You can still find good HP-UX/PA-RISC and Alpha workstations. Even though they are both supposedly architectures that are heading to that great recycle bin in the sky. Some of the HP machines are really neat, and you never hear much about them because SUN pretty much owned the market. I'm not 100% sure on IBM machines, but their PowerPC chips are quite different to the ones you find in Apple boxen. You may want to take a look on ebay or wherever else you can get this kind of stuff.

Sure, you can get MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, PowerPC, StrongARM, or something even more esoteric, but what's the point? You'll end up running the same code, just compiled to a different processor. Despite the technical shortcomings of the X86, the processor can still run anything you can compile. Sure there are annoying BIOS issues. But when you come down to running real code, even most of the kernel code, it doesn't matter one bit what processor you have.

The new Amiga One [eyetech.co.uk] hardware. This is was the subject of a previous article [slashdot.org]. Outside of the CPU, it looks to take pretty much standard PeeCee hardware, but it's PPC based and it runs Linux right now...it will run AmigaOS once the nextgen OS is completed.

Check out http://www.reputable.com. They sell used SGI systems. You can pick up an O2 or Octane for under $1000.

I have a Blade 100. Of my three desktops (I also use an IBM Thinkpad A20P and a 950Mhz Athlon), it is definitely the slowest for interactive use - terrible graphics performance is the biggest culprit here, even when I use WindowMaker instead of CDE - and really loses the price/performance war to the other two machines.

If you "need" to have a Sparc machine, it's a nice option for the budget conscious, but I honestly have to say I think you'll be disappointed with it if you want to replace a relatively recent Intel or PPC machine

You'll have to spend a few more dollars than that to get a RISC workstation that will beat a $1000 Intel machine.

But my 6-year old son hogs it all the time to play Doom. =]

I don't know if I'd recommend it for a general workstation. I'm running IRIX 6.5.15, and it's as ugly as ever. Haven't loaded up gnome yet.

It all comes down to application support. If you're just wanting to run normal desktop stuff, forget it. Stick to x86 or Mac. But if it's just out of curiosity and a desire to learn, hit eBay and get yourself a variety. I've got VAXstations, an AlphaStation, a couple of SPARCstations, a NeXTstation, and the SGI. Not to mention the bigger stuff.. a couple of MicroVAXen and a VAX 6000-510. In all, I've spent maybe $1000 on odd hardware, and most of that was for the Alpha and the SGI. The rest were free or under $100. Ok, the VAX wound up costing me a bit for truck rental and medical bills after hauling around 80-pound hard drives, but it was still under $100. And the former owner bought me dinner for hauling it away.

sure it does. it keeps you on your toes when you're developing. sparc64 is 64BE to trap int/pointer conversions and to restrict alignment. ppc has bits numbered the wrong way and has an unsigned char by default. alpha only has a 27bit pci window.

betcha if you tried running the last C code you wrote on all of the three above arches, it would break on at least one.

It's a nice machine, with a PC motherboard modified only with a Sun northbridge and removed PS/2 connectors (the processor is even socket-370!).
However, be careful with these because the normal advantage of Suns is their (1) scalability and (2) Tremendous I/O bandwidth. With only one CPU, it's obviously not scaled very far, and the I/O bandwidth just isn't there for the blade 100- it's essentially a PC's 32/33 I/O system, but it's further choked by the fact that the CPU is only 500MHz (or 600, if you buy from sun's ebay store).
The usual advantages of USII architecture are lost on this system - the slow clock speed is not compensated by large cache, fast I/O, or tremendous scalability. The only reason to buy one (and this is why I own it) is if you are devloping for big Suns and you want binary compatibility with them on your desktop. Go instead for PC hardware with Linux, or if you really want, Solaris x86 (but don't expect binary compatibility with big suns). If you really want a non-pc desktop, shell out the cash for a single-CPU blade 1000 (starts at $6000, but if you're in any way connected with an academic institution you can get it for about $4000.) Otherwise, it's probably not worth it.

Good luck!