
SPARCbook 3000ST - Breadmaker
http://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/blog/Entries/2019/3/14_SPARCbook_3000ST_-_The_coolest_90s_laptop.html
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gonzo
Fun. I was one of the software developers on the SPARCbook series (prior to
the acquisition), as well as the Alpha machine for Digital, the P1000/P1300
(Pentium), and IBM (PowerPC).

Great memories of a small team taking on huge challenges.

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sodosopa
I ran Alpha servers back then along side a bevy of DG/UX Aviion and Clariion
servers. The DECs always out-performed the DG/UX boxes.

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jcims
I never used an Alpha, but somehow I fostered such an inflated impression of
their performance that if someone told me today that their new i9 wunderbeast
was almost as fast it would take a little while before I didn’t believe them.

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cb88
Well a lot of the Alpha engineers ended up working on and helped design AMD's
AMD64 extensions and hypertransport bus, after AMD adopted the Alpha's EV6 bus
for the Athlon you could say Alpha technology and engineers had a huge effect
on why AMD bested Intel for quite awhile back in the day.

If it wasn't for the Digital and AMD engineers we'd all be suffering with
IA-64 etc... I think it's more likely PPC would have remained a force to be
reckoned with in the Desktop space.

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jcims
Hey that’s some cool background info, thank you!!

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dougb
I used a SPARCbook back in 1996 for a business trip to Germany to install our
search engine at t-online.de. The CFO of the company wanted to know who had
this machine at all times because it was so expensive, around $20k USD. It
didn't have any usable battery life, if you tried to do any type of
development, it would last about 20 minutes before it shutdown. The many disk
partitions made us get creative to fill the 1.2GB disk with data. We had to
put files all over the place, and use softlinks get our software to work. This
odd setup lead a sysadmin to "clean things up" one afternoon. He delete most
of the OS in the process. He was really mad because he had to stay up all
night to do a reinstall.

Wow, I forgot about that machine until this post.

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gonzo
The initial sparcbook had a 20MB drive, and we had to squeeze SunOS 4 onto it.

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ken
> "A whopping 128MB of RAM (in 1997, this unimaginable in a laptop)" [sic]

Really? The PowerBook in 1997 supported up to 160 MB:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#Models](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3#Models)

I don't think this was particularly unusual. HP's laptop of the day supported
up to 160 MB, as well: [http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/37569/HP-
OmniBook-570...](http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/37569/HP-
OmniBook-5700-CT/)

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Theodores
At the time I remember being amazed that the company I worked for paid out $$$
to get some SGI machines up to ~160Mb of RAM. This was because the software we
used had a memory leak of some sorts and needed such an extravagantly
'wasteful' amount of memory.

Having the sockets to support up to 160Mb was one thing, having long enough
arms and deep enough pockets to pay for it was something else. Hence
'unimaginable'.

Nowadays you get a couple of sockets on your laptop, back then whether laptop
or something else, a workstation would have lots and lots of sockets for
memory, usually with very few of them filled.

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ken
I was a student at the time, and all the computer science researchers I knew
were maxing out their laptops with 128 MB.

In the June 1998 MacWorld, you could order a 128 MB upgrade for your brand new
PowerBook G3 for $389 [1]. Not cheap, but not _that_ extravagant.

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_9806_June_1998/page/n13...](https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_9806_June_1998/page/n133)

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Theodores
Ah but that was for a Mac. In the days before the internet as we know it you
didn't have commodity RAM for workstations. You had to pay extra or risk
voiding your warranty. Plus someone else was paying so why run the risk?

Sure the chips were commodity but the modules would have a different pinout.
They would be advertised as better.t

Another problem was that the more memory you bought the more it cost per
megabyte. A set of chips to fill the sockets with 128Mb would cost three times
as much as a set of chips that filled the sockets to give 64Mb.

