@vampiress@cstross Serial terminal? Please, let’s dignify it with its proper name. Looks like an LA100 DECwriter III. I spent many hours exploring Woods’s version of ADVENT on one of those in the summer of 1978.
@trent@vampiress I once had a housemate whose hobby was collecting old Unix computers, and we had an 11/780 in the kitchen.
His pride and joy was a Multimax 310, which was a 1980s supercomputer designed to support hundreds or perhaps thousands of users. His had 8 CPUs and about a gigabyte of RAM, which was not quite fully loaded but pretty close.
The Multimax corporation designed the Annex terminal servers as a way of getting lots of users onto a machine that only had four serial ports. The Annex product was divested to Encore, which sold it to pretty much every Uni in Australia in the late 1980s. If your Uni had Sun or DEC compute resources, you probably accessed them on an RS-232 terminal connected to an Annex.
(We had several in the house for incoming modem lines)
@vampiress@NewtonMark@trent I’m seriously considering grabbing an “Old” Sun T4-1 from work and setting it up for use with the latest openly-available Solaris 11.4, to give folks a taste of something still very modern and capable but non-x86. I’ll absolutely do it if you want to port SFP/DFP to it!
@vampiress@NewtonMark@trent Is gcc >= 11 modern enough? Solaris has its own libc that isn’t glibc though, which may or may not be a problem with porting, but is very well documented. I can chuck on the Sun C compiler suite too, if you’d like an extra challenge…
@vampiress back in the 90s, Digital and Unisys had offices in buildings next door to each other in Perth. I always wondered which office they combined into