I had several SparcStation 20's back in the early 2000's. I really liked these boxes running Solaris (6,7 and 8) and OpenBSD. Built like a tank and ran for months with out rebooting.
We had hundreds of sparcstation 10's and 20's when I first started at Pratt & Whitney. Then they were replaced by ultra 1's and Ultra 2's, and finally by Ultra 10's and Ultra 60's (and a few sunblade 2000's) before they were all replaced by windows/intel workstations. I liked working in Solaris, but after the Oracle buyout, I switched to linux.
Oh yeah... brings back fond memories of my first Linux PC running X. Since it was running the same window manager and UNIX programs it looked pretty much the same - but the difference became apparent when running a vector graphics animation of the rotating earth, calculated in software every five minutes. On a Sun this barely caused any load while my 386 without floating point unit wasn't even able to complete one computation every five minutes.
DEC/Digital had their own RISC line before Alpha. They had Ultrix running on MIPS hardware. They even ported but didn't release Tru64 aka OSF/1 to MIPS.
@@sparcie I think they had problems getting greater performance. The highest end desktop machine was the DECstation 5000/260. i ran one for many years on Ultrix 4.5 with dual 19" Sony Trinitron CRT and 448MB ram. It was literally the first dual screen system I ever had. Sadly it was destroyed by a family member in 2013 while i was overseas on contract. I've also run a Sun Blade 2000 with dual Dell 19" LCD's on Sol 10.
This is a lovely machine! I had a small collection of Sparcs a couple of decades ago (from memory a Sparc 1, a 10, a 20 and a bunch of non-working IPCs). I had to let them ago about 15 years back because they were taking up space and no longer being used. The one I got the most use out of was the Sparc 1. I used it as a personal web server connected to work's network back before virtual servers were affordable.
They seem to do quite well in the webserver role. I understand about the space, I got offered a bunch of sun equipment at one point, but just didn't have the room for the machines. About the only machine I'd make space for now would be one of the lunchbox machines like the IPC, I've got a few newer Sun machines so don't need to get those so much.
@@sparcie The IPCs were definitely cute. The four I had were lacking things like RAM and drives; I'm not sure I could have put a complete and useful working example from all the ones I had. They could only take 48mb RAM too; the Sparc 1 took 64 and ran about the same speed. Of course if I'd kept the lot they would have gone for a fortune on eBay now!
@@sparcie LX is the lunchbox you seek... its a nice little 50Mhz microsparc system with a fancy Meiko FPU integrated, with integrated CG6 graphics also, and its a sun4m so more compatible with more recent stuff.
I still have that sparcstation 10 here but I never really found a use for it seeing as I'm mostly interested in games. I hear there is a Solaris version of Doom and Quake I may see if I can track down and try but I've never been able to even access the system since its password protected. I suppose I can just try reinstalling the OS or I guess I can try installing Linux or something.
Yeah reinstalling the OS is probably your best bet, was that one an ultra? The older 32bit sparcs have less options for OS, but the Ultra's can run linux, FreeBSD and a bunch of others that don't support 32bit sparc anymore. Solaris obviously supports either.
You can run Vintage Linux like redhat 5.2 which is acutally quite nice, and there is the more recent effort my Rene Rebe to get T2 SDE with Linux 5.19 working on 32bit suns... it remains to be seen if his distro runs on real hardware though (it runs in QEMU though). Also you really should get a VSIMM for your SS20 so you can use the SX accelerator.
I'll have to look into older distro's to try a few of them out, I basically went with NetBSD because it's one of the better current OS's that will work on the 32 bit sparcs. I have some spare hard disks for it, so I can swap it out and try something else fairly easily.
I had several SparcStation 20's back in the early 2000's. I really liked these boxes running Solaris (6,7 and 8) and OpenBSD. Built like a tank and ran for months with out rebooting.
We had hundreds of sparcstation 10's and 20's when I first started at Pratt & Whitney. Then they were replaced by ultra 1's and Ultra 2's, and finally by Ultra 10's and Ultra 60's (and a few sunblade 2000's) before they were all replaced by windows/intel workstations. I liked working in Solaris, but after the Oracle buyout, I switched to linux.
