Interesting hardware

Volunteering at The Working Centre I get to sometimes see some unusual hardware and be involved in some unusual projects. Not everyone has stores around that carry SCSI drives and controller cards. Sure there's always mail order, but mail order isn't always a comfortable choice. The other day I built a machine with 5 SCSI hard drives and a 20GB SCSI tape backup, not your typical home PC, but then again, most of the readers here probably are not typical PC owners. I'm always interested in hearing about what cool things people are doing with their PC's, particularly if it involves unusual hardware and Linux.

Lately I've had a bit of a hankering to get more exposure to new hardware. Volunteering is great, but my day job is non-technical, so when I'm talking about Linux it's always from a pure end-user perspective. I've been a computer consultant before, but almost all the solutions I created were based on Windows. (I've done DOS and OS/2 consulting). So, though I like what I do now, I have my eyes open for opportunities in the area to gain more exposure to new hardware and perhaps integrate a little of that new hardware experience into this web log.

For now I want to leave you with some interesting retro-ish photographs. The photograph below is of a 10GB, yes, that is gigabyte, hard drive. This beast looks like it should be a 10 MB, megabyte, hard drive, but it's a 10GB SCSI hard drive - honest!



And because I was really into SCSI the other day I decided to take a photograph of an Ultra Wide SCSI adapter. This Adaptec adapter is capable of handling up to 15 devices.



I should mention a word of thanks to my friend Kevin who gave me a different Ultra-Wide SCSI adapter for one of my home machines. I've had a 4GB Segate SCSI drive sitting unused for about 6 months now. Unfortunately the correct module did not load, so I'm going to recompile the kernel on that machine.

I've been toying with the idea of having some sort of identification contest, with prizes from Linux vendors. I have a few Ubuntu CD's I can give away. Right now it's just an idea.

Until tomorrow....

Charles