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retrocomputing NetBSD style



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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