On Fri, 9 Mar 2001 tbuskey@feanor.tools.gtei.net wrote:

> 
> "Daniel R. Killoran,Ph.D." said:
> >Lee Reynolds wrote:
> >>  I'm just wondering how much
> >>longer the 68k macs will be viable enough to make a
> >>useful system with it.
> >
> It's nice to have machines cheap enough that you can dedicate 1 for 
> file serving, one for print serving, one for email, 1 for firewall, 
> etc.  And they can be tuned & secured for that function.  Makes 
> debugging/sysadmin much easier.

Another valuable reason for the mac68k port is education.  Not the school
type, but the personal type.  As people upgrade to newer hardware, a lot
of people (like myself) are left with old obsolete systems laying
around.  People interested in trying out Unix or Linux are much more
likely to give it a go, if it will run on hardware they've got laying
around.  I upgraded from my Centris to my G3.  I probably never would have
tried out NetBSD if I had to go out and buy hardware to run it on.  I certainly 
wouldn't have tried installing it on my desktop machine (having to
partition disks and all, being the newbie that I was).  But I didn't have
to.  It ran on what I had!  Now, admittedly, there's a LOT more spare PC
hardware laying about than Mac hardware, but PC hardware is not what I had
laying about.

And due to the Mac68k port, NetBSD got one more convert, and one more unix
hobbyist, and one more NetBSD advocate.  I told one of our system
administrators at work today that she could run unix on here old SE/30 at
home.  Here eyes lit up.  She had no idea.  We may have another join the
ranks due to the Mac68k port.

Roger