> On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 08:59:34PM -0500, Nick Holland wrote: > > > > But why was I running a Sun E250? What could it do better than anything > > else for me? When my E250 did something strange (which it did from time > > to time), there wasn't much that I (as a non-coder) could do about > > it...nor was there much interest in "fixing" these power-hungry slugs by > > those that could. They didn't have one, and they didn't want one. How > > much was I helping OpenBSD by running on an E250? Close to zero. Could > > have helped a lot more if I took the money spent on power and air > > conditioning my basement and sent it to the group. > > In some markets, the problem is a little deeper: not so long ago, these > non-x86 platforms used to cost too much. Today, they're almost > impossible to find, even the not-so-odd platforms like sparc and > sparc64.
That is correct. For instance, we just had an SGI Origin 350 die on us. It takes a lot of time to diagnose the real failure of such a machine. We really would like another... you'll note how hard it is to get another, oh and if you find the current listing on ebay... does that machine work... do we take the risk? It'd be nice if we had other people to take the risk, test it, and if it is good, then ship a working machine to us :-)
