Last night I recieved far too much computer hardware for my humble apartment. As JK moves to places farther north, he passes on that which was passed to him:

• a Nextstation Color
• a Next (sync on green) Monitor
• a Quadra 900
• a Mac Monitor
• a Beige G3 PowerMac (Tower)
• an IBM Netfinity 4000r (though neither of us knew what this was at the time).
• a Sparc 5
• a Lexmark Optra RN+ Laser Printer
• a Mac Classic
• assorted cables and widgets.

Now some of these are working right off the bat. Some of these will take some work, mostly because they were either designed for enterprise installations or they are just plain obscure. Possibly both. Thng is, while I enjoyed being able to boot up the G3 and have my first chance to play with my very own Mac (discounting some experimentation with OS/X on x86) the real fun is with the Sparc and the Next.

There are these computers, that exist between the dinosaur PCs (in the larger sense of personal computing) and the Wintel GUIs of the late 90s and today, which occupy a certain place in every geek’s heart. Somehow, they contributed to the modern computing experience – or they somehow exceeded it – but were relegated to a role that kept them out of the hands of most users either by price, availability, or a failed business model. Possibly all. The Sparc and the Nextstation were two big ones on my list to aquire. As the day passed, others popped into my head, mostly in the following order:

• an SGI Indigo
• a BeBox
• a DEC alpha
• a NextCube (I admit, a bit greedy)
• one of the later Amigas
• and to make up for lost time with Apple since my Apple IIc- a IIgs, Lisa, and G4 cube.

Sure, there are others, and the G4 hardly fits with the rest of the list, but these are the computers that over the last 20 years have left me with a feeling of… well it’s hard to generalize, but they are all “cool” in one way or another – even the very corporate Sparc (for its design and OS) and Alpha (for its hardware and being the only non-x86 platform ever to run a commercially available version of Windows). They are also very system oriented – none of these computers have the commodized feel of an AMD or Intel box. Of course, that is part of the reason these computers are on this list and not in my house – their uniqueness drives their price the wrong way, making them notable objects of interest, even perhaps desire, but unobtainable until years after the company folds or sells off its hardware division as it escapes the path of the invincible price/performance ratio of x86(-64).

But now some of them are mine. And I will be scrounging for parts and attaching them to my network and then wondering what in the hell to do with them.

I’ll think of something.

Edit : The Alpha wasn’t the only non x86 Windows platform – 3.51 was released to support PowerPC, MIPS, and I believe a Sparc port was made as well. However, Alpha had the best support (though NT ran in 32-bit mode), being the only platform other than x86 to have a full set of service packs released in NT4. Had Compaq not dropped the Alpha, W2K would probably have supported it as well, as the prerelease versions, up to RC2, ran on the Alpha.

This entry was posted on ‍‍כ״ד אלול ה׳ תשס״ו - Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 12:24 and is filed under hardware, incidental. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.