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classichasclass
I've got a couple Tadpoles, including a PA-RISC PrecisionBook, but actually I
like the Sun Ultra-3 better. The one I have is a rebadged Tadpole Viper in
beautiful purple. The 1.2GHz CPU gets stinking hot unless you throttle it and
the battery life is about LOL minutes, but it can still run relatively recent
Firefoxes and Solaris is still useful.

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dublin
I had a SPARCstation Voyager for a while when I worked at Sun. One of the very
first all-in-ones ever with a color LCD screen. (My "regular" Ultra2 desktop
also had a couple of 24" HD monitors, which weighed more than a sack of
concrete each, and were much bulkier, too.)

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classichasclass
The Voyagers are lovely machines, but my personal favourite SPARC luggable is
the Solbourne S3000 with the flaring orange gas plasma screen. It looks like
no other workstation.

[http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/solace/](http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/solace/)

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dublin
Little-known story about how this little box saved the shuttle program: When
Dan Goldin took over NASA, he mandated that all of Mission Control would run
on Windows NT. (This was back when the NT kernel was excellent, as it always
had been, but the surrounding bits had serious stability problems). The
shuttle astronaut corps rebelled, literally refusing to fly if forced to bet
their lives against the BSOD. The solution was to provide the astronauts with
their own independent copy of the software that Mission Control previously ran
on their SPARCstations, so even if MCC crashed, the shuttle wouldn't. Since
the SPARCbook was already flight-qualified, the astronaut revolt was quickly
and quietly resolved, with almost no one even being aware of it...

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jasoneckert
That is awesome!

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drivers99
> Normally this isn’t a problem because you can boot a Solaris installation CD
> or network image and clear the root password in the /etc/shadow file.
> BUT....I have no SCSI CD-ROM that I can plug into the external SCSI port on
> the SPARCbook

That brought back a memory. I was working at a place in the 90s that got one
of those SPARCbooks that we were setting up for a customer, but we didn't have
a SCSI CD-ROM drive to install with. I actually went to my previous employer
(a Sun workstation support team in the computer center of a university) who
kindly let us use one of theirs on site.

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gnu8
At some point I lost my lust for obscure hardware like this, although I
remember what it felt like. I'm really disappointed he didn't take an image of
the disk as it was when he got it, because it would have been really
interesting to root through all the old Nortel stuff.

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juhanima
> The first thing I did was make a complete clone of the hard disk (c0t0d0s2)
> on my Solaris 10 desktop in case anything went wrong

I think he did.

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gnu8
Very prudent. I don’t see a torrent magnet link though :)

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tombert
Oh man, I remember seeing one of these (or something really similar) when I
went with my dad to work as a kid. When he told me that it cost more than
$19,000, I flatout didn't believe him. To a nine-year-old me, there was not an
appreciable difference between $19,000 and $1,000,000,000 , and I could not
fully understand how anyone would pay that much for anything.

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gwern
It's a more staggering number now - I get $34k using the CPI inflation
calculator. Can you imagine paying that much for a single laptop? Does anyone
even _make_ laptops that cost that much now?

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cmrdporcupine
I still like OpenLook/OpenWindows best of all the 80s/90s windowing system
attempts on Unix. Far preferable to Motif & its successors.

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ardfie
The display in the images looks quite sharp - resolution of 1280x1024! Not too
awful by today’s standards. Lenovo’s thinkpad x280, currently available with a
retail price above 1000 euro, comes with a 1366x768 display as the default
option.

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newnewpdro
Judging from the photos that display is _obviously_ not 1280x1024.

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jandrese
I don't think 1280x1024 flatscreens existed in 1997. A 1024x768 display was
pretty extravagant on a laptop.

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newnewpdro
The ThinkPad 770X had a 1280x1024 display option.

[https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:770X](https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:770X)

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wazoox
It's not from 1997. Pentium II mobile was introduced in 1998.

