I intend to do just that -- the "fastest Power Mac ever" -- just gotta get the userland set up, I have a lot of FOSS to build on it before it's ready to go. Although it would be fun to run SheepShaver on a Power 795 ...
Yes, the cost was pretty high, but the ANS was also around 10 grand when it came out in 1996. My ANS came to me nearly new as part of a consulting deal in 1998 and it's served me as my primary box continuously since then (it hosts http://www.floodgap.com, http://www.classilla.org and http://www.tenfourfox.com). That's 13 years out of a machine that other than AIX 4.1.5 has had no operating system updates or support -- all of my BOS patches I did by hand (I've never considered Linux or NetBSD on these guys to be a good option). So imagine how long I can wring out of a machine IBM actually supports (and will probably support for many years, unlike a certain fruit company we could mention). Considering that, $10K is a bargain.
Did I mention it was fast? As soon as I get gcc up and running, the first thing I'll be doing is running a benchmark (probably dhrystone since I only have dhrystone numbers for most of my historical machines).
Yes, the cost was pretty high, but the ANS was also around 10 grand when it came out in 1996. My ANS came to me nearly new as part of a consulting deal in 1998 and it's served me as my primary box continuously since then (it hosts http://www.floodgap.com, http://www.classilla.org and http://www.tenfourfox.com). That's 13 years out of a machine that other than AIX 4.1.5 has had no operating system updates or support -- all of my BOS patches I did by hand (I've never considered Linux or NetBSD on these guys to be a good option). So imagine how long I can wring out of a machine IBM actually supports (and will probably support for many years, unlike a certain fruit company we could mention). Considering that, $10K is a bargain.
Did I mention it was fast? As soon as I get gcc up and running, the first thing I'll be doing is running a benchmark (probably dhrystone since I only have dhrystone numbers for most of my historical machines).