PAPPP

I initially didn’t do enough of that in my PhD thesis (CS, about some weird non-frame-based imaging tech that is still only of academic interest), and my committee demanded I add more stake-claiming favorable comparisons to other tech to my introduction before I submitted.

I see a lot of articles talking about the white elephants that might be lost from public view, which is probably the biggest tragedy, using their KI-10 as an example.

The one I’m most worried about from that collection is that they have the last known operational CDC6000 series machine (Theirs is a slightly smaller CDC6500, the flagship CDC6600 is the machine that made Seymour Cray famous, it fucked so hard it was 3x as fast as the previous title holder when came out in 1964 and was still the fastest machine in the world until 1969… when it was replaced by the derived, upgraded CDC7600 from 1969-1975).

It’s a 12,000lb, 80" tall, 165" on a side monster that draws 30kW (at 208V/400Hz), I haven’t heard a plan for it, and there are very, very few possible long-term-secure homes for such a thing.

I guess it’s just not in the current auction so it isn’t drawing as much attention yet?

Don’t trust that they’re 100% compatible with mainline Linux, ChromeOS carries some weird patches and proprietary stuff up-stack.

I have a little Dell Chromebook 11 3189 that I did the Mr.Chromebox Coreboot + Linux thing on, a couple years ago I couldn’t get the (weird i2c) input devices to work right, that has since been fixed in upstream coreboot tables and/or Linux but (as of a couple months ago) still don’t play nice with smaller alternative OSes like NetBSD or a Haiku nightly.

The Audio situation is technically functional but still a little rough, the way the codec in bay/cherry trail devices is half chipset half external occasionally leads to the audio configuration crapping itself in ways that take some patience and/or expertise to deal with (Why do I suddenly have 20 inoperable sound cards in my pulse audio settings?).

This particular machine also does some goofy bullshit with 2 IMUs in the halves instead of a fold-back sensor, so the rotation/folding stuff via iio sensors is a little quirky.

But, they absolutely are fun, cheap hacker toys that are generally easy targets.