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SPARCbook 3000ST: The coolest 90s laptop (2019)
- scrumper 5y ago(2019) I used one once in a server room in a quasi-government agency in the very early 2000s. Compared to the plastic Toshiba Windows junk around at the time, it was a total revelation. I tried to get my boss to buy me one for customer demos; he negotiated me down to a Sun Blade 100 for my desk instead. I still felt like I'd won.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Mister_Snuggles 5y agoMy first real job included system administration on a pair of SparcStation 20s (which were replaced with a Sun Enterprise 450, which was then replaced with two Sun Fire V250s). The screenshots bring back fond memories.
- api 5y ago> Built-in ISDN That's the 1997 equivalent of built-in DOCSIS 3 and a coax jack on the laptop.
- OnlyMortal 5y agoI think it’s a bit on the late side for ISDN. I know I was using cable modems by that time in Amsterdam.
- tiahura 5y agoISDN was still prevalent in commercial settings for several years. Businesses would commonly have an ISDN PRI circuit with x channels for data, y channels for voice, and z channels for BRI miscellaneous applications.
- octorian 5y agoDial-up still very much reigned supreme in the US in '97. However, we had finally stopped saddling it with punitive pricing models that discouraged people from actually taking full advantage of the Internet. I don't remember cable modems becoming commonplace until maybe 4-5 years later. (though there was a fair bit of overlap, of course)
- OnlyMortal 5y agoI had a cable modem in SE Florida in 2001. Adelphia TV. In Amsterdam it was UPC, though that might have been their name later on.
- octorian 5y agoYeah, I'm from SE Florida, so that timing sounds about right. I recall when it was first being rolled out, it was some sort of weird hybrid service that did phone-up/cable-down. Not sure how long that nonsense lasted, because they weren't doing that anymore when my parents finally got it.
- matthewmcg 5y agoI had several iterations of this in S. Fla.--first "MediaOne" 1-way cable (downlink via a General Electric Sufboard SB-1000 ISA card with uplink via modem), then an external SB-1200 which was a combination cable modem downlink and modem uplink and an ethernet gateway. Finally, they threw all that away and gave us a DOCSIS modem. I still remember what a pain it was to get that 1-way modem working on linux. I had to print the documentation out from Windows, and then reboot. On the other hand, learning how to get that driver[1] to compile and loaded as a kernel module was very educational. [1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/sb1000.c https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/sb...
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoWe had cable at our early-20s-hacker-raver-crazy-person crashpad in Edmonton, Canada in 97, 98. And DSL was available around then, too. The year before, though, I worked in an office in Toronto with dual ISDN hookup, and it felt fast and state of the art but holy crap... looking back it certainly was not.
- Fnoord 5y agoI agree with your point, but the SGI Indy had ISDN [1], was introduced in 1993 and discontinued in 1997. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy
- hapless 5y agoISDN was very, very popular outside the United States. Hell, Tokyo's payphones used to have ISDN jacks for laptop users. Tadpole later became a vendor that almost exclusively targeted the US military, but it didn't start out that way. I imagine those ISDN jacks saw a lot of use by European and Asian customers.
- rjsw 5y agoTadpole started off making 68k multiuser UNIX systems, I don't remember those having ISDN.
- ricktdotorg 5y agoI went to work for a US bank in London as a sysadmin in 1994 and pretty much the first thing they did was have BT install 2x ISDN channels in my flat. It was incredible speed with what felt like almost no latency back then. What a treat! Moved to USA (also to work for that US bank) and it was like "ISD what???"
- 1MachineElf 5y agoI didn't think there actually were sexier laptops than ThinkPads from that era.
- Tepix 5y agoThis was it. Unfortunately it carried an unobtainable price tag.
- tyingq 5y agoDifferent genre, but the Kaypro 2000 is also pretty cool: http://oldcomputers.net/kaypro2000.html http://oldcomputers.net/kaypro2000.html
- andylynch 5y agoI have one of those stored away, it is built like a tank. Unfortunately the power supply failed some time ago. The pop up floppy drive on it is brilliant.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoSun made such fantastic products for their time and it's a real shame they never made it into the next millennium intact and profitable. So much innovation happened there.
- rjsw 5y agoThe laptop in the link isn't a Sun product.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoBut the OS is :-) And the CPU based on Sun's design...
