07/20/2010:
My basement has flooded again. The joys of living in a city built on a flood plain.
With the near-constant rain, water invariably finds its way into my basement. Usually it's only a trickle here and there, only once has it been a significant amount. I lost a few dozen old PCs that time... all barebones Pentiums under 120MHz, with single Gigabyte drives, CDRoms, and old ISA network cards. No real monetary loss (they were given to me when I bought out an old dotcom's other equipment), although I was out a large amount of time... time I'd spent installing Debian on them in order to build myself a grid. Ultimately it wouldn't have mattered, as I wouldn't have had enough power outlets in the house to accomodate them all. Besides, Manitoba Hydro would have taken a look at the (rather significant) spike in my electricity usage and reported me to the cops on suspicion I was running a grow op...
However, today's mess was but a trickle. A few small puddles and a patch of white mold in the corner... nothing I can't handle.
I did notice another trickle in a long-forgotten corner of the basement, usually inaccessable due to the pile of old furniture and junk in the vicinity. Dreading what I might find growing and/or thriving in the darkness, I grabbed my dust mask, hood, safety glasses, and rubber gloves and dove right in. Half-expecting the pile to hiss and growl as I worked, I started moving the set of 80's-vintage bar stools I'd bought at a thrift store for twenty bucks. Behind that was an end-table that had seen better days - the bottom was so waterlogged, its base crumbled to sawdust when I moved it. I opened the end-table up, and to my surprise, it contained a bunch of old Macintosh keyboards and mice (ADB). And hey! There's the dock for my friend's Handspring Visor PDA... an Amiga 500, ISA TV Tuner card, and Intel network printer server!
"Interesting," I thought to myself, "I wonder what ELSE is back here?"
And so, I kept digging... a few old end tables, a few boxes of knick-knacks, an old lamp, a Winnipeg Sun newspaper from 2004, an old Sonic the Hedgehog cart for my Sega Genesis, but not much else. After a half-hour, I was exhausted. I sat back into one of the dusty armchairs that was in the pile, casually looking to my left... "Hmm, there's my old coffee table, wonder what's in that white box on top of it?". I had to look.
I was pleasantly surprised to find a box of retrocomputing goodness: a full-height, 5-1/4" SCSI Magneto-optical drive, an Apple //c with tiny green monitor, a case with Apple disks, a shitload of console cables for my old IBM RS/6000 Powerserver 520H, a couple of Cisco 2501 routers, a Sun Type 5 keyboard and optical mouse, and more D-style power cables than I'll ever use. Not a bad haul.
I kept digging. Apart from the old Powerbook 1400cs I knew was back there, not much else was to be found in the pile. Surveying the dank ground and mopping up the water, I looked around for any signs of damage. Thankfully finding none, I set about reorganizing the mess and marking some items for immediate disposal.
As the light reached parts of the basement for the first time in years, a gleam of white caught my eye. Well, not exactly white but yellow, the yellowed body of a compact Mac... my old SE, sitting atop the cabinet in the wall. And beside it was my SE/30! Cool, I forgot I had these! "Hmmm," I hmmm'ed again, "With such cool things on top, I wonder what's INSIDE these cabinets?"
I opened up the first cabinet door and saw MORE UNIX SHIT THAN I EVER REMEMBER HAVING! And the second cabinet contained MORE OF THE SAME!
Wow. I was speechless.
It was like finding the Holy Grail, if the Holy Grail were buried by junk in some lunatic's basement.
There, boxed with all manuals, were original copies of SQLite; Informix/SQL; Oracle 7 and 8; AIX 3, 4, and 5; several Unix programming environments and apps, the complete X11 Technical Reference series (14+ volumes), an early copy of Solaris (labeled 1.1!) for Sparc, the Amiga Rom Kernel Reference (3 volumes), the Oracle Video Server, and a shitload of programming and "Teach Yourself (development environment of the day) in 24 hours"-type guides. Tons of RS/6000 and AIX stuff (including a full set of manuals for the Powerserver 520H), a few Solaris/Sparc goodies, and a couple of IRIX related items, too. All stuff I forgot I had.
Most, if not all, this stuff came from a software developer who developed Point-of-Sale systems, Automatic Teller Machines, and E-Commerce systems. I remember it well, as it was the last failed dot-com whose equipment I'd bought out. Still had the sales receipt (a hundred bucks CDN) from 2003! At the time, I was more interested in what was on the myriad of 486 machines than what was in the boxes of books, etc. I do remember putting the books, manuals, and boxes into the cabinets for later cataloguing, but I don't think I ever got around to it. So here we are, seven years later, and it's like Christmas in July... I am NOT going to be able to sleep tonight!
Once the Retrochallenge is over, my mission will be to go through this treasure trove, cataloguing what I have, and finding some way to make use of it all.
Something tells me I'll have enough here to keep me busy for many, many Retrochallenges to come. First thing I'm going to look at? Teach Yourself C and C++in 24 hours.