At Fri, 29 May 2015 10:22:35 +0000, David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote: Subject: Re: Removing ARCNET stuffs > > There's one other thing I ought to mention here, which is that I have > never entirely understood the point of running a modern OS on old > hardware; if you're going to run a modern OS, you can run it on modern > hardware and you get the exact same things as on old hardware, except > faster and smoother. It's always seemed to me that running vintage > OSes (on old hardware or even new) is more interesting, because that > way you get a complete vintage environment with its own, substantively > different, set of things. This does require maintaining the vintage > OSes, but that's part of the fun... nonetheless, because I don't > understand this point I may be suggesting something that makes no > sense to people who do, so take all the above with that grain of > salt. You're quite right that it is interesting to run classic software on classic hardware, to the extent that retrocomputing is about preserving a bit of history, or living in the past, or whatever, and to the extent that one might enjoy such a thing. However there were, and are, a lot of us who want(ed) a modern OS to run on our old hardware because we want(ed) to re-purpose that fine old hardware to do something new and exciting with it. I.e. I am/was not building a museum, but rather trying to get things done and learn new things. For example I started running NetBSD on Sun-3 and early sparc systems because that's the hardware I had, and it was good an capable hardware. However the original SunOS-4 was broken and decrepit for the uses I wanted to put it to, and I didn't have source so I couldn't really fix it. NetBSD opened the door to doing modern things without paying high-end prices for the latest commercial hardware and software. At that time the older hardware really was built better too, and it was more "operational" -- i.e. it had proper serial console support, and once I got to using Alphas, proper 24x7-Lights-Out support with the ability to power cycle it and reset it remotely without extra control hardware. In many respects I still do the same thing, but because of the things you were saying about how the pace of hardware change has dropped significantly in recent years, now the hardware I use is just an older variant of the same stuff you can buy new -- e.g. my new-to-me servers are Dell PE2950's -- they're replacing a PE2650, but they're not really all that much different from a brand new R710 or similar. The old 2650 is really feeling dated now and its processors are missing a number of features I want, but with the 2950 I can run the very same binaries quite a range of hardware from the latest greatest back to these older second-hand systems. Also, w.r.t. supporting older and less-capable systems, I would now treat them exactly the same as modern embedded systems with similar limitations. I don't expect I'll ever do many, if any, full builds on my RPi or BBB, and hopefully not even build many packages on them either, but rather I will cross-compile for them on my far more beefy big build server. Were I to try to run the latest NetBSD on an old Micro-VAX, Sun3, etc., I would never expect to actually do self-hosted builds on such systems. I really don't understand anyone who has the desire to try to run build.sh on a VAX-750 to build even just a kernel, let alone the whole distribution. I won't even bother trying that on my Soekris board! -- Greg A. Woods Planix, Inc. <woods%planix.com@localhost> +1 250 762-7675 http://www.planix.com/
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