[HN Gopher] SPARCbook 3000ST: The coolest 90s laptop (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
SPARCbook 3000ST: The coolest 90s laptop (2019)
Author : marcodiego
Score : 263 points
Date : 2021-11-02 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jasoneckert.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (jasoneckert.github.io)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| anything new here from 2019?
|
| Official link:
| https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/myblog/sparcbook300...
|
| And previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19524130
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _SPARCbook 3000ST_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19524130 - March 2019 (98
| comments)
| ben7799 wrote:
| This thing was like the coolest/rarest thing back then, it was
| almost legendary cause no one had seen one but everyone rumored
| they existed.
|
| I had various Sun & SGI workstations at my internships in the
| 1990s.. all these machines were just cool. The SGI Indy wasn't
| super impressive but the fact it had a video camera was pretty
| insane in 1996 or so when we saw them. People were so enamored of
| the video camera if you had an Indy in the lab at your office
| people will take so many videos/pictures with it that they'd fill
| its disk space up. A lot of people I knew had their first digital
| picture of themselves by getting one from an Indy, cause digital
| cameras were horrible & stupid expensive at that point. The O2
| was a pretty amazing machine too.
|
| There's something retro cool about the new Apple Silicon Macs,
| it's like we've returned to the days of RISC Unix machines
| finally. Different OSes and Platforms were much more diverse back
| then and it contributed to a real sense of wonder when you got to
| work with a really unique computer. A lot of that is lost today
| where it seems like 99% of everything is Windows, OSX, or Linux.
| My first job we were testing on like 15 different versions of
| Unix + Windows NT.
| NexRebular wrote:
| I still have Ultra 1 Creator with 1GB of RAM that I plan to use
| for some oldskool development. At the moment it has Solaris 2.5
| and SunPC DX2 card for running VB 4 and VC++ 1.52 on Win
| 3.11... And also for playing Castle of Winds.
|
| Modern hardware and software feels so boring compared to all
| this madness...
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I had a SPARCstation at my first full time developer job. The
| Sun type 4 keyboard, OpenWindows, 21 inch Trinitron... it was
| so exotic and different I felt like I was being paid to live in
| some hacker dreamworld.
|
| Moving to Windows machines after that was a real drag, but the
| Mac brought me back to some of that UNIX magic.
| georgewsinger wrote:
| This laptop is pretty 90s cool. But have you ever seen the IBM
| "Butterfly" Thinkpad? https://youtu.be/u61WxHtaXZE
|
| Now _that 's_ 90s cool.
| mstade wrote:
| Oh yeah I remember that, I think my uncle had one. I remember
| being mesmerized with the motion of the keyboard, and my uncle
| getting pissed with me opening and closing it repeatedly to try
| and figure out how it worked. Good times!
| blantonl wrote:
| I had one running OS/2 and it had a PCMCIA modem card I used to
| dial into the bank's token ring network. That thing was the
| bees knees back in the day!
| jeffbee wrote:
| This pig actually weighs _more_ than a 1996 Panasonic Toughbook
| that is built into its own briefcase with a carrying handle and
| everything, and can survive being dropped on its corner from
| waist height. I 'd take that any day over a cheesy SPARC.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Can anyone link me to the manual?
| tyingq wrote:
| Different genre, but the Kaypro 2000 is also pretty cool:
| http://oldcomputers.net/kaypro2000.html
| andylynch wrote:
| I have one of those stored away, it is built like a tank.
| Unfortunately the power supply failed some time ago.
|
| The pop up floppy drive on it is brilliant.
| yitchelle wrote:
| Talking about retro technology, I am shamelessly plugging my
| twitter account for retro tech adverts.
|
| https://twitter.com/OldTechAdverts
|
| I've been posting those amazing old tech adverts out of Byte,
| Compute, Antic and Zzap64 magazines 90s, 80s and older. Looking
| at adverts for retro games, retro electronics and others. Hope to
| see you there.
