Re: about "obsolete systems"

[Paul Eggert]

Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> writes:

> It may be worthwhile to know that there still seem to be SunOS 4.1.x
> users out there, using autotools, reporting bugs:
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-libtool/2006-06/msg00021.html

Yes, there are still some people deliberately running old systems for
backwards-compatibility testing.  (And there are some
honest-to-goodness computer museums.  :-) But we shouldn't worry about
them.

If that bug report refers to a real host, that actually is installing
new GNU tools on a m68k-sun-sunos4.1.1 host for some reason other than
to prove they can do it, then I'd be verrrrry interested to know what
the host is being used for and why software is still being installed
on it.  m68k hosts became obsolete around 1990.  Sun's highest-end
m68k box (which hardly anybody bought -- it was wayyy too expensive!)
ran about 7 MIPS, which is less than 1/100 of the speed of a 500 MHz
Pentium III.

I'm aware of hobbyist sites (e.g., <http://www.sun3zoo.de/>) but these
are not of practical interest.