11 ms·

End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video]

142 points by transpute 2y ago

fidotron 2y ago
The idea anyone would be running a Sparc in 2007 for performance . . . Some time around 2003 my boss had a Sparc machine as his desktop, though this was widely viewed as unix nerd nostalgia even then. As a junior I got a PC. It turned out my PC built the project 5x faster than the Sparc managed. After this I don’t think we bought much from Sun except one of those big tape drives, and lots of Dell servers appeared instead.
- lizknope 2y ago
  At my first job in 1997 I convinced my manager to put Linux x86 boxes on everyone's desks and move the Suns to the server room. The Suns required expensive Sun monitors while we could put cheaper larger higher resolution monitors on a Linux x86 box and display everything over X11. I was in the semiconductor / chip design business and everything ran on Solaris until around 2003 when the 64-bit Opteron came out and we never bought a Sun again.
- mrweasel 2y ago
  While I'm sure they had their use case, the Sun desktops we had while at university in the early 2000s always felt sluggish. The servers didn't seem much better. They'd handle a ton of users, but each would get the same slow experience.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    Their really competitive era was over by the early 2000’s, right? More of a 90’s company.
    - hondo77 2y ago
      And they were already feeling sluggish by the second half of the 90s. That might be because I had an SGI on my desktop, though.
- bb88 2y ago
  SparcOS was an awesome unix. Linux was respectable as well, but the hardware story in 2007 was much more shitty. Hardware vendors pretty much ignored linux, going for windows as I recall. So if you just wanted a good Unix environment, SparcOS was it. Java/ZFS were both Sun products, and we're still using them today. Just not SparcOS. Sun tried with Project Indiana, but they were getting outpaced by Linux and the open source movement.
  - wmf 2y ago
    No, if you just wanted a good Unix environment in 2007 you would buy an x86 workstation with Linux preinstalled which existed from multiple vendors/VARs. Or Mac.
    - Bluecobra 2y ago
      Solaris 10 worked pretty good on x86 and was free back then. Once Oracle acquired Sun, they eventually started to demand $1K per year per CPU core on hardware that wasn't made by Sun/Oracle.
  - rincebrain 2y ago
    SunOS/Solaris, I believe you mean. OpenSolaris was an interesting experiment.
    - robin_reala 2y ago
      It’s still going, in the form of Illumos: https://illumos.org/ https://illumos.org/
      - rincebrain 2y ago
        Kind of. I was specifically talking about the corporate experiment of deciding to go that hard for open sourcing your crown jewels, and Oracle has notably discontinued their participation in that experiment.
        2y ago
- vondur 2y ago
  This is part of the reason why Linux ate their lunch. For the price of one Sun server, you could get 4 Dell servers that ran Linux, and they were faster. Granted, you didn't have all of the redundancy that was built into these higher end Sun systems or the really good support, but hey you had 3 extra machines as a backup.
  - jhbadger 2y ago
    Yeah people used to say in the late 1990s "Linux enthusiasts want it to kill Microsoft, but what it really is doing is killing Sun".
    - tyingq 2y ago
      Well, and what really killed Sun wasn't Linux by itself, but Linux on Opteron/AMD64.
      - AStonesThrow 2y ago
        I would say that there were three factors that superseded Sun, along with most of the other proprietary workstations and servers: FOSS Unix, commodity PC-compatible hardware, and TCP/IP. The big vendors used to be differentiated on how they communicated on a network, shared files, type of bus architecture, and workloads, and so each company or unit would choose a vendor and rely on them for solutions, and the staff had specialized expertise in those systems. But all those vendors found themselves adopting TCP/IP and Ethernet. And Sun's NFS was widely adopted. X11 also became standard. The BSDs already had a wide hardware compatibility list, so that spare machine with no OS license could be returned to service. A few generations of college grads had direct experience with Unix and building PCs. Once Linux on PC-compatibles began showing up in the server room, Windows NT was mature, and software vendors were porting to Linux, it was a fait accompli.
        panick21_ 2y ago
        Kind of strange to talk about TCP/IP and Ethernet. Sun was the company that pushed that from the beginning. The self configured before others. It was part of why they had more new adoption then DEC/VAX systems. It all comes back to SPARC. Price to performance. If Sun had amazing high quality x86 servers and workstation by 1998, their software would have been perfectly fine. Its not like there was anything missing from Solaris at that time. Many people were not unhappy, they just realized that they could get a faster cheaper machine, and run the same software on a linux. Even if linux was less optimized, still end up cheaper overall for the majority of workloads. Its not like running linux on unsupported PCs in the early 2000 was that much fun. But Sun by 2002 they were still trying to kill x86 based stuff. They bought x64 server line in 2004.
- neilv 2y ago
  I'm sure this end-of-the-line machine had its merits. But if you want the cool of Elvis before he got fat, go back to when a SPARCstation 1 running SunOS 4 was new. The contemporary PC running MS-DOS or early Windows was just a toy by comparison.
  - fidotron 2y ago
    I was one of those annoying unix “I know this” kids except from early exposure to a pizza box Sparcstation, not SGI. That was in the era when Suns sold strangely well to people doing lots of color processing work. (I think you can blame Kodak for that). When the PC ran rings round the Sparc at work I fully understood how far they had fallen.
- chasil 2y ago
  The funny thing is that this is precisely what SPARC did to the VAX.
  - jrpelkonen 2y ago
    It now it seems likely that arm64 will do the same to amd64.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      It is a little different now, in the 90’s there was so much low hanging fruit that new-thing could be multiple times better than old-thing. Arm might get a durable lead of, ya know, a couple or a dozen percentage points over x86. It isn’t like a quantitative difference so huge that it becomes a qualitative one. In the 90’s, after all, aliens were coming to Earth to steal Intel’s chips.
      - nullindividual 2y ago
        Arm64 (M3) lags behind in some single core benchmarks vs Intel's high end desktop CPUs and is abysmal in multi-core benchmarks due to the limited number of cores, at least according to https://www.cpu-monkey.com https://www.cpu-monkey.com. Granted, the Intel CPU at the high end is pulling 250W+ (or was it 300W+?). There are places for both architectures. I don't see x86 going anywhere unless Intel folds and ceases to design chips. Not sure AMD could power on alone given their current market share, though I certainly hope they could as a user of their chips in the desktop (and conversely, an M2 Air for my laptop).
        bee_rider 2y ago
        I agree actually, I just wanted to set an upper-bound that nobody could really disagree with in the pro-ARM direction. A minor quibble—high end desktop is a niche almost seemingly intentionally(?) ignored by ARM. Ampere puts out interesting server chips, and Apple puts out interesting laptop chips. What a high end desktop ARM chip? Apple’s max and ultra chips maybe, but they are pretty clearly a compromise with the fact that that market is pretty niche.
- nineteen999 2y ago
