Machines I Have Known and Loved
There were definitely also a Compaq Alpha SMP SCSI full tower and a Transmeta laptop in there somewhere, but for the life of me I can't recall their names. For a few months, I owned a collection of old UNIX workstations covering IRIX, HPUX, AIX, and Solaris, but I donated these to the Georgia Tech Computing Museum, and never did enough with them to consider them truly known or loved.
This company doesn't exist anymore, but they had a crazy 2xPentium + 8xPPC blade solution that we sold IPS on. I wonder what happened to our demo copy. It was the second loudest single computer I've ever been around, the loudest being a Tilera Gx.
One day I showed up at CNN, played some Tecmo Bowl in NESticle, hit on a few girls in the non-techy areas of the floor, and saw what I assumed to be furniture being wheeled into my office. It turned out to be one of our production Sun Enterprise 4500's, a machine costing well over a hundred thousand dollars in 1999 money. I assumed that respect was finally being properly paid, and accepted the gift in tribute. Very upset people reclaimed it less than half an hour later, and yea verily, this was not the most ridiculous (nor the most discombobulated) horseshit I witnessed in a few months at the Cable News Network.
Fun(?) story: that machine was one of the two valiant frontline webservers that delivered the stripped-down CNN front page of 2001-09-11.
