[HN Gopher] End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video]
___________________________________________________________________
End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video]
Author : transpute
Score : 126 points
Date : 2024-10-01 18:24 UTC (1 days 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Their really competitive era was over by the early 2000's,
| right? More of a 90's company.
| hondo77 wrote:
| And they were already feeling sluggish by the second half
| of the 90s. That might be because I had an SGI on my
| desktop, though.
| 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.)
| jerrysievert wrote:
| > x86-based Sun 386i models, running up to SunOS 4.0.2
|
| oh gosh, I always forget about those, thanks! around
| here, it was mostly the 68k suns, followed by sparc. the
| 386 unix variants were mostly sequent.
|
| I remember one fun job interview in the 90's, where
| before we went to grab beer the interviewer (my future
| boss) stopped in the office and said "and this will be
| your sparc" - to be quite honest, that was such a huge
| perk!
| neilv wrote:
| I think Sun was trying to be more friendly for customers
| who needed to run a little PC software in addition to
| real workstation software.
|
| Incidentally, we were a Sun ISV and customer out in the
| Silicon Forest, where Sequent was located (and Intel,
| Tektronix...). I initially learned C++ and Smalltalk from
| an adjunct professor from Sequent. Also where Cray
| Research Superservers (nee FPS) was, who developed a
| multiprocessing SPARC system before Sun. Which is how, as
| a teen, I got sent by a marketing guy to onsite at Cray,
| to "port" some of our software to the Cray S-MP. It was a
| nice time and place, with a little like a mini version of
| being in Silicon Valley, but with more rain.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| yup - the job interview I was talking about was for
| EasyStreet, one of the big local IPSs in the Portland
| area. we were located in beaverton off of Allen.
|
| I also spent a lot of time in the old sequent campus, at
| the OSDL, and a bunch of time at OGI before it got
| subsumed.
|
| I still remember the day when Microsoft visited the
| office, saw I had a Microsoft keyboard connected to my
| sparc, and asked if I ran internet explorer (they had a
| solaris version). I laughed and said, "no, I only have
| 96mb of ram, you can't run internet explorer in only 96mb
| of ram".
| neilv wrote:
| Neat. We were actually in the OGI science park. (We were
| the "CADRE" sign people would see, as they turned left
| into the park off Walker Rd., IIRC, with the wildflower
| field on the other side of the Walker. Earlier, the sign
| might've been "MicroCASE" or "NWIS". And originally a
| Tektronix spinoff, to build high-end in-circuit emulator
| hardware with workstation frontends, which evolved to
| include integrated full-lifecycle CASE.)
|
| Also in the OGI science park was Verdix (makers of Ada
| development tools, and some kind of multilevel-secure
| workstation software).
|
| I don't know what all the other companies were. But
| amenities included private showers for biking to work, a
| small forest jogging trail, and a restaurant that made
| nice turkey sandwiches and huge blueberry muffins to
| replenish those calories.
| 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.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| funnily enough, solaris 2 was also identifying as sunos 5
| depending on what tool you used to query.
|
| sun's pivot from bsd to at&t was a very nice and clean
| change (I was the one who ended up upgrading our sunos
| servers to solaris when the time came in the 90's),
| sequent's switch was a nightmare.
|
| I still miss my e4500, though, but not the noise or
| electric bill.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| adding: /usr/ucb - a very nice bone to throw.
| jasomill wrote:
| _solaris 2 was also identifying as sunos 5 depending on
| what tool you used to query._
|
| Still true: $ uname -sr SunOS 5.11
|
| Not entirely unlike Windows 11, _a.k.a._
| Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.22631.4169]
| fredoralive wrote:
| Not the first time for Windows, Windows 7 is v6.1
| internally, then Windows 8 and 8.1 get 6.2 and 6.3[1].
| Main explanation is basically "programmers suck at
| checking version numbers" so Microsoft tried to avoid
| bumping the major version. I guess they risked pushing
| the version number to 10 for the "last" version of
| Windows, but have fallen back to just not touching it now
| that a new generation of management have decided that it
| isn't the last version of Windows.
|
| [1] Windows 95 also tells 16 bit apps that it's v3.95,
| but 32 bit apps get the correct 4.0.
| runjake wrote:
| I'm not sure why you're being downvoted except for the
| minor error that SunOS was available for i386 for a short
| while.
|
| The SunOS -> Solaris transition is an important piece of
| Sun history.
| panick21_ wrote:
| I can't find the link anymore, but there is the hacker
| song 'Bye Bye SunOS 4.3'. Its quite funny. If somebody
| has the link.
|
| It really is an incredibly important part of Unix
| history, not just Sun. It basically really started the
| outright Unix wars. Had Sun just gone with BSD and tried
| to create that as a standard, they could have taken most
| of the world with them without creating a massive
| blowback counter-reaction that their alliance with AT&T
| provoked.
