Making old Sparky come alive

It was roughly 3 years ago that I first heard about the finer details of a local 'University sale.' It goes something like this: the university has to eventually retire old equipment. A lot of that equipment is either outdated, or has been replaced by something much better. The university the allocates it to the surplus department who make it available for sale. I had heard about the sale before, but never had the details. What I had heard was that people had picked up Sun boxes, SGI machines, and a host of other less mainstream machines. Universities are full of unusual machines, and a university sale is a great way of getting one...

Or so I thought. My first sale I learned that in order to get the good stuff you have to come early. Even if you arrive early, you may not get what you want because others want the same stuff. On my first trip I spotted a few Sun IPX machines. I dashed over to get one, but it turned out someone had already bought them - all of them! I was quite distraught, there really wasn't much left at the sale that I was interested in - all mainstream computer components.

The next sale I went to I got smarter and arrived early, early enough to be first in line. Unfortunately, there was little of interest. Eventually I found the right mix of when to come to get a good spot, and I even found a few of the things on my list: a Sun IPC, a SGI Indigo (gutted case), and the coolest of all, 3 Sun Sparcstation 5's. I bought all three because one of the things I learned is that when you buy from the University sale, machines are often missing parts, unless they're set up and running. I was correct in my judgement to buy all three, and less upset at the guy who first beat me to the IPX's years before. Slowly I acquired more parts here and there, a 17" monitor I bought, a better 17" Sun 13w3 monitor from a friend, and a 20" Sun monitor I mentioned in a previous post, from a complete stranger whose wife wanted him to get rid of 'that junk' - which is what I'm headed for soon I'm sure. Ebay became a good friend. I was overjoyed when my Sun Type 5 keyboard and mouse finally arrived. I'd bought the Sparcstation 5's at least a year before, and going without a keyboard and mouse was difficult.

Having slapped together three systems into one I've come up with a machine with the following: 110MHz processor, 224MB RAM, 2.5GB SCA SCSI hard drive, and both an onboard network card (NIC) and a riser card NIC. There is no floppy drive, no cdrom, and I only have the proper bracket to mount one hard drive. This brings me to a brief, but interesting aside. When I bought all three Sparcstation 5's I cracked them open to reveal 3 x SCA SCSI hard drives, all with holes drilled right into them. Now I know some people are paranoid about data, but they didn't have to drill a hole through the physical media, there really are better ways of wiping a drive, and, in fact, some companies have the skills to recover data from drives that are physically mangled in this fashion, so the idea of mangling media isn't so good.

What is good is the fact that I broke down last night and made a 9.1GB SCA SCSI hard drive purchase from my favorite eBay merchant, London, Ontario based biggeek-computers, who I mention because when they say 'Expedited shipping,' they really mean it! Modern Linux distributions seem to be growing at a fanatical pace. 9.1GB isn't huge, but it's more than enough to contain a good size distribution, besides, sparky will probably end up as both a Blender workstation, and a MuSH server - or maybe just a Nethack machine.