Re: retrocomputing NetBSD style

[Andy Ball <ball%grex.org@localhost>]

Hello Greg,

  GAW> However there were, and are, a lot of us who want(ed)
     > a modern OS to run on our old hardware because we
     > want(ed) to re-purpose that fine old hardware to do
     > something new and exciting with it.

    I don't know about "new and exciting" but I agree that
there are times when I have done something interesting or
unusual on older hardware using NetBSD.  Erasing floppies
and old SCSI disks for example.  I'd also been hanging onto
a Mac Quadra 700 with the thought of using NetBSD/mac68k to
talk to devices on an RS-422 bus.  I recently recycled that
machine though after I realised that an RS-422 card plugged
into an mITX Atom board could do the same job better.

  GAW> I started running NetBSD on Sun-3 and early sparc
     > systems because that's the hardware I had, and it
     > was good an capable hardware.

    My SPARCstations 5 was a nice machine and I was
thankful for the work that people had put into making
NetBSD/sparc work well on it.  Sadly that too has been
recycled.

Regards,
  -Andy Ball