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I spent a summer’s worth of college kid shitty retail wages to buy one of these off eBay in 1998. It was by far the most expensive thing I’d ever purchased in m

by crmd 5y ago

I spent a summer’s worth of college kid shitty retail wages to buy one of these off eBay in 1998. It was by far the most expensive thing I’d ever purchased in my life. Learning Solaris inside out, including the forth prompt, let me bullshit my way into my first real job as a Unix sysadmin, which led to a pretty cool career in tech. I wonder what I’d be doing for a living right now if I hadn’t bought that ultra 1. Sun Ultra Enterprise systems will always have a very special place in my heart.

madaxe_again 5y ago
I hit the jackpot in 1999, when I was interning at a small brokerage in London as an IT gopher - the outfit a few floors below us had gone bust, and had just left their offices wide open, hardware heaped up for disposal. A coworker and I quickly whipped up an e-waste disposal flier, stuck it to their door, and lo and behold they were all too happy to have us take away all of their hardware for no charge. A lot of it went on eBay after being scrubbed, as I had rent to pay, but I ended up with a stack of sparcstations, an ultra 1, a few sgi machines and a bunch of decstations. I ended up selling the big sun servers (can’t remember models - one was about the size of a small refrigerator and styled like a 90’s Star Trek prop and the other was a full cabinet, and oh god they were noisy), but had a fascinating time setting them up and tinkering with them at home, and it was where I really first got to grips with unix sysadmin. Set myself up a small renderfarm, as I was dicking around with CG at the time, and later used a hodgepodge of machines to run simulations for my dissertation. I ultimately ended up repurposing the sparcstations into hysteresis testing stations and sold them to a pipeline company through the university. The rest, I still have, and when I have space (and power - I live off grid these days), I absolutely intend to burn many watts to have some fun reminiscing with long-past state-of-the-art hardware.
- hrunt 5y ago
  Those big Sun servers that are about the size of a small refrigerator and styled like a 90's Star Trek prop are probably Sun e450s. Fun fact: I am in the process of decommissioning a bunch of them from production use right now.
  - madaxe_again 5y ago
    Yeah, that’s the puppy. Remember being impressed at how accessible the innards were. I think the big one was an ultra enterprise 5000 - never played with that one, we sold it straight from the premises, didn’t have any means of moving it, as most of this stuff, I was lugging around on the tube, and a seven foot tall server wasn’t going to happen.

by crmd 5y ago

madaxe_again 5y ago

I hit the jackpot in 1999, when I was interning at a small brokerage in London as an IT gopher - the outfit a few floors below us had gone bust, and had just left their offices wide open, hardware heaped up for disposal. A coworker and I quickly whipped up an e-waste disposal flier, stuck it to their door, and lo and behold they were all too happy to have us take away all of their hardware for no charge. A lot of it went on eBay after being scrubbed, as I had rent to pay, but I ended up with a stack of sparcstations, an ultra 1, a few sgi machines and a bunch of decstations. I ended up selling the big sun servers (can’t remember models - one was about the size of a small refrigerator and styled like a 90’s Star Trek prop and the other was a full cabinet, and oh god they were noisy), but had a fascinating time setting them up and tinkering with them at home, and it was where I really first got to grips with unix sysadmin. Set myself up a small renderfarm, as I was dicking around with CG at the time, and later used a hodgepodge of machines to run simulations for my dissertation. I ultimately ended up repurposing the sparcstations into hysteresis testing stations and sold them to a pipeline company through the university. The rest, I still have, and when I have space (and power - I live off grid these days), I absolutely intend to burn many watts to have some fun reminiscing with long-past state-of-the-art hardware.

hrunt 5y ago
Those big Sun servers that are about the size of a small refrigerator and styled like a 90's Star Trek prop are probably Sun e450s. Fun fact: I am in the process of decommissioning a bunch of them from production use right now.
- madaxe_again 5y ago
  Yeah, that’s the puppy. Remember being impressed at how accessible the innards were. I think the big one was an ultra enterprise 5000 - never played with that one, we sold it straight from the premises, didn’t have any means of moving it, as most of this stuff, I was lugging around on the tube, and a seven foot tall server wasn’t going to happen.