Today I got a nice Unix box from a fellow who was looking to offload all his junk. It's a HP 9000 Model 735/125. It's a shame that there was no keyboard and mouse, but it came loaded OpenBSD 4.2.
I promptly upgraded the machine to OpenBSD 5.2 and it runs sweetly, if only through the serial console. I'll be on the lookout for HP-HIL adapters so that I can use the framebuffer.
For those that don't know, these machines were expensive high-end Unix workstations in the early 90s. This particular beast sports a 125 MHz PA-7150 CPU and 176MB of RAM. To put this in perspective, the average high end home machine at the time (1994) would have had 16MB of RAM. In terms of performance, these chips were second only to the most torridly clocked Alpha AXP 21064 CPUs. The PA-RISC chips of this era easily smashed the IBM POWER, SGI MIPS and Intel x86. Way to go HP!
Not sure what I'll do with it, but for now I'll just fiddle around with OpenBSD/hppa. Feels great to use a machine that cost $30,000+ at one point. They're simply built to a completely different standard...
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