[HN Gopher] End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video]
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End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video]
Author : transpute
Score : 62 points
Date : 2024-10-01 18:24 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| fidotron wrote:
| The idea anyone would be running a Sparc in 2007 for performance
| . . .
|
| Some time around 2003 my boss had a Sparc machine as his desktop,
| though this was widely viewed as unix nerd nostalgia even then.
| As a junior I got a PC. It turned out my PC built the project 5x
| faster than the Sparc managed. After this I don't think we bought
| much from Sun except one of those big tape drives, and lots of
| Dell servers appeared instead.
| mrweasel wrote:
| While I'm sure they had their use case, the Sun desktops we had
| while at university in the early 2000s always felt sluggish.
|
| The servers didn't seem much better. They'd handle a ton of
| users, but each would get the same slow experience.
| bb88 wrote:
| SparcOS was an awesome unix. Linux was respectable as well, but
| the hardware story in 2007 was much more shitty. Hardware
| vendors pretty much ignored linux, going for windows as I
| recall.
|
| So if you just wanted a good Unix environment, SparcOS was it.
|
| Java/ZFS were both Sun products, and we're still using them
| today. Just not SparcOS. Sun tried with Project Indiana, but
| they were getting outpaced by Linux and the open source
| movement.
| rincebrain wrote:
| SunOS/Solaris, I believe you mean.
|
| OpenSolaris was an interesting experiment.
| robin_reala wrote:
| It's still going, in the form of Illumos:
| https://illumos.org/
| rincebrain wrote:
| Kind of.
|
| I was specifically talking about the corporate experiment
| of deciding to go that hard for open sourcing your crown
| jewels, and Oracle has notably discontinued their
| participation in that experiment.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| sunos was the bsd-based sun operating system for 68k and
| sparc. solaris was the at&t based sun operating system for
| sparc and x86.
| neilv wrote:
| Small addition: there were also the x86-based Sun 386i
| models, running up to SunOS 4.0.2.
|
| (The Sun 386i didn't get SunOS 4.1 nor Solaris 2, at least
| not at our site, where we had a few sitting around in empty
| cubicles, and occasionally used for random things.)
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| Just to add some nuance: SunOS up to version 4 was strictly
| BSD-based with vendor enhancement. "SunOS 5" became Solaris
| 2, and conversely, SunOS 4 was retroactively dubbed
| "Solaris 1".
|
| Solaris 2 and up were derived from System V release 4,
| which had actually merged the best of System V with both
| Xenix and BSD, so rather than being purely AT&T Unix, SVR4
| was promised as the best of all worlds, with some ability
| to pick and choose which variety was in play, based
| somewhat on provision of both types of utilities in
| separate directories, and appropriate libraries and APIs.
|
| SVR4, IMHO, was the best and most stable Unix, and the
| right choice for vendors to adopt in those days.
| wmf wrote:
| No, if you just wanted a good Unix environment in 2007 you
| would buy an x86 workstation with Linux preinstalled which
| existed from multiple vendors/VARs. Or Mac.
| vondur wrote:
| This is part of the reason why Linux ate their lunch. For the
| price of one Sun server, you could get 4 Dell servers that ran
| Linux, and they were faster. Granted, you didn't have all of
| the redundancy that was built into these higher end Sun systems
| or the really good support, but hey you had 3 extra machines as
| a backup.
| neilv wrote:
| I'm sure this end-of-the-line machine had its merits. But if
| you want the cool of Elvis before he got fat, go back to when a
| SPARCstation 1 running SunOS 4 was new.
|
| The contemporary PC running MS-DOS or early Windows was just a
| toy by comparison.
| chasil wrote:
| The funny thing is that this is precisely what SPARC did to the
| VAX.
| nineteen999 wrote:
| Around that time I was working as a Solaris admin, C/C++
| systems programmer and software packager, our manager gifted us
| all a SunBlade 1000 in my final year there, although we all
| used Windows laptops for our day to day work.
|
| I got blank look when I asked "why?". Sure they were snappy,
| and you could run StarOffice on them, but really there wasn't a
| lot that they were useful for in our day to day work. Nice
| machines to be sure, but completely extraneous. I already had a
| fleet of Sparc build servers running everything from Solaris
| 2.5.1 through 2.9 which I used to build and package open source
| stuff for our corp servers. Turned out there were just some
| leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our
| departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere.
| johnklos wrote:
| Yeah - my AlphaServer DS25, which is five years older and has
| dual 1 GHz Alpha CPUs, can keep up quite well in many regards
| with a dual 1.5 GHz Sun Fire V245 (which is very similar to the
| Sun machine here).
| shrubble wrote:
| Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and
| still working, in a way that 2007 Linux would not; however RAM
| was dropping in price at the time and this wasn't much of a
| concern as a result, for desktops at least.
| ktm5j wrote:
| I wanted on of these sooo bad. I've always had a softspot in my
| heart for SPARC. I loved working with those systems at work. I
| used to have a second hand T5440 that I got off ebay for super
| cheap, I think it had 128G of RAM and 256 threads!
| dang wrote:
| URL changed from https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/the-last-sun-
| sparc-workstati..., which points to this.
| neverartful wrote:
| I owned an Ultra 60 at one time and I really liked it. It was a
| dual processor UltraSPARC II (or III) running at something like
| 450 MHz.
|
| In one of my groups we had a Sun V480 and we ran all kinds of
| stuff on it and it never had the slightest hiccup. It was rock
| solid.
|
| Fun times!
| geoffeg wrote:
| I miss Sun hardware, especially in the sun4c era. Everything was
| so solidly built and well thought out compared to a lot of PC
| hardware. The IPC/IPX is still one of my favorite form factors.
| salgernon wrote:
| I still have an IPC on my desk as a monitor stand. In 1996 I
| used it as a router for my 24hour 56kbps modem connection,
| serving all of 204.94.173.x - I was paying tlg.org $145/mo for
| my Class C address space, and all my home machines were just
| hanging out there. _that_ is the internet I really miss.
| geoffeg wrote:
| I have been thinking about getting an old IPC or IPX and
| swapping out the internals with a modern PC motherboard and
| components, but only if I can do it cleanly. I haven't done
| it due to not having enough free time and... it just feels
| wrong to me in some way.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Ah the trouble of finding a unix workstation with a
| pristine case and thoroughly cooked interior so you don't
| feel bad about gutting it for a casemod. Call me when you
| find one.
| icedchai wrote:
| I hear you. For most of the 90's, I had my home network on a
| publicly routed /24, no firewall.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I'd say the most successful Unix workstation maker is Apple. By
| far.
| pjmlp wrote:
| When I arrived at CERN back in 2003, there was a pile of Sun
| workstations on a corner from my office, waiting to be dispatched
| to computer heaven.
|
| Most folks were either using the new OS X, or Windows, with a
| custom Linux distribution on the servers, eventually replaced by
| Scientic Linux distribution.
|
| There were still some Sun stations kind of serving the X Windows
| sessions on the restaurant area, and even those didn't last much
| longer.
| rwmj wrote:
| Late 90s / early 2000s was when Sun workstations changed from
| very expensive but well constructed proprietary machines to
| very expensive PCs with cheap internals and unusual processors.
| However I still got an ex-university Sun workstation around
| 2002 for free (or a token price?) which served me well as a
| desktop machine for years and years. It eventually died of the
| capacitor plague that (to be fair to Sun) affects just about
| everything from that era.
| jclulow wrote:
| Setting the SPARC bits aside, I feel like the Ultra 20/24/27
| machines were well-constructed 64-bit x86 machines with
| regular AMD and Intel processors and ECC memory and
| reasonable fans and so on. I don't remember how they were on
| price, but I feel like they were not outrageous when compared
| to similar lines from Dell or HP at the time.
| donatj wrote:
| I always salivated over Sun SPARC workstations. I'm kind of sad
| to hear that the specs of the _last_ SPARC workstation were so
| ... low... but I guess time destroys all things
| cptnapalm wrote:
| While not quite a Sun system, I still have my Tadpole Viper. The
| only thing that runs on it in a straight forward manner is
| OpenBSD; even Solaris needs patch discs. I'd still use it
| regularly if only web browsers would work. I still prefer its
| keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever owned. It's the
| machine I was using when I finally was able to overcome my
| previous difficulties in learning C. And I even got to diagnose
| an endian problem.
| johnklos wrote:
| I wonder how well NetBSD would run on it. There're quite a lot
| of current packages for it:
|
| https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sparc64/10...
| cptnapalm wrote:
| When I was looking for a not-Solaris OS, OpenBSD was the only
| game in town for it. Literally. Somebody maintaining the
| UltraSPARC OpenBSD port decided to support this oddity
| specifically. Nothing else, including NetBSD, would work.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > I'd still use it regularly if only web browsers would work. I
| still prefer its keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever
| owned.
|
| You can just cheat: https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/08/12/vncfox-
| better-way-of-bro...
| kevitivity wrote:
| As a sysadmin, the only thing I miss about Sun hardware and
| Solaris was how reliable it was. My record for uptime was over 6
| years on a Sun Blade workstation.
| icedchai wrote:
| I feel such nostalgia for Sun hardware. I've had several
| sparcstations over the years: a SparcStation IPC, SparcStation 5,
| and an Ultra 10. I still have the Ultra 10, and put OpenBSD on it
| the other month, after replacing the NVRAM chip.
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(page generated 2024-10-01 23:00 UTC)