  Around that time I was working as a Solaris admin, C/C++ systems programmer and software packager, our manager gifted us all a SunBlade 1000 in my final year there, although we all used Windows laptops for our day to day work. I got blank look when I asked "why?". Sure they were snappy, and you could run StarOffice on them, but really there wasn't a lot that they were useful for in our day to day work. Nice machines to be sure, but completely extraneous. I already had a fleet of Sparc build servers running everything from Solaris 2.5.1 through 2.9 which I used to build and package open source stuff for our corp servers. Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere.
  - finaard 2y ago
    I used a Blade 2000 as my main machine until the early 2010s. Doing UNIX work on Windows back then with cygwin was way more painful than it is nowadays, and the hardware was a lot nicer than x86 desktops (and workstations offering things like ECC would've seen you in the same price range anyway). Back then with just dual cores running heavily loaded VMs always was annoying, and slowed your main system down noticeably - so I preferred not doing that on my x86 box. My Sun on the other hand had three SunPCI cards I used for Windows development and testing - which had pretty decent performance, still allowed me to have the disk images on my UNIX filesystem, but didn't ruin my native performance.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere. Ah, the beloved "use it or lose it" end-of-year crap. So much needless waste just to keep the beancounters happy.
- johnklos 2y ago
  Yeah - my AlphaServer DS25, which is five years older and has dual 1 GHz Alpha CPUs, can keep up quite well in many regards with a dual 1.5 GHz Sun Fire V245 (which is very similar to the Sun machine here).
- shrubble 2y ago
  Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working, in a way that 2007 Linux would not; however RAM was dropping in price at the time and this wasn't much of a concern as a result, for desktops at least.
  - gorfian_robot 2y ago
    one time we had something going ... wrong. took forever to login and the first person on entered 'uptime' and the load average was in the thousands. nothing was failing. just taking a really really long time to complete.
  - Gibbon1 2y ago
    That's what I remember my sys admin friends saying. The Sun machines could handle heavy loads without falling over. But if you were running a heavy single user application or compiling a big project a commodity wintel box was faster.
    - gorfian_robot 2y ago
      definitely. my company was paid a buncha cash by MS to convert our web infrastructure to Windows NT. We had to have roughly 8x the number of boxes. 4x to handle the load and double that because they had to be rebooted all the damn time to keep them serving.
  - throw0101d 2y ago
    > Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working […] And under high load. I've had Linux live lock on more than one occasion when load averages hit >100. I've never a Solaris (or FreeBSD) system live lock even under ridiculous loads (200+), and was always been able to login and kill whatever process(es) went sideways.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Bluecobra 2y ago
- up2isomorphism 2y ago
  Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks. BTW, even Linux lose benchmarks to windows often times. We used a Sparc Ultra 10 for a Authentication server in 2000, it supports concurrent 100K users without any issue, obviously you need to write your own software, but the server is super stable. And yes, we use cheap x86 + Linux for all sorts of thing from 1996 and it was quite faster but you can not trust it the same way as a Sparc.
  - gorfian_robot 2y ago
    we used to 'joke' that you would have to set one of fire to get it to stop responding to a ping. even then, might take a while.
    - cable 2y ago
      Been there done that? Circa 2001 I had a customer with a rack of 220R's and Clariion storage arrays. I was paged about an app outage and saw (IIRC) "environmental errors" in the logs about the temperature of the machines. One of the Clariion's, in the same rack, had caught fire which brought the database / app down but the 220R's kept chugging along. Unsurprisingly this was quickly followed a call from the NOC that the fire suppression kicking in and that I should down get there ASAP.
      - hnlmorg 2y ago
        Oh wow. I have plenty of fond memories about the stability of Spark Stations but none as fun as that. Thanks for sharing. I did once have a Bullfrog TSS that survived a literal explosion. They certainly don’t build hardware like they used to.
    - pantulis 2y ago
      That was the joke my VMS colleagues said to us the younger unix hotshots.
  - fidotron 2y ago
    My recollection is anyone doing massive concurrency per server (at the time over 10k connections) was moving to using a BSD because of kqueue. We even went through a phase of email on OpenBSD before being bought by a company that insisted on Exchange. Linux didn’t seem to pull decisively ahead of the BSDs until multicore x86 became mainstream. Up until then it always seemed flaky.
- atlgator 2y ago
  I developed cross-platform simulator software back in 2008. One of our platforms was SPARC. Still used heavily at the time. They tried to replace them with SGI Itanium servers and we know how that turned out.
- alsobrsp 2y ago
  I had a Sun as my desktop until 2010 when my Solaris admin gig was eliminated. It was running KDE on three displays. Loved it.
- systems_glitch 2y ago
  This was especially true for workloads that were hard to parallelize. Stuff that lent itself well to parallel execution was sometimes faster, though hyperthreads and multicore single-package CPUs took care of that a few years later.
- walrus01 2y ago
  As I recall in also exactly 2002 to 2003 my desktop setup shifted to a x86 whitebox PC I built myself (32-bit) FreeBSD machine that was running X and KDE2. I had a really nicely customized KDE2 setup and could do a lot with it. It was worlds better than a proprietary OS based Unix-like setup.
ktm5j 2y ago
I wanted on of these sooo bad. I've always had a softspot in my heart for SPARC. I loved working with those systems at work. I used to have a second hand T5440 that I got off ebay for super cheap, I think it had 128G of RAM and 256 threads!
dang 2y ago
URL changed from https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/the-last-sun-sparc-workstation/ https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/the-last-sun-sparc-workstati..., which points to this.
deleted 2y ago
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neverartful 2y ago
I owned an Ultra 60 at one time and I really liked it. It was a dual processor UltraSPARC II (or III) running at something like 450 MHz. In one of my groups we had a Sun V480 and we ran all kinds of stuff on it and it never had the slightest hiccup. It was rock solid. Fun times!
geoffeg 2y ago
I miss Sun hardware, especially in the sun4c era. Everything was so solidly built and well thought out compared to a lot of PC hardware. The IPC/IPX is still one of my favorite form factors.
- salgernon 2y ago
  I still have an IPC on my desk as a monitor stand. In 1996 I used it as a router for my 24hour 56kbps modem connection, serving all of 204.94.173.x - I was paying tlg.org $145/mo for my Class C address space, and all my home machines were just hanging out there. that is the internet I really miss.
  - geoffeg 2y ago
    I have been thinking about getting an old IPC or IPX and swapping out the internals with a modern PC motherboard and components, but only if I can do it cleanly. I haven't done it due to not having enough free time and... it just feels wrong to me in some way.
    - formerly_proven 2y ago
      Ah the trouble of finding a unix workstation with a pristine case and thoroughly cooked interior so you don't feel bad about gutting it for a casemod. Call me when you find one.
  - icedchai 2y ago
