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Thanks! And, wow, do i miss the old X-window workstations...well, i should clarify that i LOVED those (I think they were Sparc?) workstations that ran Solaris

by mxuribe 5mo ago

Thanks! And, wow, do i miss the old X-window workstations...well, i should clarify that i LOVED those (I think they were Sparc?) workstations that ran Solaris or SunOS back in the day! Man, that takes me back some years...but i really loved those machines! :-)

mghackerlady 5mo ago
OpenBSD supports sparc very well and is compatible with old sunos stuff (iirc). Unfortunately no 68k anymore (okay, technically there's a niche flavour of 68k that still is supported because of a very dedicated man in Japan)
- brynet 5mo ago
  > OpenBSD supports sparc very well and is compatible with old sunos stuff (iirc) No 32-bit sparc anymore (only UltraSPARC, aka sparc64). No SunOS compatibility (despite Theo de Raadt inventing it for NetBSD, before being copied by other BSDs). https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2 > Technically there's a niche flavour of 68k that still is supported because of a very dedicated man in Japan luna88k, while related, is not 68k. https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html
  - mghackerlady 5mo ago
    I must've read about the sunos thing somewhere and imagined it still existed. >luna88k, while related, is not 68k I misremembered it as being similar to the relationship between the 6502 and the 65C816
  - ninjin 5mo ago
    Modern operating system booting on hardware that is closing in on 40 years old in just over three minutes, this is wild to see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btwiiZw3B2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btwiiZw3B2s Kenji Aoyama truly is aligned with the best of the hacker spirit. As for getting your hands on a luna88k, I have no clue. The only thing I managed to find was a broken one that sold for ~USD 750 at an online auction.
    - brynet 5mo ago
      If you're interested, you should check out Miod Vallat's Motorola 88k story. http://miod.online.fr/software/openbsd/stories/m88k.html http://miod.online.fr/software/openbsd/stories/m88k.html One interesting bit of trivial is Luna-88k workstations were heavily used to implement CMU Mach (which would eventually be used by Apple).
JdeBP 5mo ago
It's worth mentioning at this point that one can still get (Open)Solaris descendent operating systems: OmniOS, SmartOS, and Tribblix. The latter still has SPARC in its installation guide. * https://tribblix.org/install-sparc.html https://tribblix.org/install-sparc.html
- mxuribe 5mo ago
  Oh wow, that's pretty cool! Thanks for sharing! Another part of my nostalgia with those old workstations (besides the core OS) was the desktop environment, i think CDE or motif or something like that. Something about the look and feel of that DE i always thought was cool!

by mxuribe 5mo ago

mghackerlady 5mo ago

OpenBSD supports sparc very well and is compatible with old sunos stuff (iirc). Unfortunately no 68k anymore (okay, technically there's a niche flavour of 68k that still is supported because of a very dedicated man in Japan)

brynet 5mo ago
> OpenBSD supports sparc very well and is compatible with old sunos stuff (iirc) No 32-bit sparc anymore (only UltraSPARC, aka sparc64). No SunOS compatibility (despite Theo de Raadt inventing it for NetBSD, before being copied by other BSDs). https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2 > Technically there's a niche flavour of 68k that still is supported because of a very dedicated man in Japan luna88k, while related, is not 68k. https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html https://www.openbsd.org/luna88k.html
- mghackerlady 5mo ago
  I must've read about the sunos thing somewhere and imagined it still existed. >luna88k, while related, is not 68k I misremembered it as being similar to the relationship between the 6502 and the 65C816
- ninjin 5mo ago
  Modern operating system booting on hardware that is closing in on 40 years old in just over three minutes, this is wild to see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btwiiZw3B2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btwiiZw3B2s Kenji Aoyama truly is aligned with the best of the hacker spirit. As for getting your hands on a luna88k, I have no clue. The only thing I managed to find was a broken one that sold for ~USD 750 at an online auction.
  - brynet 5mo ago
    If you're interested, you should check out Miod Vallat's Motorola 88k story. http://miod.online.fr/software/openbsd/stories/m88k.html http://miod.online.fr/software/openbsd/stories/m88k.html One interesting bit of trivial is Luna-88k workstations were heavily used to implement CMU Mach (which would eventually be used by Apple).

JdeBP 5mo ago

It's worth mentioning at this point that one can still get (Open)Solaris descendent operating systems: OmniOS, SmartOS, and Tribblix. The latter still has SPARC in its installation guide. * https://tribblix.org/install-sparc.html https://tribblix.org/install-sparc.html

mxuribe 5mo ago
Oh wow, that's pretty cool! Thanks for sharing! Another part of my nostalgia with those old workstations (besides the core OS) was the desktop environment, i think CDE or motif or something like that. Something about the look and feel of that DE i always thought was cool!