[rescue] WTB: Good 'antique' computer for education

[Sebastian Marius Kirsch]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 02:22:24PM -0400, Big Endian wrote:
> My fiance is looking for an OLD computer to teach herself some 
> computer architecture. 

Wow. Is she serious? Does the thing have to be usable, or do you only
want to use it as a plaything? If the latter, I'd recommend a Q-Bus vax,
I think, for example a MicroVAX II. These things are cheap, there are a
lot of them around, and you can put both a current version of NetBSD on
it and vintage 4.3BSD. (I think 4.4BSD as well.) The combo uVAXII/4.4BSD
would probably be ideal for education, since there is a lot of
documentation for it. (Think "The design and Implementation of the
4.4BSD operating system", and all the other books, like Stevens' series
of TCP/IP books, that are based on 4.4BSD, and all the books about the
VAX architecture.) Besides, the VAX is *the* 32-bit killer minicomputer,
*the* classic CISC architecture.

> How small can I make an -11 or a VAX?

A Q-Bus VAX in a BA23 case is a 19", 4U (?) rack-mountable unit. Pretty
small. Other VAXen go as big as you want.

-- 
Yours, Sebastian Kirsch <skirsch at moebius.inka.de>

The reason that every major university maintains a department of
mathematics is that it's cheaper than institutionalizing all those people.