    I hear you. For most of the 90's, I had my home network on a publicly routed /24, no firewall.
    - testfoobar 2y ago
      Hosted my own domain and mail server right under my desk...
      - icedchai 2y ago
rbanffy 2y ago
I'd say the most successful Unix workstation maker is Apple. By far.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Or better yet: NeXT. It’s just that it renamed itself Apple after acquiring the company and the brand for one Steve Jobs (and getting 400 million as change).
pjmlp 2y ago
When I arrived at CERN back in 2003, there was a pile of Sun workstations on a corner from my office, waiting to be dispatched to computer heaven. Most folks were either using the new OS X, or Windows, with a custom Linux distribution on the servers, eventually replaced by Scientic Linux distribution. There were still some Sun stations kind of serving the X Windows sessions on the restaurant area, and even those didn´t last much longer.
- rwmj 2y ago
  Late 90s / early 2000s was when Sun workstations changed from very expensive but well constructed proprietary machines to very expensive PCs with cheap internals and unusual processors. However I still got an ex-university Sun workstation around 2002 for free (or a token price?) which served me well as a desktop machine for years and years. It eventually died of the capacitor plague that (to be fair to Sun) affects just about everything from that era.
  - jclulow 2y ago
    Setting the SPARC bits aside, I feel like the Ultra 20/24/27 machines were well-constructed 64-bit x86 machines with regular AMD and Intel processors and ECC memory and reasonable fans and so on. I don't remember how they were on price, but I feel like they were not outrageous when compared to similar lines from Dell or HP at the time.
    - fidotron 2y ago
      The pricing was the other Sun problem. It was a super grimy negotiation to get them down from their ludicrous publicly stated pricing to what you could actually get them for, which was more reasonable, you just wanted to clean yourself afterwards. In the UK Sun had done some deals of the type that in North America are dominated by IBM (banking infra etc.), so they were probably absolutely milking those clients and giving the rest of us more slack than they wanted to let on.
    - f1shy 2y ago
      I had a very different experience. I was responsible for about 100 Sun servers in the early 2000. To get to our server room, I had to go through another datacenter, where all was HP. We had every single week 1 or 2 outages (power supply, disk, mainboard, memory…) all the time. EVERY WEEk! Meanwhile, the other datacenter had just a few visits per year, for upgrades…
donatj 2y ago
I always salivated over Sun SPARC workstations. I'm kind of sad to hear that the specs of the last SPARC workstation were so … low… but I guess time destroys all things
- systems_glitch 2y ago
  There are far better SPARC64 servers available, but many are so incredibly loud (looking at you SunFire T1000) that running them outside a dedicated area is not practical.
- happycube 2y ago
  Got curious and did a quick search - at least on this one sample a regular Core 2 Duo runs circles around the IIIi: https://www.glennklockwood.com/benchmarks/performance.html#sparc-processors https://www.glennklockwood.com/benchmarks/performance.html#s...
cptnapalm 2y ago
While not quite a Sun system, I still have my Tadpole Viper. The only thing that runs on it in a straight forward manner is OpenBSD; even Solaris needs patch discs. I'd still use it regularly if only web browsers would work. I still prefer its keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever owned. It's the machine I was using when I finally was able to overcome my previous difficulties in learning C. And I even got to diagnose an endian problem.
- johnklos 2y ago
  I wonder how well NetBSD would run on it. There're quite a lot of current packages for it: https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sparc64/10.0/All/ https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sparc64/10...
  - cptnapalm 2y ago
    When I was looking for a not-Solaris OS, OpenBSD was the only game in town for it. Literally. Somebody maintaining the UltraSPARC OpenBSD port decided to support this oddity specifically. Nothing else, including NetBSD, would work.
    - systems_glitch 2y ago
      Probably not especially difficult to port the platform-specific bits from OpenBSD to NetBSD, but also not trivial. A lot of the "wow, this actually Just Works on OpenBSD!" support is because one or more OpenBSD developer actually runs the given system. Supposedly that's why there's really good support for a large number of laptop peculiarities that NetBSD lacks -- OpenBSD devs are actually dailying OpenBSD on those machines.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  > I'd still use it regularly if only web browsers would work. I still prefer its keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever owned. You can just cheat: https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/08/12/vncfox-better-way-of-browsing-modern-web-on-vintage-machines/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/08/12/vncfox-better-way-of-bro...
kevitivity 2y ago
As a sysadmin, the only thing I miss about Sun hardware and Solaris was how reliable it was. My record for uptime was over 6 years on a Sun Blade workstation.
icedchai 2y ago
I feel such nostalgia for Sun hardware. I've had several sparcstations over the years: a SparcStation IPC, SparcStation 5, and an Ultra 10. I still have the Ultra 10, and put OpenBSD on it the other month, after replacing the NVRAM chip.
- technothrasher 2y ago
  I just booted up an old Sun 3/80 a little while ago for fun. Needed a new NVRAM chip (and had to figure out how to reprogram it). Used an SD to SCSI adapter, as the old hard drive was toast. Finally used tftp to network boot it off a linux VM, and install SunOS 4.1.3. Then played around with it for a bit and thought, "man, I used to think this slow as molasses machine was fast." I looked over at the 3/50 and thought about trying to boot it, but thought better of it. I've got a Sparc 5 I could try, I guess, or the SGI Indigo... I think there's a DECstation 2100 buried in the pile somewhere too.
  - systems_glitch 2y ago
    I need to build up a new SunOS install for my 3/50: https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2022/09/19/sun-3-50 https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2022/09/19/sun-3-50 ...but yeah, the slow factor means it doesn't get bench time, the 3/160 almost always gets picked over the 3/50 for hacking. I'd still like to do a dataless install for the 3/50, I recently refurbished a Sun SCSI shoebox with an 80 MB MFM drive on an Adaptec ACB-4000 and that'd probably be the "best" use for it.
  - flyinghamster 2y ago
    I was gifted an old Sparcstation, but it didn't have a hard drive, and while I had a suitable drive, I didn't have the cable - and then I looked up its performance, and never bothered to get it running. It would have been about the equivalent of a 486, when we already had Athlon 64x2 readily available. And, the future marches on, such as the DECstation 3000 emulator that runs on an RP2040. [0] Seeing a cheap microcontroller doing something like that makes me laugh out loud. [0] https://github.com/rscott2049/DECstation2040 https://github.com/rscott2049/DECstation2040
  - 2y ago
jasoneckert 2y ago
It was nice to see the bit in the video about the Tadpole SPARCbook 3000XT. They are incredibly rare compared to Sun desktop workstations, but a lot of fun. I wrote about the 3000ST model: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coolest-90s-laptop/ https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...
- neilv 2y ago
  Amazing score, getting a Tadpole, especially in that condition, and for that price.
gorfian_robot 2y ago