| golergka wrote:
| > A price tag of $21,000 US
|
| And that's in 1997 dollars. Great perspective on complaints about
| how expensive Macbooks, which start at $1,000, are.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Honestly, I bet there are people who would pay the $20,000
| premium if it just let you swap in a goddamn M.2 drive at
| leisure.
| api wrote:
| > Built-in ISDN
|
| That's the 1997 equivalent of built-in DOCSIS 3 and a coax jack
| on the laptop.
| hapless wrote:
| ISDN was very, very popular outside the United States. Hell,
| Tokyo's payphones used to have ISDN jacks for laptop users.
|
| Tadpole later became a vendor that almost exclusively targeted
| the US military, but it didn't start out that way. I imagine
| those ISDN jacks saw a lot of use by European and Asian
| customers.
| ricktdotorg wrote:
| I went to work for a US bank in London as a sysadmin in 1994
| and pretty much the first thing they did was have BT install
| 2x ISDN channels in my flat. It was incredible speed with
| what felt like almost no latency back then. What a treat!
| Moved to USA (also to work for that US bank) and it was like
| "ISD what???"
| rjsw wrote:
| Tadpole started off making 68k multiuser UNIX systems, I
| don't remember those having ISDN.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| I think it's a bit on the late side for ISDN. I know I was
| using cable modems by that time in Amsterdam.
| tiahura wrote:
| ISDN was still prevalent in commercial settings for several
| years. Businesses would commonly have an ISDN PRI circuit
| with x channels for data, y channels for voice, and z
| channels for BRI miscellaneous applications.
| octorian wrote:
| Dial-up still very much reigned supreme in the US in '97.
| However, we had finally stopped saddling it with punitive
| pricing models that discouraged people from actually taking
| full advantage of the Internet.
|
| I don't remember cable modems becoming commonplace until
| maybe 4-5 years later. (though there was a fair bit of
| overlap, of course)
| toast0 wrote:
| Telephone tarrifs were(are) state specific. At least in
| California for POTS, unlimited local calling had been
| available for a long time and wasn't too expensive. I don't
| think California ever got an unlimited ISDN tarrif though,
| which made that a very expensive proposition.
| octorian wrote:
| I think this is a big part of why a lot of the US got
| cable a bit later than other places.
|
| Because we dropped hourly billing for ISPs and didn't
| really have a tradition of time-billing for local POTS
| calls, dial-up Internet really wasn't very expensive at
| all by '97.
|
| As a result, cable-modem services were probably quite a
| bit more expensive than dial-up when they were new for
| the majority of people.
|
| This was the era when we were still trying to convince
| most adults that the Internet was actually something they
| needed access to, so justifying the kinds of pricing we
| have now would likely have been impossible for all but a
| handful of geeks in those days.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| We had cable at our early-20s-hacker-raver-crazy-person
| crashpad in Edmonton, Canada in 97, 98. And DSL was
| available around then, too.
|
| The year before, though, I worked in an office in Toronto
| with dual ISDN hookup, and it _felt_ fast and state of the
| art but holy crap... looking back it certainly was not.
| cardiffspaceman wrote:
| The @Home venture got me "high speed" internet over coax in
| 1996, from the same company I got my cable TV from. It
| wasn't DOCSIS-compliant. Road Runner was a competitor at
| roughly the same time.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| I had a cable modem in SE Florida in 2001. Adelphia TV.
|
| In Amsterdam it was UPC, though that might have been their
| name later on.
| octorian wrote:
| Yeah, I'm from SE Florida, so that timing sounds about
| right.
|
| I recall when it was first being rolled out, it was some
| sort of weird hybrid service that did phone-up/cable-
| down. Not sure how long that nonsense lasted, because
| they weren't doing that anymore when my parents finally
| got it.
