bikemath

Some ten years ago now, I read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. I don't really believe the book has aged all that well, but his description of a fully mechanical computer designed around a church's pipe organ still makes me laugh occasionally. Like, I just imagine a bunch of very-serious allied intelligence officers trying to break an enigma-like cypher with this machine that sounds like a calliope, and without fail I'll end up laughing. If you don't know what a calliope sounds like, there's a demo on Wikipedia.

I have an old rack server in my house (similar series, dual Xeon 6-core, now with 128gb of ECC ram) Since I bought the ram separately, when I was testing it out, I used some ram sticks that I had laying around. It did pass post. I managed to install a no-GUI version of Ubuntu**, which (for all intents and purposes) seemed to work fine. Naturally, your mileage may vary. **No GPU or CPU-based graphics, obviously.

For most problems: F = MA, and you can't push on a rope.