remember the e10000?
- nubinetwork 2y ago
  I sure do... there was someone on YouTube who owned one, he was going to let people use it for giggles, but he seems to have gone AWOL... shame really, because I don't know how else people can get to experience such hardware like this without physical access.
- gnufx 2y ago
  Jim Austin has one: https://www.computermuseum.org.uk/machines/sun_e10000.html https://www.computermuseum.org.uk/machines/sun_e10000.html
- sillywalk 2y ago
  It was largely developed by Cray Research, which got bought by SGI, which sold Cray's SPARC Superserver division to Sun for cheap ( < $100M)[0]. [0] https://www.forbes.com/2002/05/06/0506sun.html#703713c16a5e https://www.forbes.com/2002/05/06/0506sun.html#703713c16a5e
drmpeg 2y ago
My homage to Solaris as an iPhone wallpaper. https://www.w6rz.net/solaris_iphone.png https://www.w6rz.net/solaris_iphone.png https://www.w6rz.net/solarisios.png https://www.w6rz.net/solarisios.png
masfoobar 2y ago
Always facinated with the SPARC, NeXT, or SGI machines back in the day. Being a kid in the 90s.. always felt like reaching for something that would I would never see let along touch.
- pantulis 2y ago
  Not forgetting the DEC Alphas!
- systems_glitch 2y ago
  Indeed, these were the machines to have for a long time! My first UNIX account was on a SPARCserver 670MP (Grex, if anyone remembers that) and definitely colored my opinion of what a "real computer" was.
  - neilv 2y ago
    My R&D group at headquarters had our own 670MP pedestal, over against the far wall. That group also had one of those SPARCprinters (which offloaded the compute of printing to a very expensive workstation, sorta like Winmodems of the day). Before that, opposite coast, the company had a larger and older 4/390. Which historically performed all "server" tasks (NFS, email, even quietly a UUCP node). Eventually, 1GB IPI hard drive for it, arriving in a package the size of a person, wouldn't scale fast enough to storage needs, so we started getting multi-drive SCSI chassis, and hanging them off random Sun workstations in cubicles. Unlike the mainframe-like big fridge in the locked machine room. And some flaky Exabyte drives scattered around, each handling multiple workstation-turned-server nightly network backups, which backups would fail more often than they worked.
    - systems_glitch 2y ago
      "Distributed server" eh :P
- arethuza 2y ago
  I was offered a Xerox Lisp Machine to take home by a former employer in the mid 90's - I wish I'd taken up that offer!
bionsystem 2y ago
I have fond memories of my $veryfirstjob doing my $veryfirstprojet, end of life of old SPARC machines (replaced with Solaris Zones on T4/T5 for which I automated the deployment). Some of those machines had multiple years of uptime, I wish I had recorded all of those but I remember at least a couple of 1500+ days. Those things wouldn't die.
axpvms 2y ago
Nostalgia. I had a SparcStation 20 back in 2003 I got for free. I ended up getting NetBSD running on the thing, but for some reason I had to patch the boot floppy with a patch file I got off comp.os.bsd.netbsd for it to actually boot. Of course it was basically useless and I never really used it for anything, but it looked cool.
fevangelou 2y ago
Good luck downloading a firmware upgrade for these. Oracle requires a subscription nowadays, even if there are security related issues that the firmware resolves. And mind you, it's not a $29 subscription.
Sidneys1 2y ago
A couple years ago I got a reply to a Craigslist ad I had posted looking for 90's and 00's era computers people were looking to get rid of. This guy said he used to run a small website starting around 1995, and had a couple "SUN servers" taking up space in his storage unit that he'd love to get rid of. He was a bit of a curmudgeon, going on about how his business partner screwed him out of a "seven-digit payout" when his domain eventually got bought by some Japanese company. But a minivan rental and some elbow grease later I had a whole pile of hardware that he was all to happy to be done with: A Sun SPARCstation 20, a Sun ULTRA 1 Creator, an Axil Ultima 1 (a third-party Sun clone), an gorgeous amber Wyse CRT terminal, and a few other odds and ends. I wrote a more detailed list on my blog [1], but so far all I've managed to do with them is get the drives out and cloned and the ULTRA 1 running (an involved process as the internal BIOS memory lost power long ago, wiping such transient properties as "what is my MAC address". [1]: https://sidneys1.com/retrocomputing/2022/06/03/retro-roundup.html#sun-sparcstation-haul https://sidneys1.com/retrocomputing/2022/06/03/retro-roundup...
- mikeruiz 2y ago
  Love those terminals, was just thinking about looking for one! I remember that the programmable MAC address feature occasionally came in handy when dealing with recalcitrant / braindead software ‘entitlement’ schemes vendors would occasionally require.
  - Sidneys1 2y ago
    I absolutely adore the terminal. It appears to have several VT-compatible modes, so should be very usable with modern Linux. Except I don't have the accompanying Wyse keyboard with the appropriate setup keys required to switch compatibility modes. Gotta trawl ebay for one one of these days...
- porphyra 2y ago
  I was excited to read about cool hardware including a gorgeous amber Wyse CRT terminal, and disappointed that there were no pictures whatsoever on the blog post.
vmilner 2y ago
The power button in the top left corner was so prone to being hit by ones knee in its underdesk location almost all of them in my office had little polo/lifesaver shaped guards jerryrigged to stop it…
wslh 2y ago
[flagged]
imoverclocked 2y ago
I worked on building Debian packages en masse to Nexenta back in the day. I really loved zones+zfs+dtrace which were incredibly well integrated together. All of those technologies live on in some form but none of them are nearly as well integrated as they were on Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris. My favorite video of the time is still a guy screaming into a rack of spinning rust and watching read latencies spike on the drives nearest his mouth.
- gnufx 2y ago
  > a guy screaming into a rack of spinning rust and watching read latencies spike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
  - imoverclocked 2y ago
    That’s the one! :) Uploaded by Bryan Cantrill no less.
nazgulsenpai 2y ago
I just love the way this chassis looks. It's such a simple, minimalist, industrial yet elegant design. A thing of beauty.
deleted 2y ago
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mooktakim 2y ago
I worked for Sun Microsystems as a placement year. The first time I saw Sun Rays, I couldn't believe it wasn't already used everywhere. We had badges that let us go from desk to desk, from one building to another, and even to our home, without losing the session.
- twoodfin 2y ago
  It was used widely, it was just called Citrix.
  - mooktakim 2y ago
    Citrix was different remote desktop software. The way the sunrays worked was seamless. Thin clients and servers. Alas, that's not needed anymore.
    - twoodfin 2y ago
      Citrix/Terminal Services was certainly worse in the design sense, but from the corporate buyer's perspective (i.e. the only buyer) it was significantly better: They could deploy hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of cheap, disposable PC's as thin clients, while centrally managing everything that mattered. And unlike Sun Rays, they could natively run Windows applications. There's a reason Citrix ended up worth $16.5B when they went private a couple of years ago, they were highly successful propagating the thin client vision that Sun championed but fumbled.
  - mooktakim 2y ago
    I did hear rumours that CIA/NSA used them. It meant no one could steal a computer and take data. Only thin clients everywhere. There were thin client "laptops" too.

