alt Hacker NewsAs someone who mostly gets my retrocomputing kick from running modern software on old RISC hardware, I'll try to explain why that's my thing.
Typically, these venerable beasts come from a more "civilized" era of computing, at least that's how I feel. I wasn't around to actually experience it, coming up when real UNIX™ was already pushed to the fringes. I'm completely aware that I'm romanticizing, but for me, there is something about these machines that a PC just still can't exactly match. Trying to move a mouse and typing with broken keyboard layouts through a buggy-as-hell IPMI interface that was somehow bolted to a machine that, from it's inception, never was meant to be operated remotely, just feels like a hack. It might get the job done, and it's cheap, but it most certainly isn't elegant. The PC as a whole just isn't elegant.
But these old SUN and IBM machines, they're something different. Tools from professionals, for professionals. With remote management built into the machine from the inception! No stupid GUI with whacky translations in sight!
Of course I'm also fascinated by Solaris, AIX and HP-UX and whatnot. But running modern software on these machines has it's own appeal to me. My retrocomputing itch is to show off these machines, experience them. And what better way to do that than to actually use them to host modern software, impress people by showing how capable they still are, maybe as a glimpse into a future that never was.
Replies
Mirrors the Amiga experience. PC architecture still is a hack compared to 1200.
I felt this way in my late teens and early 20, when I spent a lot of time e.g. finding a pipeline for playing YouTube videos on sun4m machines running NetBSD.
I'm now in my late 20s, and my impression is these machines were largely always hacked together piles of garbage, they had just cost a lot more ;)
There were highs of elegance, yeah. The OpenBoot PROMs introduced with the SPARCstation were marvelously functional and beautifully elegant, especially compared to the previous pre-boot environment. But when you look under the cover, you find a million patches of duck tape, like Sun having to force their compilers to avoid using the o7 register due to speculative instruction prefetching sometimes triggering DMA activity on a peripheral card and causing an unintended side effect. This was due to one buggy CPU (the 80 MHz Weitek upgrade CPU for the SS2), but the bug required changes for all sun4c kernels (at an minimum).
Or how the ILOM on newer SPARC servers are just embedded PowerPC chips running RedHat Linux. At least in the late 2000s :)
At the end of the day, NetBSD on my SPARCstation 2 is cool, super cool even -- there's even EXA acceleration support for the CG6 framebuffers in X!
But ultimate NetBSD/sparc is basically identical to NetBSD on my raspberry pi. I can even run the big endian port if I want a BE system!
On the other hand, running a contemporary OS like SunOS 4, or something exotic like Sprite, gives a very different experience. And honestly, these 80s OSes themselves feel more "elegant" in a hacker sort of way.
(I'd agree that most mid/late 90s+ Unix systems mostly just feel like worse versions of modern Linux/Unix, though)