[SunRescue] Aviion (was)OBP coolness

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Sat, 2 Jun 2001, David Rouse wrote:

> Ah yes, I think we would be living in a better world if there was a 
> Sandbenders. Most people out there are concerned about just two 
> numbers -- price and MHz. That kind of culture makes it difficult to 
> justify putting a bunch of time into the case design and materials. I'm 
> not even hoping for something like Apple's Cube, the old sparc cases 
> have a certain class and thoughtfullness.

Yeah.  I wish I could convince people that mhz don't mean jack.  Never
manage to though.  I've never own a machine that inspired much envy due to
mhz, but they do get occasional comments on Speed and throughput.

The key to the sandbenders though was that you could swap the innards.  I
know people who do this now.  They feel that their Pentium 120 in a older
style Gateway2000 case is too slow, so they swap the motherboard and
upgrade to a pentium 200, or a pentium 2 (I'm talking about my sisters
machine here.  The previous owned swapped MB and went to a pentium 200, I
want to swap again and go to pentium2 for sis).  Nice computer cases stay
around awhile.

However, if people get a nice case, they might keep it, but they tend not
to weigh case design into their purchasing descision.

Personally, I wonder if it is even possible to make really nice computers
while still using ATX.  I've seen some semi nice cases (see Boxxtech for
one, and this
(http://www.futurelooks.com/reviews/hardware/cases/lian_li_pc60/page1_frame.htm)
review for another), but no really great cases.  But, if you don't use
ATX, then chances are that the case will never be reused.

Actually, I didn't like the Apple cube.  It looked cheap to me.  I haven't
really like any of the recent Macs.  Also, SGIs have nice colors, but none
of their cases have ever really inspired me either.  The biggest computers
that I found really, really good looking were the 20th aniversary Mac, the
Next Cube (and slab to a slightly lesser extent), and the Thinking
Machines CM-1 and CM-2 (the 5' cubes).
 
> By the way, wasn't there a bit of truth behind Sandbenders? Maybe I'm 

I saw the SRL connection.  Never seen anything like sandbenders.

--
Joshua Boyd