Oh yeah... brings back fond memories of my first Linux PC running X. Since it was running the same window manager and UNIX programs it looked pretty much the same - but the difference became apparent when running a vector graphics animation of the rotating earth, calculated in software every five minutes. On a Sun this barely caused any load while my 386 without floating point unit wasn't even able to complete one computation every five minutes.
DEC/Digital had their own RISC line before Alpha. They had Ultrix running on MIPS hardware. They even ported but didn't release Tru64 aka OSF/1 to MIPS.
Cool I had no idea they used MIPS at all. Was SGI acquiring MIPS the reason they dropped that CPU?
@@sparcie I think they had problems getting greater performance. The highest end desktop machine was the DECstation 5000/260. i ran one for many years on Ultrix 4.5 with dual 19" Sony Trinitron CRT and 448MB ram. It was literally the first dual screen system I ever had. Sadly it was destroyed by a family member in 2013 while i was overseas on contract. I've also run a Sun Blade 2000 with dual Dell 19" LCD's on Sol 10.
This is a lovely machine! I had a small collection of Sparcs a couple of decades ago (from memory a Sparc 1, a 10, a 20 and a bunch of non-working IPCs). I had to let them ago about 15 years back because they were taking up space and no longer being used. The one I got the most use out of was the Sparc 1. I used it as a personal web server connected to work's network back before virtual servers were affordable.
They seem to do quite well in the webserver role. I understand about the space, I got offered a bunch of sun equipment at one point, but just didn't have the room for the machines. About the only machine I'd make space for now would be one of the lunchbox machines like the IPC, I've got a few newer Sun machines so don't need to get those so much.
@@sparcie The IPCs were definitely cute. The four I had were lacking things like RAM and drives; I'm not sure I could have put a complete and useful working example from all the ones I had. They could only take 48mb RAM too; the Sparc 1 took 64 and ran about the same speed. Of course if I'd kept the lot they would have gone for a fortune on eBay now!
@@sparcie LX is the lunchbox you seek... its a nice little 50Mhz microsparc system with a fancy Meiko FPU integrated, with integrated CG6 graphics also, and its a sun4m so more compatible with more recent stuff.
Sounds awesome, I'll have to keep an eye out. I don't see many older sun machines unfortunately.
This is the kinda content I love! Keep up the great work! XD
Hope you do a video fixing the power supply :D
I'll have a go at it! I think I'll need a better way of filming my work bench to show what I'm doing.
I still have that sparcstation 10 here but I never really found a use for it seeing as I'm mostly interested in games. I hear there is a Solaris version of Doom and Quake I may see if I can track down and try but I've never been able to even access the system since its password protected. I suppose I can just try reinstalling the OS or I guess I can try installing Linux or something.
Yeah reinstalling the OS is probably your best bet, was that one an ultra? The older 32bit sparcs have less options for OS, but the Ultra's can run linux, FreeBSD and a bunch of others that don't support 32bit sparc anymore. Solaris obviously supports either.
@@sparcie It's a Sun Ultra 10 tower with a 440MHz RISC based UltraSPARC IIi
That's quite a fast one, should work a treat once you get it going!
You can run Vintage Linux like redhat 5.2 which is acutally quite nice, and there is the more recent effort my Rene Rebe to get T2 SDE with Linux 5.19 working on 32bit suns... it remains to be seen if his distro runs on real hardware though (it runs in QEMU though). Also you really should get a VSIMM for your SS20 so you can use the SX accelerator.
I'll have to look into older distro's to try a few of them out, I basically went with NetBSD because it's one of the better current OS's that will work on the 32 bit sparcs. I have some spare hard disks for it, so I can swap it out and try something else fairly easily.
Netsurf is a better browser than dillo for the SS20, if you are on solaris 8 or 9 opera 9.x is king though.
I've been trying to get Netsurf to work, but haven't had any luck compiling it, probably a NetBSD issue. Need to revisit that at some point.