|
| And AT&T would have been dead in the water, they might
| have tried with somebody else, but that would have just
| cast Sun as the good guys and AT&T and whoever as the bad
| guys and with Sun already being the market leader, that
| standard would have been pretty dominant I would think.
| jerrysievert wrote:
| http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00070.html
| jerrysievert wrote:
| my boss at the time refused to move to solaris from sunos
| (on his personal sparc, we moved to solaris at the
| company), it was my responsibility to deal with the
| solaris hosts from that point forward. we were definitely
| a sparc shop (though at the time we only had sun clones,
| no real sun sparc boxes).
|
| I think it was mostly that he liked the bsd tooling over
| the at&t tooling, but it instilled so much in me that I
| still have a hard time remembering the gnu command line
| options: I tend to default to svr4, then to bsd, and
| finally to gnu. probably one of the reasons I still feel
| at home on macOS.
| 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.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| Solaris 10 worked pretty good on x86 and was free back
| then. Once Oracle acquired Sun, they eventually started to
| demand $1K per year per CPU core on hardware that wasn't
| made by Sun/Oracle.
| 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.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Yeah people used to say in the late 1990s "Linux enthusiasts
| want it to kill Microsoft, but what it really is doing is
| killing Sun".
| tyingq wrote:
| Well, and what really killed Sun wasn't Linux by itself,
| but Linux on Opteron/AMD64.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| I would say that there were three factors that superseded
| Sun, along with most of the other proprietary
| workstations and servers: FOSS Unix, commodity PC-
| compatible hardware, and TCP/IP.
|
| The big vendors used to be differentiated on how they
| communicated on a network, shared files, type of bus
| architecture, and workloads, and so each company or unit
| would choose a vendor and rely on them for solutions, and
| the staff had specialized expertise in those systems.
|
| But all those vendors found themselves adopting TCP/IP
| and Ethernet. And Sun's NFS was widely adopted. X11 also
| became standard. The BSDs already had a wide hardware
| compatibility list, so that spare machine with no OS
| license could be returned to service. A few generations
| of college grads had direct experience with Unix and
| building PCs. Once Linux on PC-compatibles began showing
| up in the server room, Windows NT was mature, and
| software vendors were porting to Linux, it was a _fait
| accompli_.
| gnufx wrote:
| The last Sun systems I operated -- x2200s not up to Sun
| standards -- ran GNU/Linux on Opteron in an HPC cluster.
| vondur wrote:
| You can also add SGI and most proprietary Unix vendors at
| the time. To a certain extent I think Apple also had a hand
| in killing the workstation market. When you can get a Mac
| that did Unix things and also ran Office and Photoshop, why
| get a SGI workstation (of course not all things could run
| on the MacOS that people got SGI's for)
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Not really the same for Apple. The mac running OSX is a
| Unix workstation. It is an updated NeXT.
| sillywalk wrote:
| I agree, but to nitpick, there was a port (based on the
| Mac version) of Photoshop for Irix.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| However, I did consider it a bit of genius when, toward the
| bitter end, they pretty much went all-in with the PCI-bus,
| ATA disks, and all those PC-compatible interfaces replaced
| the Sun-specific ones which had been so distinctive (and
| expensive) up until then.
|
| It must've cushioned the blow for orgs that were still
| investing in new Suns but were able to plug in regular
| commodity peripherals, at long last.
| wang_li wrote:
| Sun used common stuff quite early on, well before "the
| bitter end". They adopted PCI in 1997. Their workstations
| they moved from SCSI to ATA around the same time, though
| the servers are still with the SCSI family today.
| Regardless, mostly you couldn't plug in generic hardware
| anyway because there are no Solaris drivers for most of it.
| Honestly, it was never a big deal.
| 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.
| fidotron wrote:
| I was one of those annoying unix "I know this" kids except
| from early exposure to a pizza box Sparcstation, not SGI.
| That was in the era when Suns sold strangely well to people
| doing lots of color processing work. (I think you can blame
| Kodak for that). When the PC ran rings round the Sparc at
| work I fully understood how far they had fallen.
| chasil wrote:
| The funny thing is that this is precisely what SPARC did to the
| VAX.
| jrpelkonen wrote:
| It now it seems likely that arm64 will do the same to amd64.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is a little different now, in the 90's there was so much
| low hanging fruit that new-thing could be multiple times
| better than old-thing. Arm might get a durable lead of, ya
| know, a couple or a dozen percentage points over x86. It
| isn't like a quantitative difference so huge that it
| becomes a qualitative one.
|
| In the 90's, after all, aliens were coming to Earth to
| steal Intel's chips.
| nullindividual wrote:
| Arm64 (M3) lags behind in some single core benchmarks vs
| Intel's high end desktop CPUs and is abysmal in multi-
| core benchmarks due to the limited number of cores, at
| least according to https://www.cpu-monkey.com.
