mrbill

Reminds me of an early release build of Win95. It would properly set time back an hour for Daylight Saving Time, but not set a flag that it had been done, so it would do it over, and over, and over...

I'm amazed that they can sell them for $125 including shipping (which has to be at least $40-50) and still make a profit. Makes me wonder what THEY paid for them..

Vendor said they had more than 100 still available, and both of the units I've gotten so far are the original config as shipped from Dell according to a service tag lookup.

It wasn't really the sysadmins that got free stuff - it was department managers / tech leads, etc, that would get gear in for review to see if it fit with our workflow, processes, etc.

Us sysadmins just had to install/maintain it, and occasionally would "profit" when it was retired and the company/vendor didn't want it back.

Managed to build an entire multi-node NetApp cluster out of spare and retired parts one day when we were bored. Our NetApp rep said "I didn't see this, I don't know it's here, I don't know it exists, as far as I care it's a bunch of spare parts you just happened to put in a rack..." :D

I worked in oil and gas (Halliburton) for 12 years.

The amount of stuff we got in "for review", "for test", "preview", etc. was simply amazing. Even pre-production gear a lot of the times. I found a pair of Tesla cards just sitting in a box in an office I cleaned out one day... and I know we got a system with some Phi cards in it when they came out.

The most interesting thing I ran into was when cleaning out a facility after a move, we found a Dell Itanium-1 box that not only did Dell not want back, they wouldn't even admit to making it in the first place... It ended up going home with one of our devs...

Nice thing about being a sysadmin was that we would get "video cards and such from our developers who had just upgraded to the latest and greatest - and the stuff they were throwing out was only one or two years old.. so our own desktop workstations built with cast-off parts were pretty nice.

It's not just workstation hardware - I've recently bought a couple of Dell T410s off eBay for $125 each (shipped!). Quad-core Xeon E5620s, 4G RAM, 6-bay hotswap chassis, DVD-ROM, iDRAC 6 Enterprise, PERC 6i RAID card.

Upgrades: $25 for 120G SSD (boot drive, goes in the empty second 5.25" bay), $27 for 16G RAM, $20ish for an E5670 6-core CPU, $35 for an LSI HBA in IT-mode (supports >2T drives), $10 for a set of SFF-8087 cables to go from the HBA to the existing hotswap backplane. 30-45 minutes to upgrade all the firmware for the DRAC, lifecycle controller, BIOS, etc.

Grand total of around $250 for a really nice server with full remote management, and for the cost of another E5670 and a Dell heatsink I can upgrade to dual-CPU (12 cores/24 threads).

They're so cheap that I've gotten two systems to upgrade as described, and this morning ordered a third (yet again $125) to have for spare parts.

The eBay vendor emailed me and offered to sell me a pallet of 24 for $80 each, but I don't have that kind of need or money lying around...

As for laptops, I tend to get refurb/off-lease Thinkpads from arrowdirect.com (coupon code ARROW gives 15% off), then max out the (cheap DDR3) RAM and throw a SSD in where the HD was. I've built up a T420s and an X230 like this for when I need a decent portable machine but don't want to take my expensive Macbook Pro somewhere. For the T420s I even got a $50 adapter board from a guy in China that let me put a FHD IPS screen in, instead of the 1440x900 TN LCD that it came with...

It definitely still exists - I used my old DECUS membership number to get a new set of license PAKs (and a link to download the install media and software kits) last week.

From the page:

"No you can't just "sed s'/Red Hat/CentOS/' (someone always offers that)"

I'm not always somewhere that I can get overnight delivery.

I had one. Horribly slow, and the keyboard was terrible and near unusable. Sold it to a coworker a couple of weeks later.

No wireless charging on the new phones.

I used the heck out of it in the Nexus 5 days, but got so used to plugging in my Pixel 1 in the interim that I hardly used it at all once I got the P3.

I'm currently using a Pixel 3, but just ordered the 3a as my new "backup" phone (replacing my OG Pixel 1 and a P1XL I bought refurbished).

I'll probably use the 3a as my primary phone for a month so I get the $100 Fi credit on my account, then move back and put the Fi data-only SIM in the 3a.

Now I just need to sell the P1 and P1XL...

The book about Fordlandia is great.

https://www.amazon.com/Fordlandia-Henry-Fords-Forgotten-Jung...

Tons. If not a POTS line its a VoIP connection.

I'm guessing that shipping is the biggest part of the cost? I see that a 10lb box is only $5 more than a 5lb box...

archive.org - look up Jason Scott/@textfiles on twitter.

Protip: cheap ultrasonic jewelry cleaner.

You wouldn't believe some of the gunk i've gotten out of pens that sat in a drawer for 20 years....

I love my Parker 51s. All of them older than I am (of course) but the ones that still work (aren't cracked, etc) work wonderfully (filled with Noodler's inks).

After I finally bought a copy (at a pretty expensive price), someone uploaded a version to the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/lisploreguidetop00brom

I got mine back in the RHEL4 days, got a 97%, and yeah its bugged me for years as I want to know what I got wrong.

Probably the "hardest", most involved, "gotta know your shit" certification I've ever done.

I definitely felt like I'd earned it.

Dave Cutler (one of the designers of VMS at DEC) led the development of WNT at MS. While some ideas may have trickled down, WNT isn't "based" on VMS. If it was, it would be a lot better :D

(Still waiting for the x86-64 VMS port to be completed... https://www.vmssoftware.com/products_roadmap.html)

The book "IBM's 360 and Early 370 systems" by IBM Press goes DEEP into the development of these systems, and is one of my very favorite technical books. I paid $50 for a used copy more than a decade ago and it's well worth it. (also: "IBM's Early Computers" from some of the same authors, covers pre-360 stuff).

https://books.google.com/books/about/IBM_s_360_and_Early_370...

I was one of the poor folks who could only afford the Matrox m3d (aka PowerVR PCX2), which shuffled video data to and from the 3d accelerator over the PCI bus, and was therefore slow as crud.. but, I had GL Quake!

http://www.vintage3d.org/pcx2.php

I bought a bunch of the Cree LED bulbs from HD when they first came out, and I've had probably 6-8 of them fail into what I call "disco strobe" mode.

Eventually I'll replace the rest of them as they fail with whatever cheap store brand LED bulbs I can get.

I worked for Halliburton as a sysadmin for 12 years.. during that time they owned 34/8 and 134.132/16.

Looking now:

134.132/16: still LGC/HAL

34/10: HAL

34.64/10: Google

34.128/10: HAL

34.192/10: Amazon

So I guess they decided to make some hefty profit...

The fancy bed was auctioned off in 2013.

http://www.heinleinsociety.org/2013/07/own-heinleins-second-...

It went for just over $2K.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Robert-A-Heinleins-Bed-/25131783994...

google reader

Article mentions smallparts.com - however, SmallParts was an independent company that Amazon bought years ago (2005). I remember getting their (awesome) catalog in the mail before the takeover.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

I used this as an example for my public speaking class in college in '94. I also passed out a Pop-Tart (in a baggie) to every person in the class. Wow, memories.

This is per-user, not per-entire-app-user-base, AFAIK

I usually brought my own keyboards (you can get one with MX browns or mx brown clones for $35-75 on amazon) to whatever job.. but at this one they saw my keyboard, said "Budget of $100, spec out whatever you want, and we'll order it."

The guy said "$150 for a keyboard and mouse of someone's choice, amortized over a year or two, is a tiny price to pay to keep our people happy."

I ended up with a Das 4C board at work (with browns) and a custom double-shot keycap set (bought out of my own pocket).