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linksnapzz
Ahem...the Fujitsu CPU in this was _not_ the fastest SPARCv8 implementation
around-IIRC, Ross made a HyperSPARC that ran at a galloping 200mhz!!

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monocasa
I never really understood splitting off /opt and /usr from / when they're all
partitions on the same drive.

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drbawb
ZFS takes this concept up one level of abstraction. You have a `zpool` which
is a collection of disks. You then have "datasets" which would be analogous to
partitions. One property of a dataset is a mountpoint, but they have many
more. In ZFS different datasets can have different compression algorithms,
different checksum algorithms, different log (journal) characteristics,
different ACL types, it can also manage exporting the dataset over the network
(setup NFS/CIFS for you), encrypt the dataset, etc.

That might give you a glimpse into why it's useful to split off different
datasets. I might want to tune my database (/var/lib/postgres) for throughput,
while my home directory is tuned for maximum compression & encrypted, while my
public fileshares are unencrypted, etc.

Also it's often useful to have different partitions if you need different
filesystems, not every filesystem is suited for every particular usecase. Also
sometimes you're constrained by other software: for instance many older
bootloaders would typically have very limited filesystem support; even today
your EFI system partition needs to be FAT formatted, which should serve as an
obvious reason why you'd want to segregate `/boot/efi` from the rest of your
system.

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monocasa
Sure, but none of that applies to this laptop, where they're all UFS.

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Annatar
The primary user if these laptops was the U. S. military and they saw combat
on the battlefield. Garrett D'Amore, father of the illumos project, used to
work on the drivers for this laptop at Tadpole.

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ajmarsh
I wanted one of these really bad back in the day. Had to settle for running
Solarisx86 on a generic laptop instead. Nice find.

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jason_slack
I have one still and a Tadpole laptop as well

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analognoise
Can't we just somehow copy that beautiful keyboard/case to make a modern open
implementation of it? We can upgrade all the internals after copying the
original format, and do all the prototyping with 3D printing.

Please tell me someone else has a screw loose and wants to do this too.

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mhandley
Now there's a blast from the past. As a young researcher, I got to have a
Sparcbook circa 1994 to take to events and demo the multicast multimedia
conferencing software we were working on. It cost about five times more than
everything I owned put together, and I was always afraid I'd forget it in the
pub or something. The alternative was traveling with a Sparc 20 in my hand
luggage, which I did too on many occasions. People were always more impressed
by seeing video on a laptop though. These days, you think nothing of it.

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heelix
Oh man - we had one of those tadpoles back in the dot com days! We got our
Sparc Oracle/Weblogic stack loaded up on it just like our 'real' servers. Our
CEO took it to a very important conference to do a live demo, took to the
podium, attempted to adjust the microphone... and the cord tipped a cup of
water onto it. Killed the laptop, but he still pulled off what he was
pitching. We were all hoping to run off with it after the event.

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peatmoss
I saw one of these last weekend at the PNW Vintage Computer expo! I coveted
those really badly back in the day.

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cik
I remember those.. I used to have one, it was so unbelievably useful. I ended
up turning it into a fastboot server in an emergency. Then... we spent ages
making it Linux :)

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stcredzero
I had a similar kind of SPARC portable computer running Solaris at a job in
1999. I didn't actually use it for my job. At that point, I had it as a
curiosity.

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chaoticmass
I used to work at a used computer store that recycled lots of e-waste. Got to
see a few different SPARCbooks but sadly none of them worked.

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bifrost
I loved the Sparcbook I used, it was great! This reminds me that I should
probably fire up my Sparc LX with its whopping 64MB of ram...

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dekhn
I knew a guy who travelled with one of these (probably 97 or 98?). I thought
he was crazy but it did have nice specs.

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pjmlp
A bit unrelated, for a while I tried to get hold of one of those Toshibas
being sold by Sun with Solaris x86 on them.

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tluyben2
If anyone has one of these for sale, please contact me (check my profile).

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intrasight
I haven't seen one of those in a few years ;)

