In article <17101.199602160606@topcat.aisb.ed.ac.uk>,
Neal Harvey  <nealh@aisb.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> Thinking about this whole more-workstations-than-is-remotely-sensible
> thing, a couple of points occured to me. Firstly, with it getting to the
> point where whole installations of Sun3 gear are being junked it has
> become feasible for an individual to amass large numbers of the things.
> Secondly, with the reusability of storage media and the networked design
> of the range, odds are that these will be mostly diskless. Thirdly,
> given that monitors tend to die a lot quicker and are, on the whole,
> more expensive to replace, then it's also likely that many of these
> easily-acquired systems will be in the form of lone CPUs. So, what can
> we do with these?

Well, a couple ideas:

2 (4*) port terminal server with SLIP/PPP capability
2 (4*) port serial printer server

* When Adam Glass was portmaster he talked about the possibility of
rewriting the zs driver to be a bus, so that the tty subdriver could be
attached to all four ports (and it sounds like Gordon just did this) and
then with hacked cabling use the kbd/mouse ports as serial ports too.

It's too bad the tings are hard/expensive to expand, or they'd make good
parallel printer servers or interface devices (network monitor your
alarm system or coke machine, or whatever). 

> Then I thought, what are the things we like about our Sun3s and what are
> the things we *don't* like, and the answer seemed obvious.

#define VOICE CROW_T_ROBOT

> We like their big monitors
Yes

> we like X
mm-hmm

> we like BSD
of course

> we like the way they love to network
yeah

> and we like the way they smell. 
and sure, I can certainly see where... <pause>  uh... *HUH*??

#undef VOICE