Re: retrocomputing NetBSD style

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> The interesting retrocomputing hardware is 15+ years old, more like
> 25 for a pmax, and there just isn't much in the way of useful or
> interesting things one can do with it.

Perhaps _you_ don't see much.  I use SPARCstation 20s as my
screen-and-keyboard of choice; I find them eminently useful.

> In other words, the landscape's changed.

It has.

> And this is why I don't really understand the motivation for running
> NetBSD on a 20-year-old box.  [...]  But NetBSD?  You get nothing you
> don't get from a $400 walmart PC, except the nameplate on the case
> and perhaps less nauseating disassembly if you have to chase a
> compiler bug.

Actually, I do.  I get a good keyboard (the Sun type-3 is the
second-best keyboard I've used, and I've never seen an instance of the
best available for grabbing).  I get a machine that has been running in
production for at least a decade, instead of breaking two weeks after
the warranty period expires.  I get a machine that can fall four feet
to a porch and crack the case instead of shattering half the insides.
I get a machine that can't run all (to a first and maybe even second
approximation) the malware out there even if it does happen to find a
hole in my exposed attackable surface.  I get keeping electronics out
of landfills (electronics both old and new).  I get a machine that
doesn't make me hold my nose every time I have occasion to look at the
assembly- or machine-language level.  I get satisfaction of nostalgic
impluses.  I get the hardware for free or close to.

There are prices, of course.  I also get a machine that doesn't let me
get away with sloppy coding - actually, that one maybe should go in the
previous paragraph.  I get a machine that draws significantly more
power.  I get a machine that exposes how sloppy flat-screen display
makers have gotten; the state of the art has advanced to the point
where I'm having trouble finding one that can do what CRT displays
routinely did.  I get a machine that is almost irreplaceable (which is
why I have more of them than just the ones I'm using).

> I grant that some people are attached to old machines such that they
> think this is worthwhile, because I see it in front of me, but I
> don't *get* it.

I think it was originally said about jazz: "If you hafta ask, you ain't
never gonna get it".  I'm not sure it's entirely fair to put it that
strongly here, but there's certainly some that is just different values
leading to different tradeoffs.

> This has deep consequences for system tuning, which is one of the
> reasons NetBSD is not really a good OS for hardware of that age.

...which is why those of us who have been and are interested in running
such machines have been talking about (and to a mild extent, doing)
forking: what NetBSD has become and is becoming is not suited for our
use.   Speaking purely personally, it's still the best of an
increasingly bad lot, which is why I'm still here - but it's 1.4T and
4.0.1 and 5.2 that I'm running, not 6.x or current (admittedly mostly
for an unrelated reason).

>> I really don't understand anyone who has the desire to try to run
>> build.sh on a VAX-750 to build even just a kernel, let alone the
>> whole distribution.

I recall a time where NetBSD/vax was broken for a long time because
everyone was cross-building; as soon as a native build was attemped,
the brokenness showed up.

I native build on _everything_.  If it can't native build, it isn't
really part of my stable, so to speak.

>> I won't even bother trying that on my Soekris board!

Interesting you'd pick that.  In my case it's a PC Engines board, not a
Soekris, but it's they're players in the same space.  It's my house
network border router, and it's running 4.0.1, and, yes, it's
self-hosted except that I use NFS instead of disk because I still
distrust mass storage with ridiculously low write cycle limits (I may
someday give it USB disk...).

> It would be sort of interesting to track down where the difference
> comes from (apart from the memory usage of gcc, which is obvious);
> ascribing it to "bloat" is facile. But that would be a lot of work,
> and when it comes down to it nobody really seems to care enough...

When I have no reason to think NetBSD would do a damn thing with the
results?  Of course I don't care enough.  NetBSD has abandonded me and
my use cases; why shouldn't I reciprocate?

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