- titzer 5y agoI worked for Sun. The company mindset never shifted from building big-iron megaservers. Which is a shame because the workstation market lulled for a bit, but is actually back with a vengeance nowadays with heavy-duty GPUs, beefy CPUs, etc, for media and video editing--think $20k workstations. Apple has a slice of that market and a few PC manufacturers that focus on that, and it's very profitable. Not million dollar server profitable, but profitable. Sun neglected its own very profitable workstation line in favor of the server market, which was completely rocked by the dot com bust. Sun, with Java, which hides SPARC vs x86 could have made the entire cloud happen a decade earlier. But SPARC was a performance loser compared to Intel and Sun just stubbornly refused to see the horizontal scaling forest for the giant E10k trees.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoYep, complete waste of talents and specialties -- for a company which had its genesis in amazing workstations to have lost its edge there is sad.
- pjmlp 5y agoAlso, who knows how it would have turned out if they had actually doubled down on OpenSTEP and DOE, instead of ramping them down in Java's favour. Or if they had invested into AOT and JIT caching options for Java instead of leaving them to third parties. Both options could have made Solaris more interesting, maybe.
- rob74 5y ago> Moreover, the source code files, test data and /etc/passwd entries had the full names of the people on the project that I could easily Google. Many of their LinkedIn profiles or academic biographies listed their detailed work on the project during their tenure at Nortel. This information was key to me constructing what the project was and where it went. Looks like Nortel wasn't very careful with their company data... it may be ancient today, but I guess when that laptop was first taken out of service, it was still a bit "fresher" and more valuable?
- jjkaczor 5y agoYes- their operational security was essentially non-existent; https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/dnd-may-abandon-1b-move-to-former-nortel-site-because-of-surveillance-bugs-1.1477766 https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/dnd-may-abandon-1b-move-to-for... And there is a distinct possibility that Huawei would not exist without Nortel; https://nationalpost.com/news/exclusive-did-huawei-bring-down-nortel-corporate-espionage-theft-and-the-parallel-rise-and-fall-of-two-telecom-giants https://nationalpost.com/news/exclusive-did-huawei-bring-dow...
- ben7799 5y agoNortel is not even the only company Huawei plundered with abandon. They did this with practically every one of their partners back in the 00s.
- titzer 5y ago> removed the 2.5” HDD from the SPARCbook, added it to the USB enclosure, popped it into my Sun Blade 1500 and mounted the slice layout on the hard disk. Even if I didn’t already know Solaris, the SPARCbook manual that I downloaded detailed everything possible about the hardware and the Solaris operating system, including the default slice layout This is why manuals are so damn important! Communicating to people 20+, maybe 50+ years in the future, what you've done, how the thing works, so it can be fixed and put back into service. All of today's undocumented soon-to-be-black-bricks--cough, I mean, electronic devices--are maddening. If you are lucky, there is a manual somewhere online, and even then, probably not the level that details hardware for fixing and replacing. Heck, you're lucky to find anything that even documents all the software functions available![1] (Recent Xfinity TV thingy, I'm looking at you). The attention to detail in older manuals was incredible. Most things these days are throwaway pieces of junk, not expensive, serviceable items that have durable documentation. [1] I mean, why would you document the software of a device that is going to upgrade its software transparently as the manufacturer races to finish the features it should have shipped with, or alter the UI to inject ads into it later when their revenue model doesn't work out? Besides, you expect consumers to just give up on it and buy the next thing in 3-5 years.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago>This is why manuals are so damn important! Apple's meteoric success would beg to differ. What you said can be found in areas like industrial, aerospace and the like, as the manuals are part of the product delivery contract, but is not valued in consumer electronics anymore.
- marcellus23 5y agoApple doesn’t include physical manuals but their built-in Help and online support docs tend to be pretty detailed.
- thereddaikon 5y agoNot really. Apple's success merely shows that their methods are good for making them lots of money. There are many ways to judge the quality of a product. I'd argue that how much profit it makes is a bad one for literally everyone except the seller.
- bsagdiyev 5y agoAm I the only one who cannot read this due to the font?
- eschneider 5y agoOur sales folks has these back in the say for demos, and I'd borrow one on occasion. They were definitely cool. :)
- jeffbee 5y agoThis pig actually weighs more than a 1996 Panasonic Toughbook that is built into its own briefcase with a carrying handle and everything, and can survive being dropped on its corner from waist height. I'd take that any day over a cheesy SPARC.
