
No, a 16-year-old Sun Sparcstation doesn’t work like a new x86 box  - bootload
http://debian.stevenrosenberg.net/index.php/2011/04/07/no-a-16-year-old-sun-sparcstation-doesnt-work-like-a-new-x86-box/
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wazoox
I'm the proud owner of an Ultra-1. It's 64 bits, but this particular machine
doesn't really fly in 64 bits mode (needs an U-2 for that). Anyway, it works
great, and currently run dnetc :) I also have an SGI Octane (a wonderful
machine, really) and an Indy (unfortunately this one recently failed self-
tests, though it's only 17 years old). I still enjoy the noise coming from the
Octane TRAMs under load :) These unix boxen used to cost 10000 to 50 000 bucks
when I used them professionally, that's a particular sort of pervert pleasure
to own them for almost nothing :)

edit: I just dug up the Silicon Graphics product sales guide from 1996. It
gives list prices from SGI, Sun, HP, IBM, DEC workstations: all in the 9-16K$
range for the base configuration (double for proper RAM, screen, etc). The
software from Alias|Wavefront and friends, however, was mind-bogglingly
expensive : up to 75000$. So a fully loaded workstation with a complete
software pack was well in the 100000$ range.

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ben1040
This takes me back to the first summer internship I had, where I was plopped
in front of an SS5 back in 1998. I was a 17 year old kid who had a 486 at
home, so this machine with no removable disks whatsoever really perplexed me.
Then I realized I could walk to any workstation in the lab, sign in, and my
homedir and everything would be right there, while everything ran off the app
server transparently. "The network is the computer" blew my mind.

Our group's web server at the time was on a quad-CPU 50 MHz SS20. I can't
imagine what that thing had to have cost when it was new.

In 2001, when I was in college, some lab in my engineering school decided to
dump some SS5's. My roommates and I rescued a handful of them from the
dumpster, and then mixed and matched parts from them so we'd have three decent
machines. We set them up on a table made from an old cable spool, and on any
given weekday evening there'd be three or four people coding away on them.

~~~
spitfire
It's sort of funny, if you can find an old HP PA-RISC 712, or Sun SS20 you can
throw NeXTstep (OS-X) on it and it'll keep up with modern machines just fine.
Wordprocessors will open up just as fast as your modern machine (without an
ssd), mathematica keeps up with whatever you throw at it, and emacs is just
fine.

I'm still not entirely sure what happened to the last 15 years of performance
gains.

EDIT: I got through college in 2000 onwards using a nextstation turbo.
mathematica and openwrite handled things just fine. I'm confident I could cope
reasonable well with that setup again if I had to.

~~~
bonaldi
Ho, I knew there was a reason I kept the SS10 lurking under the bed. Somehow I
didn't realise that OS3.3 would run on it.

Now to find the 3.3 sparc disks, and copies of Improv and WriteNow. This looks
like it might be tricky...

~~~
spitfire
Bittorrent has them. There's archives of old next software out there as well.

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jonburs
One interesting thing we discovered about IPXs late one night in the lab is
that they're FCC Class A devices -- that is, they didn't have the same level
of RF shielding as consumer Class B gear. How did we exploit this? The memory
bus timings happened to be in the FM radio range (~90-110 MHz), so by copying
buffers in tight loops we were able to create a tone generator with a 10-20
foot transmit range.

I do hope the professors with nearby offices (and conveniently with radios on
their desks) enjoyed our looping rendition of the Close Encounters of the
Third Kind theme when they came in the next morning.

~~~
furyg3
These IPXes were very cute... <http://www.obsolyte.com/sun_ipx/>

In 2000 one of my housemates found a few of these "lunchbox" systems, bought a
big piece of glass, and made the IPXes the 'legs' of our coffee table
'cluster'. Trying to track down a picture now...

It was extremely cool, but we couldn't really come up with a good use for it
outside of running John the Ripper.

~~~
dedward
First sun workstation I ever physically used (I'd used remote servers over
terminal sessions for years).

Got a new job, and they plunked an IPX down in front of me with a 20" sun
monitor. "will that do?" (I knew nothing about the IPX - I did know
sunos/solaris rather well from a cli point of view). That thing was slow as
heck, but damn if it wasn't fun fun fun to have my own SUN! (In 1995 that was
cool)

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michaelpinto
You need to understand two things looking at that photo: \- The pizza box
design for workstations and servers was really hot in the 90s (btw the ones
from NeXT starting the ball moving as I recall) \- I realize that looks like a
pile of junk today but back in the day each of those machines was a small
fortune (I'm guessing over $10k each)

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ajross
The pizza box design is older than that. The Sun 3/50 and 3/60 from 1986 or so
were the first I'm aware of. The Sparcstation design is a straightforward
evolution. NeXT shipped cubes (without hard drives...) first in 1988. The
NeXTstation pizza box wasn't until a later iteration in maybe 91 or so.

And $10k is about right. You could pay less if you skimped on memory (I think
most of the various workstations were around $6k for a minimal configuration),
and much much more if you bought the fancy framebuffer cards.

