Re: [PLUG] Linux for SPARC?

[Magnus <chrish@trilug.org>]

On Wednesday, June 25, 2003, at 02:58 PM, Bob Schwier wrote:

> 486's?
> There are those in the rest of the world who would cream for such.
> Can you imagine what someone with a bit of knowledge could do for 
> school
> children in Mombasa with 486's?

When I worked at d00k University, an only slightly better machine was 
doing email *and* web pages for all of Arts & Sciences dept.  And that 
was running the evil OS known as Solaris x86.

What Linux, at a minimum, or even BSD could do on such a box... *sigh* 
... kids today, seem to think that machines get slower as they get 
older.

My first 486 was a godsend.  I was developing in COBOL at the time.  
Compiling was orders of magnitude faster (in human time) on the 486 
than the mainframe.  I did all of my development work from that point 
on at the PC and simply recompiled the same exact code (wrapped in a 
different JCL) on the mainframe when it was done.  That was a clock 
doubled 486 25MHz (running at 50MHz internally).

My first Pentium, a Pentium 60MHz running OS/2, was more machine than I 
knew how to fill for awhile.  I had an 8 line BBS running off of it 
plus all my desktop stuff plus file & print services for my LAN (ARCnet 
rules, baby!).

And it pains me that big PC manufacturers aren't doing more to 
facilitate getting our *trash* computers to the places that really want 
them.  It pains me when I actually throw out a machine, and I have had 
to do that too much in order to keep from literally filling my home.

If I didn't have a family to support, I think it would be really cool 
to take a bunch of old computers to a developing nation and build an 
infrastructure for some of the schools there.

--

C. Magnus Hedemark
http://trilug.org/~chrish
PGP Key fingerprint = 984D 9A88 3D60 016F BE01 1506 60FB 85E1 9ABD 96F6

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