| Fnoord wrote:
| I agree with your point, but the SGI Indy had ISDN [1], was
| introduced in 1993 and discontinued in 1997.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy
| Causality1 wrote:
| Modern laptops have absolutely no style, no cool factor. I'd pay
| huge sums of money for a Sony X505 with modern specs.
| scrumper wrote:
| (2019)
|
| I used one once in a server room in a quasi-government agency in
| the very early 2000s. Compared to the plastic Toshiba Windows
| junk around at the time, it was a total revelation. I tried to
| get my boss to buy me one for customer demos; he negotiated me
| down to a Sun Blade 100 for my desk instead. I still felt like
| I'd won.
| [deleted]
| rob74 wrote:
| > _Moreover, the source code files, test data and /etc/passwd
| entries had the full names of the people on the project that I
| could easily Google. Many of their LinkedIn profiles or academic
| biographies listed their detailed work on the project during
| their tenure at Nortel. This information was key to me
| constructing what the project was and where it went._
|
| Looks like Nortel wasn't very careful with their company data...
| it may be ancient today, but I guess when that laptop was first
| taken out of service, it was still a bit "fresher" and more
| valuable?
| jjkaczor wrote:
| Yes- their operational security was essentially non-existent;
|
| https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/dnd-may-abandon-1b-move-to-for...
|
| And there is a distinct possibility that Huawei would not exist
| without Nortel;
|
| https://nationalpost.com/news/exclusive-did-huawei-bring-dow...
| ben7799 wrote:
| Nortel is not even the only company Huawei plundered with
| abandon.
|
| They did this with practically every one of their partners
| back in the 00s.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| That machine is fabulous. That the author had clear and correct
| documentation to be able to get into the system after so long is
| a testament to the manuals.
|
| As an aside - It's a bit strange to think how cyclical things in
| tech are, now we're back at a strange echo of the classic bespoke
| architecture UNIX Workstation phase with Apple's new series of
| computers.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Sun made such fantastic products for their time and it's a real
| shame they never made it into the next millennium intact and
| profitable. So much innovation happened there.
| titzer wrote:
| I worked for Sun. The company mindset never shifted from
| building big-iron megaservers. Which is a shame because the
| workstation market lulled for a bit, but is actually back with
| a vengeance nowadays with heavy-duty GPUs, beefy CPUs, etc, for
| media and video editing--think $20k workstations. Apple has a
| slice of that market and a few PC manufacturers that focus on
| that, and it's very profitable. Not million dollar server
| profitable, but profitable. Sun neglected its own very
| profitable workstation line in favor of the server market,
| which was completely rocked by the dot com bust.
|
| Sun, with Java, which hides SPARC vs x86 could have made the
| entire cloud happen a decade earlier. But SPARC was a
| performance loser compared to Intel and Sun just stubbornly
| refused to see the horizontal scaling forest for the giant E10k
| trees.
| ben1040 wrote:
| >Sun, with Java, which hides SPARC vs x86 could have made the
| entire cloud happen a decade earlier.
|
| All they had to do was live their trademark tagline, "the
| network is the computer."
|
| Which I learned today was abandoned by Sun or Oracle and was
| adopted and re-registered as a trademark by Cloudflare in
| 2019.
| pjmlp wrote:
| They did, from SUN RPC, they moved into Distributed Objects
| Everywhere with Objective-C/OpenSTEP, which then gave birth
| to RMI and J2EE.
|
| Containers are basically Java application servers, rebooted
| as language agnostic OS services.
| CalChris wrote:
| I don't know that SPARC was such a performance loser to x86
| so much as Intel simply having a commanding lead in process
| technology at the time. Even Apple capitulated. That lead
| gave them a market domination that allowed them to reinvest
| (think Amazon) in their own fabs. x86 was a dog that Intel
| spent $1B/yr on improving so that your code ran fast. They
| took that strategy to the bank for as long as they could
| which was at least a decade longer than anyone thought they
| could.
