23-10-2011, 01:51 PM
It's really sad.. I couldn't find a taker for a beautiful all original 486dx-2 with it's original windows 95 still working, or a packard-bell 8088. When you look at the stupid prices some people will pay for a zx81 you do have to wonder if the early 90's era computers will all just go to landfill instead of finding new purposes. Until I moved a pentium 133 did service as my router/firewall.. ran 24/7 for 6 years until going to the scrapyard in the sky.. I'm not going to say anything about my 64 node cluster of cyrix 333's .. except it could outstrip anything you can buy off the shelf when it came to sheer number crunching jobs like video conversion runs. All these kids constantly whining about how xxxx new game won't run unless they spend another £200 on new hardware every 6 months.. that beast ran everything in whatever hardware environment was required, the joys of emulation on a supercomputer.. half the time the problem wasn't "it won't run" so much as "how do you slow the damn thing down!!" 
.. I guess having a virtual ramdisk (no drives except the 8 gig boot drive on the "master splitter") of 31.5 gb's helps.
Anybody who gets offered a job lot of old p3/4 machines from a school/business or whatever (they do get offered.. I was offered 280 p3-800's a few weeks ago) to take off their hands.. If you have the room I would say grab them and make a few big heaps.. Businesses have to pay to have them taken away, you should be able to undercut the scrapman... which reminds me.. the council are giving us a heap of them soon.. I'll have to grab a nice matched set of 17.. p4's should do the same on 16 as the 333's did on 64.. economies of scale.
I have some photos somewhere of the "spare room" with 64 computers in blocks of 8.. it was a very impressive sight. When I find them they should be posted for posterity I reckon.
.. I guess having a virtual ramdisk (no drives except the 8 gig boot drive on the "master splitter") of 31.5 gb's helps.Anybody who gets offered a job lot of old p3/4 machines from a school/business or whatever (they do get offered.. I was offered 280 p3-800's a few weeks ago) to take off their hands.. If you have the room I would say grab them and make a few big heaps.. Businesses have to pay to have them taken away, you should be able to undercut the scrapman... which reminds me.. the council are giving us a heap of them soon.. I'll have to grab a nice matched set of 17.. p4's should do the same on 16 as the 333's did on 64.. economies of scale.
I have some photos somewhere of the "spare room" with 64 computers in blocks of 8.. it was a very impressive sight. When I find them they should be posted for posterity I reckon.
