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[Don Y]

Ray Arachelian wrote:
> Don Y wrote:
>> Even luckier -- it *came* with it!  ;-)
> Very lucky indeed!
 >
>> I originally hoped to put it in the kitchen as a nice
>> little email box (but I have been overruled on that idea  :< )
>
> Yeah, wives are interesting creatures. :-) That's where I had mine for
> the longest time - the voyager, not the wife. :-) 

Amazing how a few computers meets with disdain... yet a
closet full of *shoes* doesn't!  :-/

(and shoes are so BORING!  Hell, if it doesn't have blinkenlights,
what good is it??)

> But two years ago, I found myself a decent job that provided a lovely
> thinkpad with a dock, so the Voyager went into the museum.  Granted,
> they can do NFS, but these machines are already painfully slow to begin

Yup.  I have mine on a small UPS so that I could dial out, etc.
even if there's a power outage.  But, we have so few outages
here (and never any of more than 30 minute duration) *and*
I now have laptops to throw at that problem so it's kind of
just taking up space...  :-(

> with.  Anything you can add to speed them up helps.  1GB CF cards are
> cheap and fast these days, maybe you can go that route with a cheap
> PCMCIA<->CF cradle.  You probably can't boot the voyager off a CF card,
> but, you can certainly store swap+/tmp and /home there.  When I had the
> Voyager on the kitchen table I had two 128M CF cards in it, so that way
> swap was distributed across two drives.  I don't recall whether the
> PCMCIA bus on these multi-tasks well enough to get a performance
> increase, but I hoped it did. :-D

I had hoped NetBSD would eventually bring their support up to a
level that would let me replace Solaris on that box (since NBSD
seems pretty respectable on older SPARCs) but that hasn't yet
happened.

> I got rid of most of my sparcs, but held on to a few interesting
> ones...  For a short while, my house was "sparc-henge."

Makes one wonder what sort of rituals took place on the equinox...

>> Thanks, I'll save the pointers in case I decide to bite the
>> bullet.
>>
>> Old Macs used SCSI.  Did old apple laptops *also* use
>> SCSI drives?  (i.e. might that be a source I can check out?)
> Yes, most of the early used use SCSI drives (Duo 230, PB145, etc).  Some
> of the newer ones (5300ce), use IDE which makes life easier.  It used to
> be that SCSI got you better performance, but of course modern 2.5" IDE
> drives are a lot faster than the older 2.5" SCSI drives used in these
> beasties.

I will have to check my surplus sources and see what turns up.