> My home cluster is built from surplus Dell Optiplex desktops
I used to do this as well and this is fine if you're able to source cheap power. But I'm in the UK, electricity prices are insane and I can't afford to run this kind of setup any more.
When I was a young broth of a boy I worked as a field engineer looking after a whole bunch of different hardware. One of these was a Pick machine with its own dedicated Pick branded hardware, amongst a fleet of terminals and early PC hardware. Nothing ever seemed to go wrong with it.
As a former Data General engineer, I too would like to see some love for RDOS and AOS. And also their diagnostic tool ADES which was a specialised OS in its own right, and ICOS.
Years ago I ended up in a system with a star I couldn't refuel from and was S.O.L. I had vaguely heard of the Fuel Rats[0] and did a google to see if they were real and contactable. I put in a call to them and about an hour later a kindly pilot turned up, refuelled me and off I went with a warm fuzzy feeling. I was very grateful. It reminded me of happy times being in a corp in Eve with your comrades helping each other out.
Being reminded of this might make me give Elite another go.
That would have been Kilostream which wasn't part of the ISDN system. Kilostream pre-dated ISDN. The reason for its high cost was that you could throw as much data as you wanted to 24hrs a day and it was a point to point dedicated circuit, i.e. you couldn't "dial up" different locations the way you could with ISDN.