142 points by transpute 2y ago

The idea anyone would be running a Sparc in 2007 for performance . . . Some time around 2003 my boss had a Sparc machine as his desktop, though this was widely viewed as unix nerd nostalgia even then. As a junior I got a PC. It turned out my PC built the project 5x faster than the Sparc managed. After this I don’t think we bought much from Sun except one of those big tape drives, and lots of Dell servers appeared instead.

lizknope 2y ago
At my first job in 1997 I convinced my manager to put Linux x86 boxes on everyone's desks and move the Suns to the server room. The Suns required expensive Sun monitors while we could put cheaper larger higher resolution monitors on a Linux x86 box and display everything over X11. I was in the semiconductor / chip design business and everything ran on Solaris until around 2003 when the 64-bit Opteron came out and we never bought a Sun again.
mrweasel 2y ago
While I'm sure they had their use case, the Sun desktops we had while at university in the early 2000s always felt sluggish. The servers didn't seem much better. They'd handle a ton of users, but each would get the same slow experience.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  Their really competitive era was over by the early 2000’s, right? More of a 90’s company.
  - hondo77 2y ago
    And they were already feeling sluggish by the second half of the 90s. That might be because I had an SGI on my desktop, though.
bb88 2y ago
SparcOS was an awesome unix. Linux was respectable as well, but the hardware story in 2007 was much more shitty. Hardware vendors pretty much ignored linux, going for windows as I recall. So if you just wanted a good Unix environment, SparcOS was it. Java/ZFS were both Sun products, and we're still using them today. Just not SparcOS. Sun tried with Project Indiana, but they were getting outpaced by Linux and the open source movement.
- wmf 2y ago
  No, if you just wanted a good Unix environment in 2007 you would buy an x86 workstation with Linux preinstalled which existed from multiple vendors/VARs. Or Mac.
  - Bluecobra 2y ago
    Solaris 10 worked pretty good on x86 and was free back then. Once Oracle acquired Sun, they eventually started to demand $1K per year per CPU core on hardware that wasn't made by Sun/Oracle.
- rincebrain 2y ago
  SunOS/Solaris, I believe you mean. OpenSolaris was an interesting experiment.
  - robin_reala 2y ago
    It’s still going, in the form of Illumos: https://illumos.org/ https://illumos.org/
    - rincebrain 2y ago
      Kind of. I was specifically talking about the corporate experiment of deciding to go that hard for open sourcing your crown jewels, and Oracle has notably discontinued their participation in that experiment.
      - 2y ago
vondur 2y ago
This is part of the reason why Linux ate their lunch. For the price of one Sun server, you could get 4 Dell servers that ran Linux, and they were faster. Granted, you didn't have all of the redundancy that was built into these higher end Sun systems or the really good support, but hey you had 3 extra machines as a backup.
- jhbadger 2y ago
  Yeah people used to say in the late 1990s "Linux enthusiasts want it to kill Microsoft, but what it really is doing is killing Sun".
  - tyingq 2y ago
    Well, and what really killed Sun wasn't Linux by itself, but Linux on Opteron/AMD64.
    - AStonesThrow 2y ago
      I would say that there were three factors that superseded Sun, along with most of the other proprietary workstations and servers: FOSS Unix, commodity PC-compatible hardware, and TCP/IP. The big vendors used to be differentiated on how they communicated on a network, shared files, type of bus architecture, and workloads, and so each company or unit would choose a vendor and rely on them for solutions, and the staff had specialized expertise in those systems. But all those vendors found themselves adopting TCP/IP and Ethernet. And Sun's NFS was widely adopted. X11 also became standard. The BSDs already had a wide hardware compatibility list, so that spare machine with no OS license could be returned to service. A few generations of college grads had direct experience with Unix and building PCs. Once Linux on PC-compatibles began showing up in the server room, Windows NT was mature, and software vendors were porting to Linux, it was a fait accompli.
      - panick21_ 2y ago
        Kind of strange to talk about TCP/IP and Ethernet. Sun was the company that pushed that from the beginning. The self configured before others. It was part of why they had more new adoption then DEC/VAX systems. It all comes back to SPARC. Price to performance. If Sun had amazing high quality x86 servers and workstation by 1998, their software would have been perfectly fine. Its not like there was anything missing from Solaris at that time. Many people were not unhappy, they just realized that they could get a faster cheaper machine, and run the same software on a linux. Even if linux was less optimized, still end up cheaper overall for the majority of workloads. Its not like running linux on unsupported PCs in the early 2000 was that much fun. But Sun by 2002 they were still trying to kill x86 based stuff. They bought x64 server line in 2004.
neilv 2y ago
I'm sure this end-of-the-line machine had its merits. But if you want the cool of Elvis before he got fat, go back to when a SPARCstation 1 running SunOS 4 was new. The contemporary PC running MS-DOS or early Windows was just a toy by comparison.
- fidotron 2y ago
  I was one of those annoying unix “I know this” kids except from early exposure to a pizza box Sparcstation, not SGI. That was in the era when Suns sold strangely well to people doing lots of color processing work. (I think you can blame Kodak for that). When the PC ran rings round the Sparc at work I fully understood how far they had fallen.
chasil 2y ago
The funny thing is that this is precisely what SPARC did to the VAX.
- jrpelkonen 2y ago
  It now it seems likely that arm64 will do the same to amd64.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    It is a little different now, in the 90’s there was so much low hanging fruit that new-thing could be multiple times better than old-thing. Arm might get a durable lead of, ya know, a couple or a dozen percentage points over x86. It isn’t like a quantitative difference so huge that it becomes a qualitative one. In the 90’s, after all, aliens were coming to Earth to steal Intel’s chips.
    - nullindividual 2y ago
      Arm64 (M3) lags behind in some single core benchmarks vs Intel's high end desktop CPUs and is abysmal in multi-core benchmarks due to the limited number of cores, at least according to https://www.cpu-monkey.com https://www.cpu-monkey.com. Granted, the Intel CPU at the high end is pulling 250W+ (or was it 300W+?). There are places for both architectures. I don't see x86 going anywhere unless Intel folds and ceases to design chips. Not sure AMD could power on alone given their current market share, though I certainly hope they could as a user of their chips in the desktop (and conversely, an M2 Air for my laptop).
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        I agree actually, I just wanted to set an upper-bound that nobody could really disagree with in the pro-ARM direction. A minor quibble—high end desktop is a niche almost seemingly intentionally(?) ignored by ARM. Ampere puts out interesting server chips, and Apple puts out interesting laptop chips. What a high end desktop ARM chip? Apple’s max and ultra chips maybe, but they are pretty clearly a compromise with the fact that that market is pretty niche.
nineteen999 2y ago
Around that time I was working as a Solaris admin, C/C++ systems programmer and software packager, our manager gifted us all a SunBlade 1000 in my final year there, although we all used Windows laptops for our day to day work. I got blank look when I asked "why?". Sure they were snappy, and you could run StarOffice on them, but really there wasn't a lot that they were useful for in our day to day work. Nice machines to be sure, but completely extraneous. I already had a fleet of Sparc build servers running everything from Solaris 2.5.1 through 2.9 which I used to build and package open source stuff for our corp servers. Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere.
- finaard 2y ago
  I used a Blade 2000 as my main machine until the early 2010s. Doing UNIX work on Windows back then with cygwin was way more painful than it is nowadays, and the hardware was a lot nicer than x86 desktops (and workstations offering things like ECC would've seen you in the same price range anyway). Back then with just dual cores running heavily loaded VMs always was annoying, and slowed your main system down noticeably - so I preferred not doing that on my x86 box. My Sun on the other hand had three SunPCI cards I used for Windows development and testing - which had pretty decent performance, still allowed me to have the disk images on my UNIX filesystem, but didn't ruin my native performance.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere. Ah, the beloved "use it or lose it" end-of-year crap. So much needless waste just to keep the beancounters happy.
johnklos 2y ago
Yeah - my AlphaServer DS25, which is five years older and has dual 1 GHz Alpha CPUs, can keep up quite well in many regards with a dual 1.5 GHz Sun Fire V245 (which is very similar to the Sun machine here).
shrubble 2y ago
Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working, in a way that 2007 Linux would not; however RAM was dropping in price at the time and this wasn't much of a concern as a result, for desktops at least.
- gorfian_robot 2y ago
  one time we had something going ... wrong. took forever to login and the first person on entered 'uptime' and the load average was in the thousands. nothing was failing. just taking a really really long time to complete.
- Gibbon1 2y ago
  That's what I remember my sys admin friends saying. The Sun machines could handle heavy loads without falling over. But if you were running a heavy single user application or compiling a big project a commodity wintel box was faster.
  - gorfian_robot 2y ago
    definitely. my company was paid a buncha cash by MS to convert our web infrastructure to Windows NT. We had to have roughly 8x the number of boxes. 4x to handle the load and double that because they had to be rebooted all the damn time to keep them serving.
- throw0101d 2y ago
  > Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working […] And under high load. I've had Linux live lock on more than one occasion when load averages hit >100. I've never a Solaris (or FreeBSD) system live lock even under ridiculous loads (200+), and was always been able to login and kill whatever process(es) went sideways.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Bluecobra 2y ago
up2isomorphism 2y ago
Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks. BTW, even Linux lose benchmarks to windows often times. We used a Sparc Ultra 10 for a Authentication server in 2000, it supports concurrent 100K users without any issue, obviously you need to write your own software, but the server is super stable. And yes, we use cheap x86 + Linux for all sorts of thing from 1996 and it was quite faster but you can not trust it the same way as a Sparc.
- gorfian_robot 2y ago
  we used to 'joke' that you would have to set one of fire to get it to stop responding to a ping. even then, might take a while.
  - cable 2y ago
    Been there done that? Circa 2001 I had a customer with a rack of 220R's and Clariion storage arrays. I was paged about an app outage and saw (IIRC) "environmental errors" in the logs about the temperature of the machines. One of the Clariion's, in the same rack, had caught fire which brought the database / app down but the 220R's kept chugging along. Unsurprisingly this was quickly followed a call from the NOC that the fire suppression kicking in and that I should down get there ASAP.
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
      Oh wow. I have plenty of fond memories about the stability of Spark Stations but none as fun as that. Thanks for sharing. I did once have a Bullfrog TSS that survived a literal explosion. They certainly don’t build hardware like they used to.
  - pantulis 2y ago
    That was the joke my VMS colleagues said to us the younger unix hotshots.
- fidotron 2y ago
  My recollection is anyone doing massive concurrency per server (at the time over 10k connections) was moving to using a BSD because of kqueue. We even went through a phase of email on OpenBSD before being bought by a company that insisted on Exchange. Linux didn’t seem to pull decisively ahead of the BSDs until multicore x86 became mainstream. Up until then it always seemed flaky.
atlgator 2y ago
I developed cross-platform simulator software back in 2008. One of our platforms was SPARC. Still used heavily at the time. They tried to replace them with SGI Itanium servers and we know how that turned out.
alsobrsp 2y ago
I had a Sun as my desktop until 2010 when my Solaris admin gig was eliminated. It was running KDE on three displays. Loved it.
systems_glitch 2y ago
This was especially true for workloads that were hard to parallelize. Stuff that lent itself well to parallel execution was sometimes faster, though hyperthreads and multicore single-package CPUs took care of that a few years later.
walrus01 2y ago
As I recall in also exactly 2002 to 2003 my desktop setup shifted to a x86 whitebox PC I built myself (32-bit) FreeBSD machine that was running X and KDE2. I had a really nicely customized KDE2 setup and could do a lot with it. It was worlds better than a proprietary OS based Unix-like setup.

