Are any of yall into vintage UNIX machines?

Personally I love silicon graphics and sun micro systems and things of that nature. Let me know your experience!

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I do enjoy seeing them and learning about their history, but then again, I enjoy doing this with all sorts of vintage machines. I don’t have a collection of them, for multiple different reasons, but I hope that I will eventually get into them. For the moment, watching YouTube videos about them is great, like this one.

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Loved the Sun Ray. It was the perfect dumb-terminal for our Sun software admin, way more stable that using Exceed from Windows XP. Wish I still had access to all that great equipment.

Has it really been 25 years already? :sob:

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Heh. I had a Sun Ray 1 and a Sun Ray 150. Loved them. I couldn’t run my distributed.net client on them like I did my previous Sun desktop computer, as it sucked up all the CPU on the other side.

I threw out a pile of Java/SunRay cards couple years ago. Should’ve ebay’d them I guess.

The Computer History Museum at https://computerhistory.org/ also has a lot of old gear. And software.

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Very much so.

I had an Ultra10 for a hot minute.

Seems to me like the old SGI’s, Octane’s, HP/UX’s, and so on had more heart than today’s systems. I also love watching video’s on the old System360 machines, Cray’s, Contral Data Corporation and so on. Man I would have loved to have been a computer operator back when those were used in production.

Thank you for the responses! I myself have a small collection of SGI/SUN workstations. I have never used the sun ray thin clients. Some day I would like to go a museum and see a fully functioning cray or HP/UX machine.

I like the IBM 5150 desktop cases but still can’t find one for a normal price here in the Netherlands

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I frankly would love one of those bad boys in as close to original as possible.

From 1970 to 2004 I worked for Western Electric (1970 - 1987) and after divestiture I worked for AT&T long lines (1987 - 2004).

With Western Electric I stated using UNIX from a Teletype machine with no monitor, just a tractor feed printer. It looked very similar to this one.


Except it didn’t have the tape reader on the left, and it didn’t have the rolls of paper like this one. We put a box of tractor feed paper on the floor, fed it to the TTY then the used paper fed into another box. Then the boxes were labeled with date & time when the box was installed and when it was replaced. They now had an archived record of exactly what was done on that terminal.

When I went to AT&T I was working in one of the long lines NCCs (Network Control Center). They had Sun work stations on Unix. The first 2 years the early models were kind of crude by today’s standards. But then in 1990 they switched to a newer model Sun workstation that I used for the next 14 years or so.

Pudge

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Back in the early 2000s when the bubble burst. I bought a bunch of Unix workstations and small servers for close to nothing. Back then, they were still very usable. HP(HP-UX), Sun(Solaris), SGI(Irix), DEC Alphas(Tru64). I had a stack of them that was as tall as me.

I ended up getting rid of them about 10 years ago since they were just taking up space in my closet.

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for some strange reason I always enjoyed the simplicity and directness tin which Solaris did things, especially in an industrial environment. that said you could never debug anything on it easily.