alt Hacker NewsEnd the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video]
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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-coo...
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.
My homage to Solaris as an iPhone wallpaper.
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.
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.
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.
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.
URL changed from https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/the-last-sun-sparc-workstati..., which points to this.
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!
I'd say the most successful Unix workstation maker is Apple. By far.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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…
I just love the way this chassis looks. It's such a simple, minimalist, industrial yet elegant design. A thing of beauty.
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.
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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...