ktm5j 2y ago

I wanted on of these sooo bad. I've always had a softspot in my heart for SPARC. I loved working with those systems at work. I used to have a second hand T5440 that I got off ebay for super cheap, I think it had 128G of RAM and 256 threads!

dang 2y ago

URL changed from https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/the-last-sun-sparc-workstation/ https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/the-last-sun-sparc-workstati..., which points to this.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

neverartful 2y ago

I owned an Ultra 60 at one time and I really liked it. It was a dual processor UltraSPARC II (or III) running at something like 450 MHz. In one of my groups we had a Sun V480 and we ran all kinds of stuff on it and it never had the slightest hiccup. It was rock solid. Fun times!

geoffeg 2y ago

I miss Sun hardware, especially in the sun4c era. Everything was so solidly built and well thought out compared to a lot of PC hardware. The IPC/IPX is still one of my favorite form factors.

salgernon 2y ago
I still have an IPC on my desk as a monitor stand. In 1996 I used it as a router for my 24hour 56kbps modem connection, serving all of 204.94.173.x - I was paying tlg.org $145/mo for my Class C address space, and all my home machines were just hanging out there. that is the internet I really miss.
- geoffeg 2y ago
  I have been thinking about getting an old IPC or IPX and swapping out the internals with a modern PC motherboard and components, but only if I can do it cleanly. I haven't done it due to not having enough free time and... it just feels wrong to me in some way.
  - formerly_proven 2y ago
    Ah the trouble of finding a unix workstation with a pristine case and thoroughly cooked interior so you don't feel bad about gutting it for a casemod. Call me when you find one.
- icedchai 2y ago
  I hear you. For most of the 90's, I had my home network on a publicly routed /24, no firewall.
  - testfoobar 2y ago
    Hosted my own domain and mail server right under my desk...
    - icedchai 2y ago

rbanffy 2y ago

I'd say the most successful Unix workstation maker is Apple. By far.

