[HN Gopher] Build your own SPARC workstation
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Build your own SPARC workstation
Author : marcodiego
Score : 55 points
Date : 2021-08-05 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (learn.adafruit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (learn.adafruit.com)
| neilv wrote:
| One of my greatest bits of luck was getting access to these and
| other Unix workstations&servers as a teen.
|
| If you run old SPARCstation OSes, a few points of interest...
|
| If you get the OpenWindows era with Open Look look&feel, one of
| the things that were newish around then is the pinnable menus and
| dialogs. You could sometimes tear off a menu and turn it into a
| persistent window that's more like a toolbar (which was also
| emerging then).
|
| Open Look (or Sun) was also introducing small rectangular
| drag&drop target widget on windows, when drag&drop was new. Which
| I don't recall seeing later, so maybe it was a mix of less
| drag&drop than we thought we might have, and more an expectation
| of the user to learn what things could be dragged and where they
| could be dropped.
|
| Behind Open Look also a number of different toolkits and window
| system backends that might be behind a given Open Look
| application and desktop. My favorite toolkit was XView, and it
| was very easy to work with in C, and used varargs sorta like GTK
| later did. Desktop-wise, besides X, there was the XNeWS server,
| which supported a kind of display PostScript on steroids, and you
| could write entire applications in PostScript (though their
| OpenLook widgets looked poor early on, compared to the pixel-
| perfect XView result).
|
| Maybe the key thing to notice about OpenLook... At the time, the
| other main X GUI look&feel that workstations were moving to was
| Motif, which was mostly just rectangles. Someone once posted
| screenshots of a dialog in Open Look and then another in Motif,
| with all the text removed, and, in Open Look, you could pretty
| much tell what all the familiar widgets were, and you immediately
| knew how to interact with all of them. That was considered
| valuable at the time. (Though HCI in general has moved more
| towards brochure-like and magazine-like motivations in the
| interests of the creator, and away from motivations we had
| before, for new-user and power-user usability in the interests of
| the user.)
|
| If you go back a little further with your workstation, to SunOS
| 4.1.x or 4.0.x, you can forget about X and NeWS, and see
| something a bit different: SunView. This was a monochrome GUI,
| maybe sorta like an old Mac, but without all the things the Mac
| had, and backed by much more sophisticated workstation/server OS.
| People did powerful things with it, on a workstation with a
| megapixel display and 8MB of RAM. The GUI toolkit was the
| predecessor to XView, and similar.
|
| For workstation application programs (like my employer
| developed), it wasn't unusual to implement your own portable GUI
| layer, including an entire window systems. So, our stuff and
| Interleaf's, for example, would create a native window for
| whatever workstation desktop was in use, and implement our own
| desktop within that. And they were all different, and often
| innovative, sometimes in ways that have been lost.
|
| I didn't see how all the different CAD, EDA, etc. packages
| worked, but sometimes the workstation was pretty much an
| appliance for running a single program, and on occasion would
| even be branded with a physical badge for the application
| software on it.
|
| You can rediscover some of the same flavor _still alive_ by
| looking at UI innovations by, for example, Blender, where (last I
| used it) they built UI from scratch, and they seemed to innovate
| in the interests of the users, including power users. Maybe more
| accessible to us on HN, some IDEs are places that get creative
| innovations often in the interests of power users.)
|
| You'll also see innovations less-familiar in some other
| workstations, like Apollo Domain. (A lot of Sun stuff might be a
| little too familiar, because they sorta won, albeit in the form
| of Linux and the BSDs today. SunOS was also arguably the easiest
| out-of-box platform for building GNU-ish software on the
| Internet, before Linux was sufficiently ready, so that's another
| regard in which they both influenced and were influenced.)
|
| Also, if you end up trying a real-metal vintage workstation
| experience, don't forget to hit the degauss button on your 21"
| CRT, be startled by the sounds and the ray behavior, and each
| time wonder in the back of your mind whether there's any health
| risk to be standing near it each time that happens. :)
| abeyer wrote:
| > For added fun, a Sun Type 5 keyboard converted to USB
|
| We must have _very_ different definitions of fun. The pile of
| mush that was the Type 5 is up pretty high on my list of "never
| again" keyboards. I was a full on Sun fanboy, but even I was the
| first to admit that their input devices could be pretty awful.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Sun optical mice were a pain in the ass too.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Hey, I'm moving the mouse but the pointer isn't going much of
| anywhere! What's wrong?!