- Tsiklon 5y agoThat machine is fabulous. That the author had clear and correct documentation to be able to get into the system after so long is a testament to the manuals. As an aside - It's a bit strange to think how cyclical things in tech are, now we're back at a strange echo of the classic bespoke architecture UNIX Workstation phase with Apple's new series of computers.
- TMWNN 5y ago>As an aside - It's a bit strange to think how cyclical things in tech are, now we're back at a strange echo of the classic bespoke architecture UNIX Workstation phase with Apple's new series of computers. I see what you mean. Let's see: IBM had (and has) POWER (Is RT/PC's CPU an ancestor of POWER? Or a different genus?) HP had PA-RISC, DEC had Alpha, Sun of course had SPARC. (Oracle still sells new SPARC hardware, yes? Although I doubt any true workstation-class devices.) Did Apollo have its own custom silicon? Who else am I forgetting from the Workstation Wars days?
- marcodiego 5y agoI got the chance of using an SGI Fuel in the early 2000's and also some O2's. I don't know exactly why, I never bought one, I don't even like proprietary or closed solutions but those 90's UNIX workstations... I have an unreasonable attraction to them. I remember in mid 90's trying some of them for the first time. I've got really impressed by Sun sparcstations and IBM Power machines. Computers which you could spend the whole day programming with no threat to system stability, even after consecutive segfaults, impressed me. And it impressed even more knowing that in the UNIX world it has always been like that. Seeing a x86 again running windows felt mostly like a toy after that. Certainly one of the reasons that influenced me to use linux. Those machines were expensive. In the range of a tens of thousands dollars. So, working on one of them was a symbol of status and success. Owning one of them, to me, was like owning an yacht or exclusive sports car. One thing I like about cheap ARM SBC's these days is their performance... these machines have a performance, that I think, is similar to how those UNIX would feel. Linux is way more advanced than those old unices but the feeling is still there. I can install wmaker and get a very interesting nostalgic feeling. Just to try it, I installed the latest CDE version on my experimental Debian 11 system. It is incredibly usable and performant. Being able to have a well integrated system, with everything needed for development was just another level in those days. While on the PC people rejoiced because of Delphi and Visual BASIC, you could write real GUIs in C with CDE and application builder. I'm not claiming it is better in any way, but it felt incredibly more powerful.
- mstade 5y agoI letande 3d modeling on an SGI O2 back in the late '90s, and subsequently also got started with programming on it. I still remember the joy and rush when my programs compiled successfully, and then half the time wondering how the heck they would build in the first place. Not much has changed since. ;o) I still have that O2, it's packed up in its original box in my apartment. I also have two of those old SGI flat panel displays, which was pretty amazing back then when flat panels where basically unheard of. I think one of them is broken though, sadly. I've been meaning to boot it back into action, to see if any of my old "art" is still on there. If it even starts, that is.
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- georgewsinger 5y agoThis laptop is pretty 90s cool. But have you ever seen the IBM "Butterfly" Thinkpad? https://youtu.be/u61WxHtaXZE https://youtu.be/u61WxHtaXZE Now that's 90s cool.
- mstade 5y agoOh yeah I remember that, I think my uncle had one. I remember being mesmerized with the motion of the keyboard, and my uncle getting pissed with me opening and closing it repeatedly to try and figure out how it worked. Good times!
- blantonl 5y agoI had one running OS/2 and it had a PCMCIA modem card I used to dial into the bank's token ring network. That thing was the bees knees back in the day!
- kaycebasques 5y agoCan anyone link me to the manual?
- 0des 5y agoI read this article and then went on to a few others. The author of this blog has something, I don't know what it is, but I like it, it brightened up my morning. What a great bit of nostalgia, thanks for posting this Marco!