|
| As I think you're pointing out, Java wasn't a pivot. It was
| rather an excuse not to pivot. Sun really needed a Gates
| style pivot with Internet Explorer or a Bezos style pivot
| with his services manifesto. Instead you got a ponytail.
|
| Also, before missing the cloud, Sun missed routers. Still,
| they were a pretty successful failure. We should all fail so
| well.
| titzer wrote:
| Oh, it was totally. Sun lost at least two generations of
| microarchitectures to mismanagement. They resisted doing
| out-of-order execution far too long and they just could
| never keep up with single-core performance. Even process
| technology would not have been able to rescue the
| comparatively sophomoric micro-architecture. Intel and AMD
| and IBM just totally outclassed them.
| adrian_b wrote:
| I have been using SPARC for a decade, in 1998-2007.
|
| In all this time all the SPARC servers and workstations
| that we had were ridiculously slow in comparison with
| Intel/AMD CPUs.
|
| Nevertheless they were used because there were a lot of
| EDA/CAD tools that were available only for Solaris.
|
| As soon as Cadence, Mentor etc. have ported their programs
| to Linux, SPARC was dead.
|
| Towards the end of that decade, the difference became
| extreme, my laptop with a 64-bit AMD Turion CPU could run a
| SPICE simulation much faster than a very large and very
| expensive multiprocessor SPARC server.
|
| Despite their slowness, the Sun or Fujitsu computers had
| many nice features before they became also available on
| Intel/AMD computers.
|
| For example, in 1998 I was impressed that the Sun
| workstation we had could be powered on and off from its
| keyboard, because this happened before this became normal
| also for Intel/AMD computers. At that time we still had PCs
| with PC/AT power supplies, not with ATX power supplies, so
| power on and off had to be done from traditional switches.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| I remember impressing my boss in about '97 - I got the
| first Mac in the company as my work computer, and I could
| switch it on (and off again) with a dedicated key on the
| keyboard. That was unheard of in his PC-centric world.
| ATX power supplies did become popular soon after that,
| though.
| Melkman wrote:
| Sun didn't miss routers... The part of Stanford University
| Network that went to do routers used an other name: Cisco.
| hapless wrote:
| SPARC rapidly became a performance loser to x86. And, at
| the time, Intel had no process advantage. None at all.
|
| Intel Pentium II was almost exactly 100% as fast as
| UltraSPARC IIi, on the same process (350 nm), at about
| 1/20th the cost. That was the last _competitive_ Sun SPARC
| product, after that they were all brutally slow. The less
| said about US III and US IV, the better.
|
| By the time that Sun put itself on the auction block, their
| internal CPUs weren't even good enough for legacy
| customers. They were obliged to start re-selling Fujitsu
| SPARC products just to keep SPARC loyalists inside the
| tent.
| CalChris wrote:
| You're right. When I compare SPARC with x86, they seem to
| have the same process node at roughly the same time. I
| probably meant manufacturing rather than process. Intel
| at the time was colossal. It was possible for an
| innovator like Transmeta to come along and develop low
| power. But then Intel could motor past them on a
| marketing promise, engineering and finally out
| manufacturing them. This manufacturing prowess was a lot
| of the reason for Apple's PowerPC to x86 switch in 2005.
| Moreover, advantage begat advantage until x86 ran into
| various walls.
|
| Things have changed since and now TSMC, Transmeta's fab
| then, is the new colossus. And Apple has even dumped x86
| for their own ArmV8 designs (manufactured by TSMC).
| pjmlp wrote:
| Ironically Solaris with SPARC ADI is one of the few
| UNIXes where C is properly tamed with hardware memory
| tagging, while Intel borked yet again their attempt to
| provide such capability on their CPUs (MPX).
| aww_dang wrote:
| Didn't the UltraSPARC lines have greater throughput as
| compared to x86 offerings, even when they couldn't keep
| up on single threaded performance?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It really is amazing that Sun and HP had the hubris to
| design their own RISC processors in SPARC and PA-RISC;
| everything that was wrong with the Unix workstation
| market in the 90s can be summed up there, in a way.
| Proprietary CPUs and custom repackagings of Unix, all
| slightly different, but in reality they weren't different
| enough to justify. And this just left room for Microsoft
| and Linux and x86 to just come up the middle and make
| them all obselete.
|
| Lots of vendors throwing around "open" this and "open"
| that but none of them meant it. Just try writing a GUI
| app for a Unix machine in the mid 90s. Motif was closed
| source, with licensing fees. Things like GTK and QT were
| still primitive. Xt was garbage. It was just a hodge
| podge of things with the assumption that anybody entering
| the market had hugely deep pockets.
|
| If they'd all just united around POWER architecture at
| least maybe they'd have had a chance?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yep, complete waste of talents and specialties -- for a
| company which had its genesis in amazing workstations to have
| lost its edge there is sad.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Also, who knows how it would have turned out if they had
| actually doubled down on OpenSTEP and DOE, instead of ramping
| them down in Java's favour.
|
| Or if they had invested into AOT and JIT caching options for
| Java instead of leaving them to third parties.
|
| Both options could have made Solaris more interesting, maybe.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It was really hard to resist the tidal wave of commodity
| x86 hardware at that point in time. Nobody did, not even
| Apple. And the server market got eaten by Linux, Solaris
| had no serious advantage anymore despite being a quality
| product.
|
| It really is a different story now, though. There's room
| for more diversity, though they'd probably have to have
| made the switch to Linux.
|
| Open sourcing Solaris earlier on before Linux ate the whole
| market -- or embracing Linux, or taking some hybrid
| approach, could maybe have kept them relevant.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Many would state that even today there are quite a few
| features that Solaris does much better than Linux, but so
| is "progress".
| rjsw wrote:
| The laptop in the link isn't a Sun product.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| But the OS is :-) And the CPU based on Sun's design...
| marcodiego wrote:
| I got the chance of using an SGI Fuel in the early 2000's and
| also some O2's. I don't know exactly why, I never bought one, I
| don't even like proprietary or closed solutions but those 90's
| UNIX workstations... I have an unreasonable attraction to them.
|
| I remember in mid 90's trying some of them for the first time.
| I've got really impressed by Sun sparcstations and IBM Power
| machines. Computers which you could spend the whole day
| programming with no threat to system stability, even after
| consecutive segfaults, impressed me. And it impressed even more
| knowing that in the UNIX world it has always been like that.
| Seeing a x86 again running windows felt mostly like a toy after
| that. Certainly one of the reasons that influenced me to use
| linux.
|
| Those machines were expensive. In the range of a tens of
| thousands dollars. So, working on one of them was a symbol of
| status and success. Owning one of them, to me, was like owning an
| yacht or exclusive sports car.
|
| One thing I like about cheap ARM SBC's these days is their
| performance... these machines have a performance, that I think,
| is similar to how those UNIX would feel. Linux is way more
| advanced than those old unices but the feeling is still there. I
| can install wmaker and get a very interesting nostalgic feeling.
|
| Just to try it, I installed the latest CDE version on my
| experimental Debian 11 system. It is incredibly usable and
| performant. Being able to have a well integrated system, with
| everything needed for development was just another level in those
| days. While on the PC people rejoiced because of Delphi and
| Visual BASIC, you could write real GUIs in C with CDE and
| application builder. I'm not claiming it is better in any way,
| but it felt incredibly more powerful.
| mstade wrote:
| I letande 3d modeling on an SGI O2 back in the late '90s, and
| subsequently also got started with programming on it. I still
| remember the joy and rush when my programs compiled
| successfully, and then half the time wondering how the heck
| they would build in the first place. Not much has changed
| since. ;o)
|
| I still have that O2, it's packed up in its original box in my
| apartment. I also have two of those old SGI flat panel
| displays, which was pretty amazing back then when flat panels
| where basically unheard of. I think one of them is broken
| though, sadly.
|
| I've been meaning to boot it back into action, to see if any of
| my old "art" is still on there. If it even starts, that is.
| zippergz wrote:
| My main memory from working on SGIs in the 90s was the mess
| with mixing 32 bit and 64 bit libraries and such. It's long
| enough ago that I don't remember the details, but I remember
| it always being a pain to compile stuff because of having
| both 32 and 64 bit stuff present on the system.
| tobiasu wrote:
| Probably will not start. It requires a working clock chip to
| turn on and the battery is way past its expiration date.
|
| There are plenty of tutorials on where to dig into the epoxy
| and add a cr2032 battery holder to fix it permanently.
|
| Same deal with various SPARC machines (those will at least
| power on)
| mstade wrote:
| Thanks for your comment, I had no idea. Out of curiosity,
| do you know if it's dangerous or otherwise unadvisable to
| try and start it before making this modification?
| unxmaal wrote:
| SGUG has a nice Discord chat, and we're porting current FOSS
| to IRIX.
|
| We've recently ported Netsurf latest, which gives IRIX a
| working modern browser, and have a mail client (CLAWS) and a
| Discord client (Adium).
|
| Here's the ports: https://github.com/sgidevnet/sgug-rse And
| here's the main user group page: http://sgi.sh
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| I didn't think there actually were sexier laptops than ThinkPads
| from that era.
| Tepix wrote:
| This was it. Unfortunately it carried an unobtainable price
| tag.
| ricktdotorg wrote:
| It was nice to see Nortel mentioned in the article because I did
| my "gap year" at Bell Northern Research/Standard Telephones &
| Cables Ltd (R&D arm of Northern Telecom) back in the 90s and
| there were several of these SPARCbooks that the Meridian folks
| used to take with them on remote jobs. I was a mere youngster
| "helping" to write C code to convert Nortel switch signalling
| into OSI-standard CMIS. I never got to use one of the SPARCbooks
| of course but for that year I had an incredible SPARCstation IPX
| and learned so much from all the crusty old telco engineers.
| Great post about the SPARCbooks and what a great purchase!
| Mister_Snuggles wrote:
| My first real job included system administration on a pair of
| SparcStation 20s (which were replaced with a Sun Enterprise 450,
| which was then replaced with two Sun Fire V250s). The screenshots
| bring back fond memories.
| titzer wrote:
| > removed the 2.5" HDD from the SPARCbook, added it to the USB
| enclosure, popped it into my Sun Blade 1500 and mounted the slice
| layout on the hard disk. Even if I didn't already know Solaris,
| the SPARCbook manual that I downloaded detailed everything
| possible about the hardware and the Solaris operating system,
| including the default slice layout
|
| This is why manuals are so damn important! Communicating to
| people 20+, maybe 50+ years in the future, what you've done, how
| the thing works, so it can be fixed and put back into service.
| All of today's undocumented soon-to-be-black-bricks--cough, I
| mean, electronic devices--are maddening. If you are lucky, there
| is a manual somewhere online, and even then, probably not the
| level that details hardware for fixing and replacing. Heck,
| you're lucky to find anything that even documents all the
| software functions available![1] (Recent Xfinity TV thingy, I'm
| looking at you). The attention to detail in older manuals was
| incredible. Most things these days are throwaway pieces of junk,
| not expensive, serviceable items that have durable documentation.
|
| [1] I mean, why would you document the software of a device that
| is going to upgrade its software transparently as the
| manufacturer races to finish the features it should have shipped
| with, or alter the UI to inject ads into it later when their
| revenue model doesn't work out? Besides, you expect consumers to
| just give up on it and buy the next thing in 3-5 years.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| I think you've actually undermined yourself.
|
| > This is why manuals are so damn important! Communicating to
| people 20+, maybe 50+ years in the future,
|
| Nobody making a commercial product at consumer (or general
| business-friendly) pricing today, cares about 50+ or even 20+
| years into the future. You damn well better be selling
| something new to that customer, not supporting them 20 years in
| the future for your otherwise obsolete product.
