX, an adapter for whatever it's video output connector is (it
looks like three coax connectors in a D-sub case) to VGA would be handy.
I have the proper monitor, but dang its bulky and heavy. Also, a
transceiver to go from either 10BASE5 or 10BASE2 to 1OBASET would be nice.

For the Indigo, a CD-ROM drive with a 50-pin SCSI-1 connector would be
nice to have.

For the HP, one of their Visualize series of PCI graphics cards would be
cool. It's not to important though, as the serial console works well in
HP-UX and linux should support many graphics cards.

[0] http://www.pfrst.de/download.html
[1] http://www.flickr.com/photos/puerexmachina/4554834402/

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts