On the summit of W7O/CN-074:
Staged to look like I was using it… it was just a fun gag photo. It is a real Altair from the 70s, and has not been powered on in decades.
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Who’s going to take a full rack unit up K2 with them? 
Also, anyone taking a photo with a bit of Solaris tin on a summit is clearly using genAI. Nobody used Solaris! 
Solaris? None of that modern rubbish. SunOS it was …
… never carried a box running it up a mountain though.,
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I can barely remember my time with Solaris and CDE or which Sun box I had on my desk. It had its wrinkles. The alternative was using the PIII 733MHz running NT 3.51 sat next to it. Neither was something you’d make an effort to use again!
I mainly ran Modelsim on the Sun and was so appalled with the speed the embedded processor assembler inside Modelsim (20-25mins to build the code) I taught myself Java and wrote a standalone assembler that did the same job in under 3 mins. And that was using a linear search through symbol table. Next job for the assembler was a hashed search but I jumped ship to a startup and wrote Linux drivers for StrongARM based video systems.
A real MITS Altair is worth some proper moulah nowadays. The toggle switches remind me of the old DG Nova 1200 front panel. The switches on the Nova 3 or PDP-11 were much nicer.
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The Altair above is before my IT time.
I started IT in 1996 or there abouts and we had a Dec PDP11 running a brake dyno machine (testing brakes for trains). Only 1 person had the knowledge to fix it.
I started doing some support on SGI Irix machines, SCO unix machines along with Windows 3.1/NT onwards.
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My first commercial programming was on one of these
Assembler code, TI-9900 based, circa 1982 …
RIck
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If memory serves me correct I only recall ever seeing one comms room with a bit of Sun Systems tin in it. Thats across about 25-30 years.
Personally never used Solaris myself. Always heard it was a pain in the rear to use and integrate with other systems.
The Nascom II and the Merseyside Nascom User Group were my introduction to computing. Meetings were in an upstairs room above a pub on James Street I think. I suspect that I was probably rubbing shoulders with several people in this thread.
Kevin
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I’d recommend CQRlog for Linux, which is a quite sophisitcated logging software and it also supports ADIF export for archiving purposes. It interfaces to online services like LotW, eQSL, clublog etc.
73 Jens HB9EKO
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