|
| I would say that if this is the justification, then
| documentation be damned.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> This is why manuals are so damn important!_
|
| Apple's meteoric success would beg to differ.
|
| What you said can be found in areas like industrial, aerospace
| and the like, as the manuals are part of the product delivery
| contract, but is not valued in consumer electronics anymore.
| SahAssar wrote:
| Just because it is not valued currently does not mean it is
| not important.
| icedchai wrote:
| I remember the manuals that came with the Apple II series.
| They actually had schematics of the machine. How times have
| changed...
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The Apple II manuals were Great Literature, not merely
| Excellent Documentation.
|
| The listings of Woz's riveting 6502 code and his brilliant
| schematics were the Jane Eyre of its genre.
|
| Or maybe it's more appropriate to compare the fold-out
| Apple II schematics to the original Marilyn Monroe
| centerfold of Playboy's first issue in December 1953.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Apple doesn't include physical manuals but their built-in
| Help and online support docs tend to be pretty detailed.
| [deleted]
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Not really. Apple's success merely shows that their methods
| are good for making them lots of money. There are many ways
| to judge the quality of a product. I'd argue that how much
| profit it makes is a bad one for literally everyone except
| the seller.
| rnd0 wrote:
| > I'd argue that how much profit it makes is a bad one for
| literally everyone except the seller.
|
| This cannot be emphasized strongly enough -agreed!
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I once went into a music store and they sold an old studio tape
| recorder - I say old but it looked new, everything aluminium
| and all. The thing about that one is that it came with a manual
| that included all the schematics for the electrical components,
| so that you can repair, replace or rebuild the electronics if
| needs be. They weren't so worried about others copying them at
| the time, I guess - I mean it was a specialist product for a
| niche market, and just because you have the plans doesn't mean
| you can reproduce it in a cost effective manner.
| titzer wrote:
| > doesn't mean you can reproduce it in a cost effective
| manner.
|
| But you could fix it if, e.g. a capacitor blew. And
| capacitors do have a tendency to blow. Thankfully recapping
| something typically doesn't require a manual, since they are
| labelled, but you get the point. Repair is important.
| JorgeGT wrote:
| My TEAC A-X55 Mark II sound amplifier manual comes not only
| with the full block schematic, exploded view but with the
| full BOM and even all the PCB printouts... you can basically
| build the thing from scratch: https://imgur.com/a/hZeWFUF
| numpad0 wrote:
| Not just professional equipment, pre-90s every
| electric/electronic hardware itself larger than a book had at
| least a high level block diagram on a sticker on the back or
| on an inside wall, and also more detailed diagrams on
| manuals. Complexities then went overboard and those diagrams
| became rarer.
|
| I remember those diagrams also didn't include mechanical
| drawings, so the last part of your comment is right too. You
| aren't going to be making magnetic read/write heads or even
| DC motors from information taken from those diagrams, merely
| the topology of control circuits - which is an opposite view
| from how we'd see it today.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Here in Brazil, in the 80's, (probably still happens today)
| you could buy suitcases filled with many pages of reverse
| engineered schematics of popular TV and radio sets.
|
| If you had any problem with your TV, would could take it to a
| workshop, the technician could diagnose it, query the
| schematic of that specific model and replace any defective
| part.
| bluGill wrote:
| You could in the us too. However that soon stopped as solid
| state became reliable enough to rarely need repair.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Aside from the pesky capacitors, but then you don't need
| a schematic to find the part surrounded by burned PCB.
|
| It's is a great shame how many LCD's have been landfilled
| for want of a part that costs nickel.
| rvense wrote:
| There's so much of this. Think of how many perfectly good
| battery cells from powerbanks end up in landfills because
| of cheap micro USB connectors that snap off the PCB.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| That SPARCbook price was $21,000. Site doesn't say if that's
| inflation-adjusted for today's dollars, and internet being what
| it is today the top search links and Wikipedia reference links
| go back to this site as the source.
