Re: Anyone have working pre-v8 machines?

[Chris Hanson <cmhanson%eschatologist.net@localhost>]

On Apr 5, 2022, at 11:07 AM, Romain Dolbeau <romain%dolbeau.org@localhost> wrote:
> 
> I also have several other "working" (read: last time I tried) pre-v8 machines ; my 4/330 is running NetBSD, though it hasn't been turned on since around 2019. I also have a SS2 clone known to work, but it has SunOS 4 on it at the moment. A slew of others have been mothballed working but not tried in a (long) while.

Same, I have a bunch of old SPARC hardware on which I have and would like to continue to run NetBSD, including a Sun-4/110 next to the HP 9000-433s in my home office and a couple SPARCstation 1 as well as a multiprocessor (ROSS) SPARCstation 20 as well as a bunch of stuff in between.

One great thing to do is set up NetBSD and SunOS 4.1.4 side by side, it shows well how a modern OS doesn’t need to be tens of gigabytes and require thousands of MHz of deeply pipelined multicore CPUs to be usable and useful, it doesn’t really require that much “overhead” at all.

  — Chris