Post #4075081
2026-07-24 22:37 UTC
Replies (2)
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@ewen@social.ewenbell.com 2026-07-24 23:34
My greatest contribution to medical research, having quit my PhD and headed in a different direction, was to compile a library for predicting 3D folding structures for DNA and RNA. I had a "spare" SPARC station that got turned into an mfold server with a web front end. It was way slower than the SGI machines the code was written for, but it had a lot less people queuing up to use it too. Would save weeks of work for the researchers using it. I miss living in a world where I could be a useful human just by scraping together code and hardware for the other folks who knew how the science worked. I felt useful being part of a team, and being part of something bigger. Being self-employed is just very transactional most of the time.
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@plzupgrademe@fedi.txw.ca 2026-07-24 23:45
@ewen@social.ewenbell.com I don’t intend to conflate vintage computing with sparc in the list. My interest in vintage computing and alternative processor architectures intersect, but are distinct. I use modern POWER hardware, and SPARC is still alive with Elbrus in a way.