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[Don Y]

Ray Arachelian wrote:
> Don Y wrote:
>> Don't confuse consumer "peecees" with other modern machines.
>> (what's the MTBF on that 15 year old disk drive from your 386sx??)
> Depends on the drive.  I've had modern 80GB, and 160GB drives die on me
> after only about a year of use (funny how they go just past the
> warranty!).  These were well taken care of drives.  Meanwhile I have
> several 5MB 5.25" full height Seagate drives for my Lisa that are nearly
> 25 years old - and they still work, though they sound like jet engines
> when I turn them on.

But how many *hours* do they have on them?

> The real problem with ancient x86 hardware is cost per watt.  I don't
> mean the CPU, I mean the entire machine.   A modern machine runs a lot
> more efficiently than an old 386, even though Intel CPU's were until
> recently notorious for consuming lots of power.  There are very few
> things I can't do with a modern machine that I could do with an old 486
> or 386 - even if it has to be inside a VM or emulator.
> 
> That said, until very recently, I used a Pentium I 100Mhz with 64M of
> RAM as a router.  Ran beautifully, and it served better as a router than
> taking up space in a junk yard.
> 
> I replaced this with another aging machine - a PIII running at 500Mhz,
> which only uses 100Watts more - but I can certainly get a lot more out
> of it.  So that old machine certainly cost me more to run than the new
> one in terms of performance for electricity used.  I certainly don't
> need a 2Ghz AMD64 with 4GB of RAM for use as a router.  Today.  In 5
> years from now, my desktop will be very likely be my router.

I prefer SPARC LX's... they draw maybe *40* watts?  (though I
don't move much network traffic through them so I can live with
their reduced bandwidth)  Perhaps I'll replace the disk with
a solid state drive and cut that (and the noise) even more...

> I tend to look at the early machines as a Cambrian explosion.  We saw a
> ton of different kinds of machines, each unique in its own way.  The

Good analogy!

> market made them extinct, so now we have only several handfuls of kinds
> of machines.  But, those old ancient beasties were wonderful in their
> own ways.  A 286, or 386 being the ancestor of modern common PC's makes
> it uninteresting - but only because of how common they were. 
> 
> A few of the ancient x86 line have some historical value.  The 1st IBM
> PC, the Jr, the 1st laptops, the 1st portable PC, and so on are
> collectibles because they are the 1st of something.  But a generic white
> box 386, meh.

<grin>