[SunRescue] howdy, and question about utility of old sparcstations

[Steve Pacenka]

Howdy, all!  Happy 2001!

I'm part of a local computer recycling volunteer group.  Besides raising a 
little money for our parent body -- a children's science museum -- we are 
trying to save machines from landfills or scrap recyclers, and maybe even 
prevent a few new machines from being manufactured when someone's castoff can 
do the job.  The emphasis is on Macs and PCs, but we have about 20 Unix 
workstations.

Somehow I became the workstation specialist.  Amongst the donations are six 
Sparcstation IPCs, two 2's, two 1+'s, and a 1.  Most of the boxes have memory 
and hard drives.  There are a few external hard drives, monitors, mice, 
keyboards, and CD-ROM drives.  There is enough stuff in good enough shape to 
make a couple of complete working systems and a couple of headless server 
boxes, 32-64M RAM + 300-1G hard drive.

May I consult your collective wisdom about what we should do with this 
collection of Sunstuff to make it useful to someone?

I don't mind investing a little bit of money -- had to already for NVRAM -- 
and my time is free if the results will be worthwhile for our museum ($$ 
yield), for someone's landfills, and for some local small businesses or 
students.

One idea is to make network-attached-storage devices that could be used by a 
work group for auxiliary storage and remote file access.  The specs on a 
Sparcstation 2 look about like a high-end 486, as far as CPU and disk 
performance go; not bad for Linux or NetBSD.

Appreciate your ideas.

-- thanks, Steve Pacenka @ Babbage's Basement of Ithaca Sciencenter, 
   Ithaca NY, US  http://www.sciencenter.org/