|
| Still, you're advocating paying $20-40,000 for a laptop with
| the dual justification that "not expensive" is bad, and that
| 20+ years in the future someone can give a presentation on it
| to a usergroup interested in novelty value. That does not seem
| like a value for money proposition.
| madengr wrote:
| Back when engineering software ran on Unix, exclusively, you
| had no choice but to use one of these. I remember the Mentor
| sales guy having one to demo the latest IC design software.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Can't find an original ad but looks like similar SPARCbooks
| were $7,500 in their day. You can still spec out apples and
| thinkpads to this price, so I think the critique is
| legitimate.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| That was 20 years ago or more so the MacBook is much
| cheaper even if it is maxed out
| numpad0 wrote:
| > Introduced in August 1995, the PowerBook 5300 series
| were the first PowerPC PowerBooks, ... The 100 MHz 5300c,
| with active matrix color, sold for $3,900 for the 8/500
| configurration, and $4,700 for 16/750.[1]
|
| > Announced in March 1998, ... The PowerBook G3 Series
| started at $2,299 for 233 MHz with no floppy drive and a
| 12" screen, and cost around $7,000 fully loaded.[2]
|
| > If 2007 had a title, it might well be "Year of the
| Laptop." The US notebook market boomed in 2007, with
| laptop shipments rising 21 percent to a total of 31.6
| million units. Desktops still outsold laptops in 2007,
| but the gap between the two has shrunk as desktop sales
| continue to decline.[3]
|
| Laptop PCs started from $6000 range down to $2000 range
| over decades up to 2005 or so, not up from zero to there,
| at which point it established its position as the default
| form factor of personal computers. So if you go back in
| time they only gets expensive despite inflation.
|
| 1: https://apple-history.com/5300c
|
| 2: https://apple-history.com/pg3s
|
| 3: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/01/2008-could-be-
| the-ye...
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Sorry I wasn't specific. Lets say the price of a laptop
| is constant from 1995 to 2021 then with inflation it
| becomes cheaper forward in time.
|
| It also gains more features sometimes.
| buildbot wrote:
| This goes for super expensive digital items too, and it's
| really sad - High end Phase One gear, and basically every other
| manufacturer in this market, has so much hacking potential.
| It's all just serial interfaces, so far, but you have to
| reverse engineer it all :/
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| Am I the only one who cannot read this due to the font?
| eschneider wrote:
| Our sales folks has these back in the say for demos, and I'd
| borrow one on occasion. They were definitely cool. :)
| 0des wrote:
| I read this article and then went on to a few others. The author
| of this blog has something, I don't know what it is, but I like
| it, it brightened up my morning. What a great bit of nostalgia,
| thanks for posting this Marco!
| Lammy wrote:
| I was reading some other articles and found a picture of him
| rocking this SPARCbook in a coffee shop:
| https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/myblog/copyleft-is-...
| :)
| blantonl wrote:
| When I started reading this article, I would have bet 100 bucks
| this laptop was used in a military / government setting for
| SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) software.
|
| Solaris, solid metal hardware, tens of thousands of $$ - just
| screams SIGINT to me.
| trimbo wrote:
| Ahhh that OpenWindows desktop brings me back. But I thought by
| 1997 when this was released, Sun had moved to Motif? Do I have
| that wrong?
| excitom wrote:
| Typically it was a configuration option, to show Motif or
| OpenWindows mode.
| heelix wrote:
| Back in the dot com days, we had all of our stack running on
| Solaris. (nothing clever, just Weblogic/Oracle) Our president (?)
| got a beast of a tadpole to do live demos in the field. The first
| major demo, he set up to present/pitch, got a cord wrapped up,
| and managed to spill a glass of water on it. (He then proceeded
| get the funding anyhow, but we were all looking forward to having
| that laptop)
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