|
| Oh yeah, _the mouse isn 't CORRECTLY ALIGNED with the mouse
| pad_! I'd better check if the mouse pad has moved out of its
| proper position on the desk. And pay a bit more attention to
| how I'm holding the mouse so that I don't introduce too much
| rotation about the vertical axis.
|
| That alignment was something I never had to worry about with
| any type of mouse I used before or after. On the other hand,
| it worked pretty well when it was lined up right. It really
| seemed to track motion more smoothly and accurately than
| mechanical mice.
|
| For those who don't understand why it had to be aligned,
| Wikipedia has an article
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Systems) with two good
| photos.
|
| Mouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Systems#/media/Fil
| e:Sun_...
|
| Close-up of grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Systems
| #/media/File:Mous...
| wyldfire wrote:
| The ones w the reflective metallic mousepad?
| abeyer wrote:
| yup, and the marks were painted on, so started wearing off
| (and thus losing mouse resolution) the second you started
| using it.
| hughrr wrote:
| This thread brings me pleasant memories of drunken post
| student union bar C hacking sessions in the 90s. Apart
| from the mice. And openwindows. Fuck both of them!
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| What's wrong with openwindows? Always like it.
| neilv wrote:
| I don't know whether to blame the Type 4, something about our
| desks, or something in the water... but our entire development
| team were getting RSI problems, like I haven't heard of before
| or since.
|
| (Fortunately, there was chatter on the Internet about this
| problem at the time, and I learned the very simple workstation
| adjustments that worked for me. Ever since, I've been able to
| type like crazy, with no discomfort. To this day, I give
| everyone The Talk about typing RSI injuries, the set of usual
| culprits I know about, so you can adjust and see what works for
| you, and the absolute necessity of not working through typing
| pain. And if someone is noticing typing-related pain, they need
| to get a referral to a specialist(s), they need to keep on the
| specialist so they don't fall through the cracks, and they need
| to do what the specialist says.)
| crawdog wrote:
| Now all you need is a license for ATG Dynamo and you can setup
| your own circa 1998 ecommerce website.
| tyingq wrote:
| You can get 6 LEON/Sparc boards for $36:
| https://navspark.mybigcommerce.com/navspark-mini-6pcs-pack/
|
| Though I suppose 200k of RAM might be a barrier :)
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Cluster them for more ram !
| mrlonglong wrote:
| I've used most of the SPARC stations during the late 90s. 4, 5
| and 20. They were a lot better than the Pentiums in use. Moved up
| to the UltraSPARCs, my last one was a Blade 2000. Linux was a
| champ on those architectures. But I don't miss the blasted bus
| errors not one bit. AMD is where it's at nowadays, ARM will be
| next within the next few years.
| ttul wrote:
| As a teenager, I scored a sweet job installing new SPARC 5
| workstations at an electronics company for a few weeks during an
| otherwise quiet summer. Man, those were some amazing computers.
| The cases opened with a thumbscrew and were so easy to work with.
| Elegant design. Super robust. For a kid who had only ever worked
| with cheap PCs, Sun hardware was an absolute dream.
| icedchai wrote:
| I had a Sparc 5 at home when I was in my early 20's, probably
| 1996 or 97. That was my main desktop for about 4 or 5 years.
| Great machines.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Oh and I thought OpenWindows was cool
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| You can also implement a Sparcstation 5 on an FPGA (and not only
| in qemu) thanks to temlib: http://temlib.org/site/
| chrisBob wrote:
| > Operating range : (altitude < 18km) or (speed < 515m/sec),
| both not exceeded simultaneously
|
| Is that a limitation so that you don't use it for missile
| guidance?
| packetslave wrote:
| Yep. Same reason your phone's GPS won't work above a certain
| speed and/or altitude.
| bifftastic wrote:
| Tempted to try this with SunOS 4.1.3 for the sake of nostalgia -
| the first Unix I ever used.
| usr1106 wrote:
| Read the article but it did not mention anything about the
| software licences. Have these old versions been released for free
| in the meantime?
|
| Copyright expires 7O years after the death of the author. Not
| really suitable for software lifecycles. Nothing from the 1990s
| has any commercial value any more.
| NexRebular wrote:
| Sadly there are no free releases of these old versions
| available. Not even sure it's legal to install from authentic
| media if the hardware is not real SUN hardware...
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