[HN Gopher] Getting and restoring a Sun Ultra 1 Workstation
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       Getting and restoring a Sun Ultra 1 Workstation
        
       Author : alexellisuk
       Score  : 28 points
       Date   : 2021-05-11 10:08 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.rup12.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.rup12.net)
        
       | johnklos wrote:
       | It's amazing sometimes to see how much modern software compiles
       | and runs without fuss on UltraSPARC systems. Projects like LLVM
       | still include UltraSPARC, even if Solaris on UltraSPARC isn't
       | horribly popular these days.
       | 
       | The number of packages for NetBSD on UltraSPARC is huge:
       | 
       | http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sparc64/9.0...
       | 
       | And while you wouldn't want to run stuff like Rust on a machine
       | with 192 megs of memory, it's impressive that you can run Rust on
       | a machine from 1995.
        
       | ruptwelve wrote:
       | I had a lot of fun restoring this hunk of junk and trying to make
       | it work. But there is still a long ways to go. Surprisingly there
       | really NOT a lot of information out there on the Ultra 1. But do
       | stay tuned for part 2.
        
         | spfzero wrote:
         | Thanks for sharing this!
        
       | smackeyacky wrote:
       | Shame about the monitor, I would have been pretty upset at that
       | freight company.
       | 
       | I remember getting my IPX replaced by one of these bad boys, was
       | quite an exciting day since the IPX was positively ancient in
       | 1995, although we quickly turned them into dogs with VisualWorks
       | and had to get more memory.
       | 
       | That crew was fun to work with, although it probably helped that
       | we were young and stupid and getting paid what felt like bonkers
       | money to work on sexy gear like a Sun.
        
       | commandlinefan wrote:
       | I was a CS major around the time these were new, and we got a
       | dozen of them for our computer lab. At the time we had a huge
       | computer lab full of PCs (386's or 486's I think) and a darkened
       | back room with a dozen SparcStations. At the time, I didn't know
       | anything about Sparc or even Unix, but I did know that the
       | English majors descended on our computer lab first thing every
       | morning and took every available PC. However, the SparcStations
       | in the back room were almost always available. I ended up
       | learning, out of necessity, how to do my assignments on them,
       | since computers were then still too expensive for me to be able
       | to afford one of my own. Well, around that same time, a new
       | research project called the World Wide Web was taking off, and
       | they hooked all of the Sun workstations to it. I lucked into
       | discovering "the internet" in the early 90's because all of the
       | PCs were already taken.
        
         | ja27 wrote:
         | When the first Raspberry Pi came out, I remember digging up
         | benchmarks and - if I remember correctly - the $35 Pi was at
         | least 4x faster than the SparcStation 20's we all fought to get
         | neural net training time on in our grad school lab.
        
       | lunatuna wrote:
       | I have some good memories of this and some sparkstation 2s were
       | used for our 3D CAD course. They were in this darkly lit lab that
       | made it all feel very serious.
       | 
       | I remember the mouse was optical but you needed a special mouse
       | pad that had little triangles on it for the sensor to detect the
       | movement. It was all way smoother than the 486 and pentiums that
       | we used for the 2D CAD work.
        
       | rjsw wrote:
       | I have the same model. The idiot that I bought it from decided to
       | pack the keyboard on edge underneath the main unit so it arrived
       | with a bit of a kink in the chassis and a cracked case.
        
         | ruptwelve wrote:
         | I am very sad for my cracked monitor!
        
       | eb0la wrote:
       | That was my first DNS server in the University!
       | 
       | In fact it was the primary DNS for our University domain
       | (uah.es).
       | 
       | I remember if you press the stop+a keys you get an ok prompt (the
       | ROM monitor). You can debug the pci register from there and call
       | a forth program to zconfigure the hardeare. Also it is able to
       | netboot from a dhcs or rarp server and a NFS share (much faster
       | than the CD).
       | 
       | I guess the only modern OSes that can handle this hardware today
       | are NetBSD and OpenBSD.
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-11 23:02 UTC)