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On 09/01/14 19:56, Tom wrote: > Perhaps I should have said 32bit machines. I do have a 50Mhz 486 but > everything else is still good to go! > Tom te tom te tom I'm a serious hoarder, particularly when it comes to computer gear, but I only keep the interesting/cool/historical machines to hand: the garage rack has a PA-RISC HP workstation, an IBM RS6000 (Power), a Motorola 68000 powered Apple, some PPC Macs, a couple of Sparc/UltraSparc based Sun boxes, several MIPS based SGI machines and a whole bunch of other exotic gear. At one point or another I've owned pretty much every architecture from VAX to a cell based IBM blade. I still miss my Alpha, sadly destroyed by morons during a house move across London. Mostly they're for nostalgia, but I keep them all up-to-date with current software and they do occasionally get fired up in anger to compile some exotic software or for increasingly uncommon real-world tests: nearly all my clients have got rid of their legacy machines at this point. It used to be common for shops to have a big mix of iron in service, which I somewhat miss: now it's all Linux and Windows on x64. Boring. The one thing I *don't* keep is crappy old x86 hardware. I mean really, what's the point of some lame old Pentium2 or even a five year old Celeron D? Weak, inefficient, underpowered and with absolutely no redeeming historical or rarity value. No support for "cool" or exotic operating systems either. I give them away where possible, or just check the real rubbish and I'd count anything not 64bit and with less than four cores pretty much junk at this point. With a bit of patience an Intel quad Q6600 can be had from Ebay for about a tenner. Regards PS: if anyone cares, my absolute favourite machine *ever*, of all time, is the Sun Ultra 1, which I originally learnt Linux and Solaris on. 170MHz! Still works like a charm. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq