[Oberon] Re (5?): Names and numbers of releases.

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 15 Jul 2020 at 16:17, <peter at easthope.ca> wrote:
>
> P.s. SunOS and Solaris are long gone from the SS2. Debian was
> installed years ago to have capabilities not present in Solaris.

Well, yes, I understood that. Before I gave the machine away, my
SPARCstation IPC ran Red Hat Linux. But that was about 25Y ago, and I
just wanted a working modern-ish OS for what was still fairly capable
hardware in 1996.

> NetBSD was installed when the old Debian was reported to have become a
> security liability.

Also understandable.

But the thing is, now, it not being 1996 and a SPARCstation 2 being a
collectable antique rather than useful, capable hardware, if I was
researching some 1996 software that ran on a SPARCstation when it was
new, I would max out its memory, put a SCSI2SD card in it for big fast
cheap modern storage, and run the original OS -- either perhaps the OS
it came with, SunOS 4:

https://winworldpc.com/product/sunos/4x

... or the latest original OS it could run, in this case Solaris 7:

https://winworldpc.com/product/sun-solaris/7x

https://archive.org/details/solaris_7_1199_sparc

Then I would have a hope of running, say, Ulm Oberon on it.

It's not my machine and I don't know what disk and RAM it has, or what
you use it for.

But a SPARCstation 2 is a vintage box now, not useful, capable,
powerful hardware. By modern standards it is _extremely_ slow and
feeble. Thus I am a little mystified why you'd try to run a modern OS
(e.g. NetBSD) and then run a PC emulator on that (e.g. Bochs) to run a
PC version of Oberon, when for $5 you could buy a PC from a thrift
store or get one from your local Freecycle group that would run PC
Oberon (or NetBSD if that's what you want) about 1000× faster.

I am not in Canada, I am in a relatively poor, former Communist
country in what was behind the Iron Curtain... but I suspect I could
walk out of the house now and be home in a couple of hours with a
gigahertz-class PC and a screen from a junk shop. I suspect my
flatmate probably has a few in the basement.

If I were home, I would have access to about a dozen such machines,
including a 2008 MacBook, a 2009 MacBook Pro, a Thinkpad X61 tablet
and a Thinkpad X301, all of which were given to me as junk in the last
year alone.

Hardware is not a problem any more. A 10Y old PC is a powerful,
capable machine; the slowest and least capable machine in the list
above is a 2GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM and an 80GB disk. It's
currently running NeverWare's version of ChromeOS and I should give it
to a new home, but my circa 12Y old Thinkpad X200 (bought 2nd hand for
CA$200 in 2013) runs A2/Bluebottle  on the bare metal and is very fast
indeed.

So why on Earth try to run PC Oberon on a vintage RISC box? Surely the
point here is running vintage RISC Oberon on the vintage RISC box?

Or if the SPARCstation 2 has little memory and disk, and you have no
optical drive for it, then just run SunOS on a PC in an emulator:

http://defcon.no/sysadm/playing-with-sunos-4-1-4-on-qemu/

-- 
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