rbanffy 2y ago
Or better yet: NeXT. It’s just that it renamed itself Apple after acquiring the company and the brand for one Steve Jobs (and getting 400 million as change).

pjmlp 2y ago

When I arrived at CERN back in 2003, there was a pile of Sun workstations on a corner from my office, waiting to be dispatched to computer heaven. Most folks were either using the new OS X, or Windows, with a custom Linux distribution on the servers, eventually replaced by Scientic Linux distribution. There were still some Sun stations kind of serving the X Windows sessions on the restaurant area, and even those didn´t last much longer.

rwmj 2y ago
Late 90s / early 2000s was when Sun workstations changed from very expensive but well constructed proprietary machines to very expensive PCs with cheap internals and unusual processors. However I still got an ex-university Sun workstation around 2002 for free (or a token price?) which served me well as a desktop machine for years and years. It eventually died of the capacitor plague that (to be fair to Sun) affects just about everything from that era.
- jclulow 2y ago
  Setting the SPARC bits aside, I feel like the Ultra 20/24/27 machines were well-constructed 64-bit x86 machines with regular AMD and Intel processors and ECC memory and reasonable fans and so on. I don't remember how they were on price, but I feel like they were not outrageous when compared to similar lines from Dell or HP at the time.
  - fidotron 2y ago
    The pricing was the other Sun problem. It was a super grimy negotiation to get them down from their ludicrous publicly stated pricing to what you could actually get them for, which was more reasonable, you just wanted to clean yourself afterwards. In the UK Sun had done some deals of the type that in North America are dominated by IBM (banking infra etc.), so they were probably absolutely milking those clients and giving the rest of us more slack than they wanted to let on.
  - f1shy 2y ago
    I had a very different experience. I was responsible for about 100 Sun servers in the early 2000. To get to our server room, I had to go through another datacenter, where all was HP. We had every single week 1 or 2 outages (power supply, disk, mainboard, memory…) all the time. EVERY WEEk! Meanwhile, the other datacenter had just a few visits per year, for upgrades…

donatj 2y ago

I always salivated over Sun SPARC workstations. I'm kind of sad to hear that the specs of the last SPARC workstation were so … low… but I guess time destroys all things

systems_glitch 2y ago
There are far better SPARC64 servers available, but many are so incredibly loud (looking at you SunFire T1000) that running them outside a dedicated area is not practical.
happycube 2y ago
Got curious and did a quick search - at least on this one sample a regular Core 2 Duo runs circles around the IIIi: https://www.glennklockwood.com/benchmarks/performance.html#sparc-processors https://www.glennklockwood.com/benchmarks/performance.html#s...

cptnapalm 2y ago

While not quite a Sun system, I still have my Tadpole Viper. The only thing that runs on it in a straight forward manner is OpenBSD; even Solaris needs patch discs. I'd still use it regularly if only web browsers would work. I still prefer its keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever owned. It's the machine I was using when I finally was able to overcome my previous difficulties in learning C. And I even got to diagnose an endian problem.

johnklos 2y ago
I wonder how well NetBSD would run on it. There're quite a lot of current packages for it: https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sparc64/10.0/All/ https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sparc64/10...
- cptnapalm 2y ago
  When I was looking for a not-Solaris OS, OpenBSD was the only game in town for it. Literally. Somebody maintaining the UltraSPARC OpenBSD port decided to support this oddity specifically. Nothing else, including NetBSD, would work.
  - systems_glitch 2y ago
    Probably not especially difficult to port the platform-specific bits from OpenBSD to NetBSD, but also not trivial. A lot of the "wow, this actually Just Works on OpenBSD!" support is because one or more OpenBSD developer actually runs the given system. Supposedly that's why there's really good support for a large number of laptop peculiarities that NetBSD lacks -- OpenBSD devs are actually dailying OpenBSD on those machines.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
> I'd still use it regularly if only web browsers would work. I still prefer its keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever owned. You can just cheat: https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/08/12/vncfox-better-way-of-browsing-modern-web-on-vintage-machines/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/08/12/vncfox-better-way-of-bro...

kevitivity 2y ago

As a sysadmin, the only thing I miss about Sun hardware and Solaris was how reliable it was. My record for uptime was over 6 years on a Sun Blade workstation.

icedchai 2y ago

I feel such nostalgia for Sun hardware. I've had several sparcstations over the years: a SparcStation IPC, SparcStation 5, and an Ultra 10. I still have the Ultra 10, and put OpenBSD on it the other month, after replacing the NVRAM chip.

technothrasher 2y ago
I just booted up an old Sun 3/80 a little while ago for fun. Needed a new NVRAM chip (and had to figure out how to reprogram it). Used an SD to SCSI adapter, as the old hard drive was toast. Finally used tftp to network boot it off a linux VM, and install SunOS 4.1.3. Then played around with it for a bit and thought, "man, I used to think this slow as molasses machine was fast." I looked over at the 3/50 and thought about trying to boot it, but thought better of it. I've got a Sparc 5 I could try, I guess, or the SGI Indigo... I think there's a DECstation 2100 buried in the pile somewhere too.
- systems_glitch 2y ago
  I need to build up a new SunOS install for my 3/50: https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2022/09/19/sun-3-50 https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2022/09/19/sun-3-50 ...but yeah, the slow factor means it doesn't get bench time, the 3/160 almost always gets picked over the 3/50 for hacking. I'd still like to do a dataless install for the 3/50, I recently refurbished a Sun SCSI shoebox with an 80 MB MFM drive on an Adaptec ACB-4000 and that'd probably be the "best" use for it.
- flyinghamster 2y ago
  I was gifted an old Sparcstation, but it didn't have a hard drive, and while I had a suitable drive, I didn't have the cable - and then I looked up its performance, and never bothered to get it running. It would have been about the equivalent of a 486, when we already had Athlon 64x2 readily available. And, the future marches on, such as the DECstation 3000 emulator that runs on an RP2040. [0] Seeing a cheap microcontroller doing something like that makes me laugh out loud. [0] https://github.com/rscott2049/DECstation2040 https://github.com/rscott2049/DECstation2040
- 2y ago

jasoneckert 2y ago

It was nice to see the bit in the video about the Tadpole SPARCbook 3000XT. They are incredibly rare compared to Sun desktop workstations, but a lot of fun. I wrote about the 3000ST model: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coolest-90s-laptop/ https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...

neilv 2y ago
Amazing score, getting a Tadpole, especially in that condition, and for that price.

gorfian_robot 2y ago

remember the e10000?

