What's your specialty?

From: Christopher Smith <csmith_at_amdocs.com>
Date: Wed Feb 6 12:21:56 2002

I have a pretty varied collection. If I had to claim a
specialty, it would be "high-end" systems. Perhaps I
could specialize even further and say "graphics
workstations," but that would leave out several machines
which I'm very interested in -- the PDP-11 series, VAXen
(Unless I manage to find an old Intergraph...)

I've also become very interested in vector processors
recently, though most of those are way too large for my
current resources.

Most of my collection consists of machines which I find
interesting, and / or unusually innovative or powerful
given the time of release.

Generally this means:

SGI

NeXT

DEC

Other datacenter/workstation type machines -- for instance,
I have one SPARC (two, but only one that is setup...), one
HP 9000, and a Sequent S81 (multiprocessor fridge sized
box with up to 30 i386/16Mhz CPUs and matching Weitek co-
processors), MIPS M/120 (Interesting to me since I see
a lot of MIPS influence in modern SGI systems...) An Atari
ST (newest machine I can think of with the entire O/S in
ROM -- excluding embedded systems.)

Early machines (the earlier the better. I only have one
slide-rule, though, and one abacus)

I also have a collection of interesting or significant
home micros... A couple of apples (notably a IIGS), an
Amiga (I would like a better one, actually...), a Heath H8
(interesting because of the front-panel, if for no other
reason)

Things that I'm missing would include:

Intergraph

A working NeXT (of any sort. I have a slab, but no monitor
cable or mouse -- I'm getting there... would also like a
cube)

A Unibus PDP-11. Preferably with blinkenlights, 8" disks,
DECTape, etc, etc...

A hardcopy terminal (Though, I'm supposed to get one
sometime soon...)

At Atari ATW (well, I can dream, right? :)

A Cray EL92 (or 94, or something)

A lisp machine

An RS/6000 (I'd actually like to find a smaller one of
these...)

An AS/400 (Yes, I know somebody offered one up recently,
but imagine having it shipped! Anyway, I'm holding out
for the Cray :)

A working Alpha (I'm well on my way to getting my
Multia running)

Chris

Christopher Smith, Perl Developer
Amdocs - Champaign, IL

/usr/bin/perl -e '
print((~"\x95\xc4\xe3"^"Just Another Perl Hacker.")."\x08!\n");
'
Received on Wed Feb 06 2002 - 12:21:56 GMT