~~~
Bud
I still have my NeXTStation Turbo Color. Damn thing still runs, too. I run it
a bit in the winter for amusement, and to help heat my apartment; I'm pretty
sure it's more efficient at doing than than my electric wall heaters.

Having this machine in 1996 on a 7Mbps DSL line made me feel like God. So, so
far ahead of its time.

~~~
ido
DSL in 1996??

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kylemaxwell
Man, this takes me back. I still have a bunch of IPXs and SS5s in my garage
someplace, and if they have an OS at all, they have OpenBSD. I finally turned
them off because of the power draw relative to their functionality.

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killerswan
Recently, I've had reason to set up systems of various types from that era.
Frankly, SunOS 4.1.3 is a dream compared to consumer stuff like Macs running
System 7, or PCs with Windows 3.1. Sure, it isn't going to run modern
software, but you can reliably do things in the shell, and quickly, that are
tedious on those other systems. Great stuff!

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joshu
It's interesting; those machines were very different from consumer gear of the
time. Especially the lack of necessity around the video card and local
keyboard/mouse. You could just as easily boot with console being a serial
port.

Modern PCs can use EFI over a serial console so they're a lot closer these
days.

(Fun fact: Sun once made a 386-based workstation.)

~~~
rbanffy
I have a SPARC box with a Chimera board. It's a complete PC, with its own VGA
out, on a PCI board.

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zdw
I have a few Fire v210's (dual 1Ghz UltraSparc 3, NUMA architecture with RAM
attached to processor), and they run great. Quad gig ethernet ports on them,
and a very nice LOM coprocessor. Decently cheap too.

I also ran NetBSD on a 25Mhz 68040 Quadra 700 back in the early 2000's. That
was a less than stellar experience.

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rbanffy
Say whatever you like, I love my Ultra 1, my SPARCclassic and my IBM 43p...
Like old cars, they won't run fast, but they sure feel they run better.

Besides, when you are using a beautiful piece of equipment, why would you
hurry?

To be fair, I also love the Blade 1000. Not as pretty as the others, but
"feels" solid.

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xradionut
I once collected old workstations and servers. (DEC, SGI, and Data General...)
But after filling a house full of old silicon that could be out-preformed by
cheap white boxes with better software, I let go of my nostalgia and sold the
lot to collectors and scrap dealers. There's a few interesting circuit boards
on the wall of my office, but old crap is mostly crap compared to this decades
technology.

If I feel like visiting the past, I break out the soldering iron and work on
radios or help a buddy do some embedded work. Nothing like twiddling bits with
gcc or constructing antennas to bring back the glory days...

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mahrain
A great use for this would be to connect to a remote X-server and have the
applications execute there. Then he could use a mix of remotely executing apps
and native local apps to get his work done on this awesome machine!

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dedward
Wow - I used to use one of those. An I have another sun pizzabox (and the
metal grid mousepad and the red laser mouse, and the full sun keyboard!)
kicking around in storage somewhere..... sun4. (Lower model than the SS20 in
the box)

I think it has 4 megs of ram and a 100 meg disk or something (possibly
smaller).

I do recall leaving it with Debian installed - if it isn't destroyed by some
other physical means it'll probably boot, and I may even remmeber the
password.

EDIT: Meant to be under the IPX thread

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bane
Out of curiosity, I wonder how well we could emulate one of these today?

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killerswan
I'm sure some veterans from Sun or maybe Fujitsu could do it, but I think the
CPU architectures have changed enough that it would be painful...

There are probably lots of applications for which -- if you can't find
hardware -- it is easy enough to compile on an old version of RedHat using x86
hardware, instead. Either way, what starts to kill you is tracking down old
proprietary software like specific versions of Motif.

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Apocryphon
Bring back OpenSolaris!

~~~
mironathetin
yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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smackfu
Ironically, it's probably best used as a dumb X terminal.

