I got to have this kind of fun a few years ago, when a company in our building threw away a Sun Ultra 45, which I believe was the last of the SPARC boxes packag

I got to have this kind of fun a few years ago, when a company in our building threw away a Sun Ultra 45, which I believe was the last of the SPARC boxes packaged into a desktop form factor. These things were the stuff of legend - we had the later x86 Sun's in college - and I quite nearly blew a fuse after my coworker sent a photo of it in a dumpster, without telling me where it was until 30 minutes later. By this point, Sun hardware was mostly PC-like: it took SATA hard drives, DDR memory, and USB peripherals. You didn't need to issue STOP to get to the `ok` prompt, you just had to do some specifically-timed dance with the (soft) power button. My guess, based on the company throwing it out, is that they hit the power button, got a blinking red light with no video output, assumed it was dead, and tossed it. At this point, I didn't even know yet that there was an `ok` prompt to get to, and I spent a few hours at the office that night, wrapping my head around the service manual before getting it to dump me to `ok` and let me poke around. I dreamt for years of restoring it and using it as a NAS (ZFS!), but life got in the way, and I eventually sold it (sufficiently refurbed to be running Solaris 10, but missing things like the side panels and drive cage) for only $250 or so.