On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 08:59:34PM -0500, Nick Holland wrote: > > But why was I running a Sun E250? What could it do better than anything > else for me? When my E250 did something strange (which it did from time > to time), there wasn't much that I (as a non-coder) could do about > it...nor was there much interest in "fixing" these power-hungry slugs by > those that could. They didn't have one, and they didn't want one. How > much was I helping OpenBSD by running on an E250? Close to zero. Could > have helped a lot more if I took the money spent on power and air > conditioning my basement and sent it to the group.
In some markets, the problem is a little deeper: not so long ago, these non-x86 platforms used to cost too much. Today, they're almost impossible to find, even the not-so-odd platforms like sparc and sparc64. Not so long ago, it was common to find 50 MHz sparc machines costing the same as a decent car, not to say sparc64, even when GHz amd64 were available. I still run on a macppc and used to run on a hppa, which I bought cheap, probably because the guy who sold didn't know what to do with it. -- db
