alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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This reminds me! I used to have a Sun 3/60 way back before I got the Sparcs. Boy those things were slow... Still, I learned so much from SunOS 4.x systems.
I need to build up a new SunOS install for my 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.
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