nubinetwork 2y ago
I sure do... there was someone on YouTube who owned one, he was going to let people use it for giggles, but he seems to have gone AWOL... shame really, because I don't know how else people can get to experience such hardware like this without physical access.
gnufx 2y ago
Jim Austin has one: https://www.computermuseum.org.uk/machines/sun_e10000.html https://www.computermuseum.org.uk/machines/sun_e10000.html
sillywalk 2y ago
It was largely developed by Cray Research, which got bought by SGI, which sold Cray's SPARC Superserver division to Sun for cheap ( < $100M)[0]. [0] https://www.forbes.com/2002/05/06/0506sun.html#703713c16a5e https://www.forbes.com/2002/05/06/0506sun.html#703713c16a5e

drmpeg 2y ago

My homage to Solaris as an iPhone wallpaper. https://www.w6rz.net/solaris_iphone.png https://www.w6rz.net/solaris_iphone.png https://www.w6rz.net/solarisios.png https://www.w6rz.net/solarisios.png

masfoobar 2y ago

Always facinated with the SPARC, NeXT, or SGI machines back in the day. Being a kid in the 90s.. always felt like reaching for something that would I would never see let along touch.

pantulis 2y ago
Not forgetting the DEC Alphas!
systems_glitch 2y ago
Indeed, these were the machines to have for a long time! My first UNIX account was on a SPARCserver 670MP (Grex, if anyone remembers that) and definitely colored my opinion of what a "real computer" was.
- neilv 2y ago
  My R&D group at headquarters had our own 670MP pedestal, over against the far wall. That group also had one of those SPARCprinters (which offloaded the compute of printing to a very expensive workstation, sorta like Winmodems of the day). Before that, opposite coast, the company had a larger and older 4/390. Which historically performed all "server" tasks (NFS, email, even quietly a UUCP node). Eventually, 1GB IPI hard drive for it, arriving in a package the size of a person, wouldn't scale fast enough to storage needs, so we started getting multi-drive SCSI chassis, and hanging them off random Sun workstations in cubicles. Unlike the mainframe-like big fridge in the locked machine room. And some flaky Exabyte drives scattered around, each handling multiple workstation-turned-server nightly network backups, which backups would fail more often than they worked.
  - systems_glitch 2y ago
    "Distributed server" eh :P
arethuza 2y ago
I was offered a Xerox Lisp Machine to take home by a former employer in the mid 90's - I wish I'd taken up that offer!

bionsystem 2y ago

I have fond memories of my $veryfirstjob doing my $veryfirstprojet, end of life of old SPARC machines (replaced with Solaris Zones on T4/T5 for which I automated the deployment). Some of those machines had multiple years of uptime, I wish I had recorded all of those but I remember at least a couple of 1500+ days. Those things wouldn't die.

axpvms 2y ago

Nostalgia. I had a SparcStation 20 back in 2003 I got for free. I ended up getting NetBSD running on the thing, but for some reason I had to patch the boot floppy with a patch file I got off comp.os.bsd.netbsd for it to actually boot. Of course it was basically useless and I never really used it for anything, but it looked cool.

fevangelou 2y ago

Good luck downloading a firmware upgrade for these. Oracle requires a subscription nowadays, even if there are security related issues that the firmware resolves. And mind you, it's not a $29 subscription.

Sidneys1 2y ago

A couple years ago I got a reply to a Craigslist ad I had posted looking for 90's and 00's era computers people were looking to get rid of. This guy said he used to run a small website starting around 1995, and had a couple "SUN servers" taking up space in his storage unit that he'd love to get rid of. He was a bit of a curmudgeon, going on about how his business partner screwed him out of a "seven-digit payout" when his domain eventually got bought by some Japanese company. But a minivan rental and some elbow grease later I had a whole pile of hardware that he was all to happy to be done with: A Sun SPARCstation 20, a Sun ULTRA 1 Creator, an Axil Ultima 1 (a third-party Sun clone), an gorgeous amber Wyse CRT terminal, and a few other odds and ends. I wrote a more detailed list on my blog [1], but so far all I've managed to do with them is get the drives out and cloned and the ULTRA 1 running (an involved process as the internal BIOS memory lost power long ago, wiping such transient properties as "what is my MAC address". [1]: https://sidneys1.com/retrocomputing/2022/06/03/retro-roundup.html#sun-sparcstation-haul https://sidneys1.com/retrocomputing/2022/06/03/retro-roundup...

mikeruiz 2y ago
Love those terminals, was just thinking about looking for one! I remember that the programmable MAC address feature occasionally came in handy when dealing with recalcitrant / braindead software ‘entitlement’ schemes vendors would occasionally require.
- Sidneys1 2y ago
  I absolutely adore the terminal. It appears to have several VT-compatible modes, so should be very usable with modern Linux. Except I don't have the accompanying Wyse keyboard with the appropriate setup keys required to switch compatibility modes. Gotta trawl ebay for one one of these days...
porphyra 2y ago
I was excited to read about cool hardware including a gorgeous amber Wyse CRT terminal, and disappointed that there were no pictures whatsoever on the blog post.

vmilner 2y ago

The power button in the top left corner was so prone to being hit by ones knee in its underdesk location almost all of them in my office had little polo/lifesaver shaped guards jerryrigged to stop it…

wslh 2y ago

[flagged]

imoverclocked 2y ago

I worked on building Debian packages en masse to Nexenta back in the day. I really loved zones+zfs+dtrace which were incredibly well integrated together. All of those technologies live on in some form but none of them are nearly as well integrated as they were on Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris. My favorite video of the time is still a guy screaming into a rack of spinning rust and watching read latencies spike on the drives nearest his mouth.

gnufx 2y ago
> a guy screaming into a rack of spinning rust and watching read latencies spike https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
- imoverclocked 2y ago
  That’s the one! :) Uploaded by Bryan Cantrill no less.

nazgulsenpai 2y ago

I just love the way this chassis looks. It's such a simple, minimalist, industrial yet elegant design. A thing of beauty.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mooktakim 2y ago

I worked for Sun Microsystems as a placement year. The first time I saw Sun Rays, I couldn't believe it wasn't already used everywhere. We had badges that let us go from desk to desk, from one building to another, and even to our home, without losing the session.

twoodfin 2y ago
It was used widely, it was just called Citrix.
- mooktakim 2y ago
  Citrix was different remote desktop software. The way the sunrays worked was seamless. Thin clients and servers. Alas, that's not needed anymore.
  - twoodfin 2y ago
    Citrix/Terminal Services was certainly worse in the design sense, but from the corporate buyer's perspective (i.e. the only buyer) it was significantly better: They could deploy hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of cheap, disposable PC's as thin clients, while centrally managing everything that mattered. And unlike Sun Rays, they could natively run Windows applications. There's a reason Citrix ended up worth $16.5B when they went private a couple of years ago, they were highly successful propagating the thin client vision that Sun championed but fumbled.
- mooktakim 2y ago
  I did hear rumours that CIA/NSA used them. It meant no one could steal a computer and take data. Only thin clients everywhere. There were thin client "laptops" too.