71–80 of 82 posts
Sun Blade 2000 I'm actually planning to put an SSD in it, but my co-workers say it's a waste of money. That may be true, but it'll be the coolest Blade 2000 out there.
How? I thought those only had FC and SCSI interfaces.
I have no idea how old the systems are behind this data point but it seems relevant nonetheless: there are apparently 200-300 billion lines of COBOL still in production : http://www.enterpriseinnovation.net/content/how-should-gover... This showed up here a while back and is also an interesting read: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2010/08/western-civilization... Sometimes in all my eagerness to keep up and constantly…
That's slightly less impressive when you remember that it takes about 1,000 lines of Cobol to write Hello, World.
I asked him once why he didn't switch to PCs, he couldn't see any reason to do so - the minicomputer was rock solid, still running strong and had the software he needed.
I imagine the oldest machines still in production would be with companies that regard computers the way a factory would regard expensive machinery - switching costs are high, and there is no sense in switching when the old one still works.
And I guess they would be mainframe class computers rather than PCs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, though startups also like to cut costs, and old stuff can be free. A lot of the hackers I know who still hang around the fringes of academia have some crazy old hardware salvaged from university skips etc that still works and is used reliably - usually, to echo the thread above, as a router or similar.
I second that.. I'm trying to start my business with an old Dell bi-xeon server, one P3 733MHz and 3 other older computers. As far as they work fine, I use them to run web crawling, solr and hadoop. They are very very helpful, and I plan to use them to the death before going live and have to spend any €€€. They are all in my kitchen, with a perfect Qnap NAS for the backups.
Sun Blade 2000 I'm actually planning to put an SSD in it, but my co-workers say it's a waste of money. That may be true, but it'll be the coolest Blade 2000 out there.
On a tangentially related note, a friend of mine is planning on putting an SSD into his PowerBook G4. Of course, those plans may be on hold as he claims to not use his computer much anymore, after getting an iPad.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a tangentially related note, a friend of mine is planning on putting an SSD into his PowerBook G4. Of course, those plans may be on hold as he claims to not use his computer much anymore, after getting an iPad.
That'll be kind of difficult. There are hardly any PATA SSDs available.
On an internship with the UK defense research agency my job involved the conversion of some ALGOL-68 simulation code into Java. I would be very surprised if the professor for whom I worked was not still hacking away at the ALGOL. No idea how old the machine he used was, but it would be quite happy in a museum...
UK Defence Research Agency's ALGOL 68RS (algol68toc) is available from sourceforge, It now generates C.
The interpreter Algol68G is also available, is easier to use, and a list snippets can be found at http://rosettacode.org/wiki/User:NevilleDNZ
To download Linux's Algol68 Compiler & Interpreter: * http://sourceforge.net/projects/algol68