Of the Love of Oldtimers - Dusting Off a Sun Fire V1280 Server

vikingpower writes "Today, I decided to acquire a refurbished Sun Fire V1280 server, with 8 CPUs. The machine will soon or may already belong to a certain history of computing. This project is not about high-performance computing, much more about lovingly dusting off and maintaining a piece of hardware considered quirky by 2013 standards. And Now the question creeps to mind: what software would Slashdotters run on such a beast, once it is upgraded to 12 procs and, say, 24 GiB of RAM ?"

Comments

Free software.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many free software projects are not regularly tested on anything other than x86.
Make your system available for free software developers and you will be sure to have
the loag average of 30 or more. Ghostscript project, for instance, would greatly benefit
from testing on minority platforms.

No emotional connection

[Weaselmancer]

I own some old stuff. An Amiga 2000, a C64, an Apple IIe, a Macintosh se/30. I maintain them because they were a part of my childhood. I have an emotional connection to these machines. Someday (I am watching) I will buy the digital microvax my old university used for their comp labs if I can. Loved that box. Spent days on it. I'll own an original Defender cabinet someday too.

I guess what I'm trying to say is why? You have no connection to this machine. You won't get nostalgic when you see it boot. Why bother?

Re:Keep it Vintage

[Lord Kano]

I'm into vintage firearms. I can't tell you how many times I've seen an old WWII or WWI vintage rifle that's worth next to nothing because some Bubba went and fucked it up. Guns that would be worth a lot of money if they were un-messed with are only worth a couple hundred dollars. I assume it's the same with most classic car collectors.

LK