WARNING: RANTING COMPUTER NUT...

From: Scott Stevens <sastevens_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Sat Jun 26 02:09:44 2004

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 09:58:34 -0400
"Jason McBrien" <jbmcb_at_hotmail.com> wrote:

> >
> <SNIP>
> >I've never committed the crime of having anything to do with the SGI
> >boxes that sport an Intel processor and run NT, though.
> >
> >(Aieeee!, huh? )
> >
> <SNIP>
>
> I think those are going to be collectable machines. I've been looking
> for a cheap one for a while. It's a really interesting architecture.
> Custom memory bus (== EXPENSIVE memory modules) Custom system bus and
> integrated video controller. These things were way ahead of anything
> else at the time, unfortunatly for SGI the PC hardware market catches
> up quickly and commodity PC hardware had the kind of bus speeds their
> workstations had within a year (RAMBUS, BOO! HISS!) As vertically
> marketed as they were they don't run anything other than Windows NT. I
> think there's a version of Linux floating around for them, and odds
> are NetBSD will at least boot on them (Horray for serial console! :)
>
> >(** I'm probably one of the .0001% of people who has seen a Windows
> >NT desktop on a PowerPC system)
>
> I've got Visual Studio 5 for PowerPC if you're interested...
>
Actually, I am somewhat interested in something like that. I've sold
the IBM RS/6000 box that I ran NT/PPC on, but could easily pick up
another such machine sometime. The problem I had with NT/PPC was that
there is nothing, completely and absolutely nothing, to run on it. I
wobbled around on the net (as an experiment) with the crippled IE2 that
they bundled with NT4 before shrugging and putting AIX back on the
machine. With an actual compiler on the box, it could actually be
useful for running code on. Being the weird person I am I'd probably
get another PPC box and bring it up again.
Received on Sat Jun 26 2004 - 02:09:44 BST