[rescue] Sun 3/80 Restoration

[David Brownlee]

On Sun, 6 Oct 2019 at 20:40, John Carr <jcarr at poethecat.com> wrote:
>
> (mistakenly sent this to Bill directly)
>
> On 10/5/2019 4:17 PM, Bill Dorsey wrote:
> > I just read over the last year or so of postings for the list and see
> > that there still appear to be a couple of people here who have Sun 3
> > computers in their collection.BB  Would be pleased to exchange thoughts
> > with anyone still actively using these old machines.
>
> I have a 3/60 ("moonbeam") that I'm typically pretty active with, but
> it's off right now and in a storage unit (flooding in the basement...
> long story). For awhile, it was my work machine at a startup where
> everyone was using NetBSD as their primary desktops. While everyone else
> had pretty fast x86 boxes, I was rocking my 3/60.  I still have my
> desktop image from '01, and you're absolutely right ; NetBSD 1.6 is
> considerably faster... but, I think we all understand why. When I get it
> back and start using it again, I'm debating what i want to do with it
> this time around and what OS to run on it. I'm debating doing
> NetBSD-current and working with some of the devs to try to get some of
> the m68k routines a bit more speedy.

There seems to be some good activity on NetBSD/x68k and NetBSD/luna68k
(from what I can tell from my non jp reading perspective...).

IIRC there was work with mlterm to get a console graphical twitter
client running (though I think you need to connect via an http->https
gateway to get any effective speed:), and recent changes to the
in-kernel audio mixer to make it performant on m68k.

(For some of us there is just something gratifying on a deep level
about having hardware from the late 80's both able to run its
contemporary unix, and the same *nix that is being actively developed
for 64bit arm/x86 machines -p)

Daavid