- Lammy 5y agoI was reading some other articles and found a picture of him rocking this SPARCbook in a coffee shop: https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/myblog/copyleft-is-dying/ https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/myblog/copyleft-is-... :)
- 0des 5y agoI suddenly understand the nature of the term "baller status"
- ChrisArchitect 5y agoanything new here from 2019? Official link: https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coolest-90s-laptop/ https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/myblog/sparcbook300... And previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19524130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19524130
- dang 5y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: SPARCbook 3000ST - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19524130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19524130 - March 2019 (98 comments)
- ben7799 5y agoThis thing was like the coolest/rarest thing back then, it was almost legendary cause no one had seen one but everyone rumored they existed. I had various Sun & SGI workstations at my internships in the 1990s.. all these machines were just cool. The SGI Indy wasn't super impressive but the fact it had a video camera was pretty insane in 1996 or so when we saw them. People were so enamored of the video camera if you had an Indy in the lab at your office people will take so many videos/pictures with it that they'd fill its disk space up. A lot of people I knew had their first digital picture of themselves by getting one from an Indy, cause digital cameras were horrible & stupid expensive at that point. The O2 was a pretty amazing machine too. There's something retro cool about the new Apple Silicon Macs, it's like we've returned to the days of RISC Unix machines finally. Different OSes and Platforms were much more diverse back then and it contributed to a real sense of wonder when you got to work with a really unique computer. A lot of that is lost today where it seems like 99% of everything is Windows, OSX, or Linux. My first job we were testing on like 15 different versions of Unix + Windows NT.
- nsxwolf 5y agoI had a SPARCstation at my first full time developer job. The Sun type 4 keyboard, OpenWindows, 21 inch Trinitron... it was so exotic and different I felt like I was being paid to live in some hacker dreamworld. Moving to Windows machines after that was a real drag, but the Mac brought me back to some of that UNIX magic.
- NexRebular 5y agoI still have Ultra 1 Creator with 1GB of RAM that I plan to use for some oldskool development. At the moment it has Solaris 2.5 and SunPC DX2 card for running VB 4 and VC++ 1.52 on Win 3.11... And also for playing Castle of Winds. Modern hardware and software feels so boring compared to all this madness...
- Causality1 5y agoModern laptops have absolutely no style, no cool factor. I'd pay huge sums of money for a Sony X505 with modern specs.
- npteljes 5y agoI agree. I have a Compaq Armada E500 lying around, and it's fantastic to even just touch the device. I'd love to use one with a similar build, but updated interior.
- trimbo 5y agoAhhh that OpenWindows desktop brings me back. But I thought by 1997 when this was released, Sun had moved to Motif? Do I have that wrong?
- excitom 5y agoTypically it was a configuration option, to show Motif or OpenWindows mode.
- ed_at_work 5y agoDef brings me back. I remember being a young n00b hacker, running openwindows on slackware, wishing I had a real, live SPARCstation of my own.
- heelix 5y agoBack in the dot com days, we had all of our stack running on Solaris. (nothing clever, just Weblogic/Oracle) Our president (?) got a beast of a tadpole to do live demos in the field. The first major demo, he set up to present/pitch, got a cord wrapped up, and managed to spill a glass of water on it. (He then proceeded get the funding anyhow, but we were all looking forward to having that laptop)
- golergka 5y ago> A price tag of $21,000 US And that's in 1997 dollars. Great perspective on complaints about how expensive Macbooks, which start at $1,000, are.
- smoldesu 5y agoHonestly, I bet there are people who would pay the $20,000 premium if it just let you swap in a goddamn M.2 drive at leisure.
- ricktdotorg 5y agoIt was nice to see Nortel mentioned in the article because I did my "gap year" at Bell Northern Research/Standard Telephones & Cables Ltd (R&D arm of Northern Telecom) back in the 90s and there were several of these SPARCbooks that the Meridian folks used to take with them on remote jobs. I was a mere youngster "helping" to write C code to convert Nortel switch signalling into OSI-standard CMIS. I never got to use one of the SPARCbooks of course but for that year I had an incredible SPARCstation IPX and learned so much from all the crusty old telco engineers. Great post about the SPARCbooks and what a great purchase!
- yitchelle 5y agoTalking about retro technology, I am shamelessly plugging my twitter account for retro tech adverts. https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts I've been posting those amazing old tech adverts out of Byte, Compute, Antic and Zzap64 magazines 90s, 80s and older. Looking at adverts for retro games, retro electronics and others. Hope to see you there.
- blantonl 5y agoWhen I started reading this article, I would have bet 100 bucks this laptop was used in a military / government setting for SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) software. Solaris, solid metal hardware, tens of thousands of $$ - just screams SIGINT to me.