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January 12, 2002
For the Week of 1/12/02
Wasting your Time:
The Computers of RouseWorld
(RouseWorld Labs) — There have been many changes to the RouseWorld LAN since I last babbled about it, so I decided to waste some time talking about "The Kids". I've got sort of an antique computer collection. Sadly antique computers are about as valuable as antique paper plates — so it makes me a bit of a freak, not a savvy investor.
The keystone of the main LAN (10/100 BaseT) is valis, my Sun Microsystems ss1000 which is the main house file and print server, now that albemuth is down. It's a big, noisy box and currently the only multi-CPU machine. In the other corner of the "office" is harp, a little Sun IPX that is the house web server and dns server. Sitting on my desk is a Sun ss10, bishop, my main Sun desktop — bless its heart. The Sun's use Texas Instruments RISC CPUs.
Sharing space with bishop is a Power Macintosh 6100, aka Power Pizza. It mainly sits there running SETI@home very slowly. In my bedroom (stop looking at me like that, I need to put it somewhere) is a Macintosh Quadra 950, aka Grievous Elder. It also runs SETI and has a analog video capture board, should I ever need one (hey, I got a good deal on it).
On the wireless LAN, naturally, is a Macintosh PowerBook G3, RouseBook purchased just days before the release of the G4 PowerBooks — not that I'm bitter. This is my main machine, since I've sold the iMac to my Mom, who need something a little more modern that the 6100 she was using.
On the LocalTalk network segment are the "living room" Macs, which mainly sit around playing Bolo.
The one Power Macintosh in the LocalTalk group, a PM 6500 known as EggHead, also keeps my financial records (such as they are). All of the other machines use the 68k architecture. The youngest of these machines is a Performa 636CD, a new addition that hasn't been named yet. Then comes a PowerBook 190, or BabyBook, an older, smaller laptop. The oldest member of the LocalTalk group is an Macintosh SE-30, called Owl — it is one of the "Classic" all-in-one Macs.
I've also got one of the very first Macintoshes, the Macintosh 128K, with a 8 MHz CPU and, yes, 128K of RAM. I don't use it much because it can't be connected to any of the networks.
Is that all of the computers? Well, what do you count as a computer?