Some Old Stuff I Like

• Old UNIX workstations.

  I'm something of a retro-computing buff. That's a nice way of saying that I'm a terminal pack-rat and completely incapable of throwing away equipment that still works (no matter how slowly, by today's standards).

  • Digital Equipment Corp. DECstation 5000/260 (60 MHz MIPS R4400).

    You've got to love those old TurboChannel® boxes. Former Sequoia 2000 folks might remember the DEC 5900 file servers, “heel” and “toe”; I've got their brains (they come on convenient, easily-removed daughtercards) and Prestoserve® boards installed in a couple of 5000/240 workstation chassis. ULTRIX® just keeps going and going and going - I hope I can avoid going to NetBSD/pmax or DECstation Linux for a bit longer (the peripheral support isn't quite there, yet - wish I had the time and expertise to help).

  The Sun 3 and Sun 4 machines are gone, as threatened.

• Old books.
  • Unbelievably, many of the old Richard Scarry books are out of print! This, in spite of the fact that they've got people churning out coloring books, pop-up books and videos with new stories and art. For example, you can't find any of the Tinker and Tanker stories any more. Some of the older books seem to have been sectioned into series of tiny paperbacks.
  • If you're a bibliophile, check out the big used-book web sites, like BookFinder. I've now found GREAT copies of some books for which I've (manually) searching for some time. Examples: Jacques Bertin's Semiology of Graphics, Laurie Anderson's Stories from the Nerve Bible.
  • I spend entirely too much time contributing bibliographies for long-past conferences to Michael Ley's DBLP Project. It's mostly for the greater glory of Berkeley DBMS research; a lot of the early INGRES publications were in workshops and one-off conferences.
    • ACM Pacific: '75, '80.
    • ACM SIGIR: '80.
    • ACM SIGFIDET/SIGMOD:
      Conferences: '70, '71, '72, '74 (Vol. 1, Vol. 2)
      Workshop on Data Bases for Interactive Design '75
      Workshop on Data Abstraction, Databases and Conceptual Modelling '80
      Workshop on Databases for Business and Office Applications '83
      Workshop on Engineering Design Applications '83
      Workshop on Computer Architectures for Non-Numeric Processing '78, '80
    • IEEE SSDBM: '83, '86.
    • FQAS: '94, '96

Modified: $Date: 2003/01/02 04:22:33 $ by $Author: aoki $