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  • Thom, not a YouTuberthomholwerda@exquisite.social
    Dec 15, 2025, 12:26 AM

    I wish I was wealthy so I could set a big-ass financial bounty for whomever ports modern Firefox to HP-UX 11i. It would involve Rust so it'd have to be a serious bounty.

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Replies

  • HP van Braamhp@tmm.cx
    Dec 15, 2025, 12:41 AM

    @thomholwerda I think with rust's GCC code gen it might not be as insane a proposition as it might seem. HPPA is still supported in current GCC.

    It's probably not insanely difficult. I expect the biggest problem might be spidermonkey, I don't know if there's still a non-jit option.

    And I just honestly have no idea how hard it'd be to make a hppa jit for it, nor how usable it'd be without jit.

    But I think it'd be possible. My guesstimate is that it'll be more "annoying" than "difficult"

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  • Thom, not a YouTuberthomholwerda@exquisite.social
    Dec 15, 2025, 3:51 PM

    @hp If I had any skill in this area I would work so hard to make this happen. Sadly I can't even get pkgsrc working, that's how incompetent I am.

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  • HP van Braamhp@tmm.cx
    Dec 15, 2025, 4:07 PM

    @thomholwerda This stuff is all a giant pain in the ass. You have to have a screw loose to find stuff like this fun and also remember all of the dumb shit.

    I'm the kind of person that just read all of the manpages-dev... That's my idea of fun.

    You have "a life" ;)

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  • HP van Braamhp@tmm.cx
    Dec 15, 2025, 4:06 PM

    @thomholwerda @CursedSilicon Auch, that sure makes it quite the commitment as a project! :D

    It's insane how much money some people think these boxes are worth. Who is really paying that much money?! Are there companies that desperately need them?

    Are most retro computing enthusiasts just way richer than me?!

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  • Thom, not a YouTuberthomholwerda@exquisite.social
    Dec 15, 2025, 4:45 PM

    @CursedSilicon @hp IBM IntelliStation POWER 285 and an AlphaStation ES47. The two machines highest on my list. Closely followed by the HP zx6000 (late model).

    Rare and expensive. Very, very expensive.

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  • HP van Braamhp@tmm.cx
    Dec 15, 2025, 4:47 PM

    @thomholwerda @CursedSilicon The two major architectures still missing from my collection are Itanic and Alpha... I have UNIX workstations for most other flavors. quite low-spec ones though, and I'd really love to get an O2 again.

    I miss my o2.

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  • Bitslingers-R-UsAnachronistJohn@zia.io
    Dec 15, 2025, 4:44 PM
    @thomholwerda @CursedSilicon @hp Is it reasonable to think that if someone were interested in working on it, you could give them shell access to your system?

    Another non-Rust platform that could use a genericised Firefox / SpiderMonkey is Alpha, and there may be more Alphas out there than PA-RISC, but once patches are made for one CPU, that would likely be most of the work needed for the other.

    OTOH, Rust does exist for 32 bit and/or big endian PowerPC, and nobody's genericised Firefox / SpiderMonkey enough yet to get them running there.

    It's a shame so many people are radicalized in to believing that portable code is "too hard", requires constant, ongoing "maintenance", and that it "holds back" development and progress. Thanks, Linux distros :P
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  • HP van Braamhp@tmm.cx
    Dec 15, 2025, 4:51 PM

    @thomholwerda @AnachronistJohn @CursedSilicon What does "securely" even mean in this context?

    I will 100% guarantee you that there's known local root exploits on that box. :)

    I, personally, wouldn't worry about it. The biggest nod to security I might care about would be maybe putting an RPI on the network with modern SSH to hop to the C8000 from.

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  • Bitslingers-R-UsAnachronistJohn@zia.io
    Dec 15, 2025, 4:53 PM

    @thomholwerda @hp @CursedSilicon Even if ssh for HP is old, one can still use a modern system as a jumphost using ssh -J.

    A Raspberry Pi or something similarly small / low power can run a modern OS (like #NetBSD), and you can offer key-based ssh to it, and allow ssh access from it to your HP. That’s one hopefully simple possibility.

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