alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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Ditto here. I loved their hardware from that era up until the early 2000s. I still have a few dozen systems from those years in my basement. I tried getting rid of them years ago using the Marie Kondo method, but they all SPARC joy...
I can remember carrying a Sun machine around for demos in '95 or so - the IPX was easy to carry but the monitor less than easy. What I particularly remember is getting the occasional electric shocks from the monitor when carrying it (presumably from energy stored in capacitors) and being really careful not to drop it as our two person company only had one Sun monitor!
My first homebrew wireless AP was an old SPARCclassic with the now-rare SBus PCMCIA adapter and a Orinoco Gold, running IIRC Debian Potato.
Still a very cool form factor, though nowadays beware that the PSU is a cap goop timebomb:
https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2017/07/24/ipc-recap
I greatly enjoy the Sun3 and Sun4c/Sun4m era, always under SunOS 4. Probably because that's what I started on with my first UNIX account (Grex). Probably why I still prefer the BSD-style distros nowadays.
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.