Quoting Greywolf (greywolf@starwolf.com):
> Thus spake Johan A.van Zanten ("JAZ> ") sometime Today...
> 
> JAZ> Randy Beaudreault <maccult@pacbell.net> wrote:
> JAZ> > I say we plagirize the last lines of Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus"
> JAZ> > with Beastie as the Statue of Liberty:
> JAZ>
> JAZ> Wow! I really like this idea! Great image, and great original copy.  Of
> JAZ> course, the potential to offend even more people (cross-dressing, defiling
> JAZ> a national icon, etc.) is pretty large, but the mental image of a pair of
> JAZ> chucks peeking out from under the Daemon Statue's robes delights me.
> 
> "chucks"?  [daemon is theoretically nameless, is certainly not named
> "chuck".  Quoth McKusick: "If you have to give it a name, call it 'beastie'."]

We had a chat and I tried to convince him of the fine merit of
the name, but he did insist on Beastie (which makes pronunciation
sense in english).

That said, I like my Chuck Taylor AllStars, but converse just got
eaten by Nike.  Alas.

> JAZ> Give me your ancient, your obscure,
> JAZ> Your hard-booted machines, yearning to run free,
> JAZ> The random silicon refuse of your teeming machine rooms.
> JAZ> Send these, the unwanted, dumpster-tossed, to me:
> JAZ> I TFTP the kernel to the growing 'net.
> 
> ...now, THAT is cool.

Just discussing elsewhere that I felt it was a waste of effort,
98% of the time, to spend efforts to keep utterly useless machines
running.  While a VAX 750 holds some nostalgia for some people,
to quote an Ikea commercial:  "Get over it, it's just a lamp."

When developer time is spent getting a 2MHz machine to run well
when it would be spent better getting current machines and new
features in, then obscurity takes away from the project.  As neat
as it would be to run BSD on my Motorola model 6300 Minicomputer
(perhaps an S100 backplane, a 68030, an 80MB MFM disk and 1-2MB
RAM and some wierd motorola unix that served 16 people in my old
office until we replaced it with a 386/25 running Linux^H^H^H^H^HXenix
that ran 200 times faster), any time spent to make that work would
be taken away from useful projects.

Faster file systems, logical volume management, ACLs, user-invisible
clustering over a network, AFS ports - all more worthwhile that pushing
off dust.

<opinion whose="mine only">
I enjoy my Kaypro "portable" CPM box and my 6300, but I don't
consider it worthy of the time it would take away.  Hell, the
Sparc 1's and DECstation5000's are beyond being useful (my PDA
draws a couple watts and smokes both of those).

My recently bought (new) 486 on a chip box IS worthy - currently
shipping appliances are great and worthy efforts.  Crap that ran
in 1989 (or 1979) doesn't count as moving the project ahead.

Do I care if new code to make a HyperSPARC work better breaks a
Sun 4/280?  not unless there's a really good reason to keep that
old machine working (eg. it's got cards in it that run a factory
floor).  The "cool machine" factor ranks pretty low, IMHO.
Esp when it draws away resources.

Educational purposes are different.
</opinion>