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Build your own SPARC workstation
- johndoe0815 5y agoYou can also implement a Sparcstation 5 on an FPGA (and not only in qemu) thanks to temlib: http://temlib.org/site/ http://temlib.org/site/
- chrisBob 5y ago> Operating range : (altitude < 18km) or (speed < 515m/sec), both not exceeded simultaneously Is that a limitation so that you don't use it for missile guidance?
- packetslave 5y agoYep. Same reason your phone's GPS won't work above a certain speed and/or altitude.
- bifftastic 5y agoTempted to try this with SunOS 4.1.3 for the sake of nostalgia - the first Unix I ever used.
- bink 5y agoI'm still mad about the BSD->SYSV switchover.
- usr1106 5y agoI remember it caused some commands to work differenty / no longer with same syntax. Cannot remember a single example though, so it must yave been a while...
- Annatar 5y agoI grew up on System V Release 4.0, and I'm glad that I did. What was so superior about SunOS 4 (BSD) that you are still mad about it?
- abeyer 5y ago> For added fun, a Sun Type 5 keyboard converted to USB We must have _very_ different definitions of fun. The pile of mush that was the Type 5 is up pretty high on my list of "never again" keyboards. I was a full on Sun fanboy, but even I was the first to admit that their input devices could be pretty awful.
- jeffrallen 5y agoSun optical mice were a pain in the ass too.
- wyldfire 5y agoThe ones w the reflective metallic mousepad?
- abeyer 5y agoyup, and the marks were painted on, so started wearing off (and thus losing mouse resolution) the second you started using it.
- hughrr 5y agoThis thread brings me pleasant memories of drunken post student union bar C hacking sessions in the 90s. Apart from the mice. And openwindows. Fuck both of them!
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoWhat's wrong with openwindows? Always like it.
- chasil 5y agoThis was a "Mouse Systems" design. Early mechanical mice commonly had a switch labeled PC/MS which would toggle the protocol used by the device. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Systems https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Systems I own one somewhere in a closet.
- tyingq 5y agoYou can get 6 LEON/Sparc boards for $36: https://navspark.mybigcommerce.com/navspark-mini-6pcs-pack/ https://navspark.mybigcommerce.com/navspark-mini-6pcs-pack/ Though I suppose 200k of RAM might be a barrier :)
- mrlonglong 5y agoCluster them for more ram !
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoAm I out of the loop when I've been unaware of something that small for 6$ a piece is GPS capable? (minus antenna) Very interesting!
- fake-name 5y agoIt seems like it's basically a commercial GPS SoC where people have figured out how to run their own code on the CPU that is part of the GPS SoC. The IC in question here is a Venus828F. It seems like navspark is either a project of SkyTraq (the company that makes the Venus IC), or SkyTraq have a SDK which this packages in a blob format.
- usr1106 5y agoRead the article but it did not mention anything about the software licences. Have these old versions been released for free in the meantime? Copyright expires 7O years after the death of the author. Not really suitable for software lifecycles. Nothing from the 1990s has any commercial value any more.
- NexRebular 5y agoSadly there are no free releases of these old versions available. Not even sure it's legal to install from authentic media if the hardware is not real SUN hardware...
- bink 5y agoOh, I'm sure the current owner of the IP would have no problem... what's that? Oracle? Oh...
- crawdog 5y agoNow all you need is a license for ATG Dynamo and you can setup your own circa 1998 ecommerce website.
- ttul 5y agoAs a teenager, I scored a sweet job installing new SPARC 5 workstations at an electronics company for a few weeks during an otherwise quiet summer. Man, those were some amazing computers. The cases opened with a thumbscrew and were so easy to work with. Elegant design. Super robust. For a kid who had only ever worked with cheap PCs, Sun hardware was an absolute dream.
- icedchai 5y agoI had a Sparc 5 at home when I was in my early 20's, probably 1996 or 97. That was my main desktop for about 4 or 5 years. Great machines.
- simonblack 5y agoI bought a SPARC 1 that I later converted to a SPARC 5. Lovely pizza-box.
- madengr 5y agoHad an IPX at that time too, stacked high with peripheral boxes. It acted as my auto-dial gateway to the internet. Of course that was connected to an HP 700 series workstation, a SGI Indigo^2, an IBM PS/2, and a Linux box. The good old days of finding surplus workstations at computer flea markets.
- icedchai 5y agoI also had a Sparc IPC for a while. Those were slowwwww.
- alexwasserman 5y agoI also liked having to replace some hardware on one (maybe a disk, was a while back), and wondering what tools I'd need. I opened up the case (just a thumbscrew or latch) very easily, to find a Sun branded official screwdriver sat inside the case in a tool holder, ready for me to use. Was a nice sign someone really cared about being able to work easily on those machines.
