"In the first purchase of his collection, Sellam Ismail loaded the trunk of his car with old computers he stumbled upon at a flea market for USD 5 apiece. He soon had filled his three-car garage with what others would consider obsolete junk. Years later, his collection of early computers, printers and related parts is piled high across shelves and in chaotic heaps in a 4500-square-foot warehouse near Silicon Valley. And it is worth real money."
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Member since:2005-11-14
I have a dec alphastation 433au that I am trying to get rid of and can't bring myself to take it to be recycled. Do you know anyone who wants it bad enough to pay shipping from saskatchewan? It's "free" otherwise. It's running freebsd 4.11 now. It has a dead battery and will ship sans hdd (ultimate data security, reformats aren't enough). Only annoying thing is it loses time and boot device info when the power is removed. Of course being an alpha, you never need to turn it off anyways, but I'd imagine that a battery could be found easily.
Member since:2007-04-16
Member since:2006-10-08
"I'm more into the kind of stuff you have in the modern part of your collection. I like the older computers, but I would rather gather up 90s systems that are a little more usable."
You mentioned SGI systems (O2, Indy). I've worked at some of them at university (Indy, Octane) and they're still fun to use. Video editing and OpenGL programming are their main field of use, and, of course, playing DooM. The MIPS processors are even faster at iteration count than Sun's Sparc ones. And surely wou'll have noted the nice design of these machines, no comparisons to the ugly stuff PC vendors sell today. With a little work, these machines can be made running without any hearable sound. If you're used to have your computer running silently, most "modern" PCs are to be considered crap in terms of noise. The "troughput" (real operations per cycle unit) is very good, MIPS R16k @ 500 MHz with 1.692 vs. AMD Athlon @ 1333 MHz with 0.672. SGI also made nice multiprocessor systems (and I mean multiprocessor, with real processors with own memory, own channels etc., not just cores) which made parallel processing with IRIX fun. And yes, IRIX is still usable. So, this was a long ode to SGI oh joy. :-)
BTW, do you know the SGI Crimson? It can "easily" be turned into a fridge. :-)
DEC (and Compaq) really made fantastic systems, the Alpha architecture was really impressing.
"and theres a few old DEC mainframes at work waiting for me if I ever take the time to go pick them up. I think the one is a 4000."
I have to state that I began my "career" in a data processing center (but sadly not for a long time) where mainframes (robotron EC1055M) were the usual means of high performance computing. Today you can laugh about them (huge boxes for 256 kB RAM etc.), but you still can learn from the principles they realized, and the software engineers who got complex tasks solved with these machines. But I cannot have them at home, so they're doomed. :-(
"I just need more room, I've had to pass on some sweet stuff."
Ah yes, I know this problem. It's a typical collector's problem. :-)
Consider the second important problem when you have two places of storage (house, garage). What you need is always there where you are not, e. g. you want to repair a machine in your house, but the hard disk you need resides in the garage...
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Google added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem.""It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow."During its Keynote today, Google announced new features coming to its flagship search function - you know, that thing we all started using Google for. VP Amit Singhal spent some time discussing what Google's search functionality will eventually morph into. Google's strategy is summarized by three words: answer, converse, and anticipate. Singhal explained that many of the pieces of these upcoming changes can already be seen in products that Google has recently introduced - namely, Google Knowledge Graph and Google Now, with perhaps a splash of Google Glass, too." I hold on to my hat every time Google changes Search. It's such a vital product in my daily life.
Member since:
2006-07-28
I'm more into the kind of stuff you have in the modern part of your collection. I like the older computers, but I would rather gather up 90s systems that are a little more usable.
I have...
SGI o2
sgi indy
dec alphastation 433a
hp pa-risc something or other (haven't touched it yet)
sgi octane 2000 (8cpu rack server)
origional compaq-branded alpha (forgot how fast)
and theres a few old DEC mainframes at work waiting for me if I ever take the time to go pick them up. I think the one is a 4000.
I just need more room, I've had to pass on some sweet stuff. I'm actually keeping the rack at my girlfriend's right now.