- neilv 5y agoOne of my greatest bits of luck was getting access to these and other Unix workstations&servers as a teen. If you run old SPARCstation OSes, a few points of interest... If you get the OpenWindows era with Open Look look&feel, one of the things that were newish around then is the pinnable menus and dialogs. You could sometimes tear off a menu and turn it into a persistent window that's more like a toolbar (which was also emerging then). Open Look (or Sun) was also introducing small rectangular drag&drop target widget on windows, when drag&drop was new. Which I don't recall seeing later, so maybe it was a mix of less drag&drop than we thought we might have, and more an expectation of the user to learn what things could be dragged and where they could be dropped. Behind Open Look also a number of different toolkits and window system backends that might be behind a given Open Look application and desktop. My favorite toolkit was XView, and it was very easy to work with in C, and used varargs sorta like GTK later did. Desktop-wise, besides X, there was the XNeWS server, which supported a kind of display PostScript on steroids, and you could write entire applications in PostScript (though their OpenLook widgets looked poor early on, compared to the pixel-perfect XView result). Maybe the key thing to notice about OpenLook... At the time, the other main X GUI look&feel that workstations were moving to was Motif, which was mostly just rectangles. Someone once posted screenshots of a dialog in Open Look and then another in Motif, with all the text removed, and, in Open Look, you could pretty much tell what all the familiar widgets were, and you immediately knew how to interact with all of them. That was considered valuable at the time. (Though HCI in general has moved more towards brochure-like and magazine-like motivations in the interests of the creator, and away from motivations we had before, for new-user and power-user usability in the interests of the user.) If you go back a little further with your workstation, to SunOS 4.1.x or 4.0.x, you can forget about X and NeWS, and see something a bit different: SunView. This was a monochrome GUI, maybe sorta like an old Mac, but without all the things the Mac had, and backed by much more sophisticated workstation/server OS. People did powerful things with it, on a workstation with a megapixel display and 8MB of RAM. The GUI toolkit was the predecessor to XView, and similar. For workstation application programs (like my employer developed), it wasn't unusual to implement your own portable GUI layer, including an entire window systems. So, our stuff and Interleaf's, for example, would create a native window for whatever workstation desktop was in use, and implement our own desktop within that. And they were all different, and often innovative, sometimes in ways that have been lost. I didn't see how all the different CAD, EDA, etc. packages worked, but sometimes the workstation was pretty much an appliance for running a single program, and on occasion would even be branded with a physical badge for the application software on it. You can rediscover some of the same flavor still alive by looking at UI innovations by, for example, Blender, where (last I used it) they built UI from scratch, and they seemed to innovate in the interests of the users, including power users. Maybe more accessible to us on HN, some IDEs are places that get creative innovations often in the interests of power users.) You'll also see innovations less-familiar in some other workstations, like Apollo Domain. (A lot of Sun stuff might be a little too familiar, because they sorta won, albeit in the form of Linux and the BSDs today. SunOS was also arguably the easiest out-of-box platform for building GNU-ish software on the Internet, before Linux was sufficiently ready, so that's another regard in which they both influenced and were influenced.) Also, if you end up trying a real-metal vintage workstation experience, don't forget to hit the degauss button on your 21" CRT, be startled by the sounds and the ray behavior, and each time wonder in the back of your mind whether there's any health risk to be standing near it each time that happens. :)
- mrlonglong 5y agoI've used most of the SPARC stations during the late 90s. 4, 5 and 20. They were a lot better than the Pentiums in use. Moved up to the UltraSPARCs, my last one was a Blade 2000. Linux was a champ on those architectures. But I don't miss the blasted bus errors not one bit. AMD is where it's at nowadays, ARM will be next within the next few years.
- madengr 5y agoI had a Blade 2000 with dual 24” monitors and the PC card. It was a beast.
- mrlonglong 5y agoOh and I thought OpenWindows was cool
- nineteen999 5y agoBack in one of my first mom-and-pop ISP jobs, my boss was interested enough in exotic hardware that he decided to buy a Sun Microelectronics motherboard with an Ultrasparc IIi CPU. We were able to put it in a large form factor ATX case, find a compatible video card and Ultra2 SCSI drives and install Solaris 2.7 (or 2.8?) on it. We later deployed it as an LDAP and MySQL server amongst other things. It was a real eye opener for me having come from the world of Windows/Linux on x86. Later he bought a bunch of DEC Alpha motherboards and CPU's as well, I had fun installing Debian and compiling pre-1.0 versions of Gnome for them. These experiences made me far more comfortable with non-x86 systems and I'm grateful for that exposure more than 20 years later.
- bink 5y agoJust remember that out-of-the-box Solaris 2 had an absolute ton of remote root exploits. So, unless you have access to security patches don't allow inbound connections to the VM. Even with a full patch set it's probably not a good idea.
- gompertz 5y agoIs there an army of hackers waiting around to exploit a 30 year old operating system? And not even Windows; but Solaris. Notwithstanding, quite sure anyone installing this is doing it to fiddle, not trade crypto.
- simtel20 5y agoYes there are. Every scanner out there fingerprints the OS and throws known sploits at it. Solaris is easy to fingerprint.
- Annatar 5y agoGood luck breaking into a Solaris 10 or illumos system... even The Shop's exploits are now completely useless and obsolete, and have been for a decade. I did my graduate thesis on securing Solaris. Even back then, it was already difficult to break into, and locked down, it was damn near impossible. There were only about 13 processes running when I was done with it. Ran CheckPoint FireWall-1 like a dream.
- gompertz 5y agoMaybe if you're not sitting behind a firewall/router, sure. But who does that anymore.
- EamonnMR 5y agoBecause of the domain I was hoping this was going to be a hardware guide. But I really do appreciate this type of in depth emulation tutorial, because the documentation for these is usually geared towards people who A) are very familiar with emulation and B) are very familiar with the system in question.
- pyuser583 5y agoI confused this with SPARK. Especially since the website has ada in its name.
- jqcoffey 5y agoIronically, I got into the sysadmin (and later programming) business because a wise coworker of mine told me to stop mucking around in Windows 95 and grab the Sparc LX in the corner of the shop and install RedHat on it.
- rsync 5y agoI have a sealed box, never-been-opened "new-old-stock" sparcstation 20. I should do an unboxing video or something ...
- RandomLensman 5y agoFrom time to time I catch myself eyeing a used blue pizza box. Not sure what I would do with it but it brings back fond memories.
- musicale 5y agoHow about OpenSPARC running on an FPGA?
- orionblastar 5y agoBut does the network function? I built a Solaris Sparc Qemu machine before but the supported network card emulation didn't work.