|
| Granted, the Intel CPU at the high end is pulling 250W+
| (or was it 300W+?).
|
| There are places for both architectures. I don't see x86
| going anywhere unless Intel folds and ceases to design
| chips. Not sure AMD could power on alone given their
| current market share, though I certainly hope they could
| as a user of their chips in the desktop (and conversely,
| an M2 Air for my laptop).
| bee_rider wrote:
| I agree actually, I just wanted to set an upper-bound
| that nobody could really disagree with in the pro-ARM
| direction.
|
| A minor quibble--high end desktop is a niche almost
| seemingly intentionally(?) ignored by ARM. Ampere puts
| out interesting server chips, and Apple puts out
| interesting laptop chips. What a high end desktop ARM
| chip? Apple's max and ultra chips maybe, but they are
| pretty clearly a compromise with the fact that that
| market is pretty niche.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| I don't know, it seems that while SPARC was an industry
| leader, there were plenty of peers competing in that space
| helping to supersede VAX.
|
| HP PA-RISC, RS/6000, MIPS on SGI and others, DEC Alpha
| itself. Every workstation and server vendor had a proprietary
| architecture and a Unix variant to match.
| 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.
| finaard wrote:
| I used a Blade 2000 as my main machine until the early 2010s.
| Doing UNIX work on Windows back then with cygwin was way more
| painful than it is nowadays, and the hardware was a lot nicer
| than x86 desktops (and workstations offering things like ECC
| would've seen you in the same price range anyway).
|
| Back then with just dual cores running heavily loaded VMs
| always was annoying, and slowed your main system down
| noticeably - so I preferred not doing that on my x86 box. My
| Sun on the other hand had three SunPCI cards I used for
| Windows development and testing - which had pretty decent
| performance, still allowed me to have the disk images on my
| UNIX filesystem, but didn't ruin my native performance.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Ah, the beloved "use it or lose it" end-of-year crap. So much
| needless waste just to keep the beancounters happy.
| 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.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| one time we had something going ... wrong. took forever to
| login and the first person on entered 'uptime' and the load
| average was in the thousands. nothing was failing. just
| taking a really really long time to complete.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| That's what I remember my sys admin friends saying. The Sun
| machines could handle heavy loads without falling over. But
| if you were running a heavy single user application or
| compiling a big project a commodity wintel box was faster.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| definitely. my company was paid a buncha cash by MS to
| convert our web infrastructure to Windows NT. We had to
| have roughly 8x the number of boxes. 4x to handle the load
| and double that because they had to be rebooted all the
| damn time to keep them serving.
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Solaris ' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure
| and still working_ [...]
|
| And under high load.
|
| I've had Linux live lock on more than one occasion when load
| averages hit >100. I've never a Solaris (or FreeBSD) system
| live lock even under ridiculous loads (200+), and was always
| been able to login and _kill_ whatever process(es) went
| sideways.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| I once ran into an issue on a GNU Mailman host putting out
| an email storm and the load average was > 800 on an x86
| Solaris box that probably only had 4x AMD cores. I was
| eventually able to get in as root on the serial console and
| fix it. Back in those days it was almost shameful to just
| reboot something vs. slogging through and trying to fix it.
| Also I miss not having to deal with OOM issues.
| up2isomorphism wrote:
| Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks. BTW,
| even Linux lose benchmarks to windows often times.
|
| We used a Sparc Ultra 10 for a Authentication server in 2000,
| it supports concurrent 100K users without any issue, obviously
| you need to write your own software, but the server is super
| stable. And yes, we use cheap x86 + Linux for all sorts of
| thing from 1996 and it was quite faster but you can not trust
| it the same way as a Sparc.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| we used to 'joke' that you would have to set one of fire to
| get it to stop responding to a ping. even then, might take a
| while.
| cable wrote:
| Been there done that? Circa 2001 I had a customer with a
| rack of 220R's and Clariion storage arrays. I was paged
| about an app outage and saw (IIRC) "environmental errors"
| in the logs about the temperature of the machines. One of
| the Clariion's, in the same rack, had caught fire which
| brought the database / app down but the 220R's kept
| chugging along. Unsurprisingly this was quickly followed a
| call from the NOC that the fire suppression kicking in and
| that I should down get there ASAP.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Oh wow.
|
| I have plenty of fond memories about the stability of
| Spark Stations but none as fun as that.
|
| Thanks for sharing.
|
| I did once have a Bullfrog TSS that survived a literal
| explosion. They certainly don't build hardware like they
| used to.
| pantulis wrote:
| That was the joke my VMS colleagues said to us the younger
| unix hotshots.
| fidotron wrote:
| My recollection is anyone doing massive concurrency per
| server (at the time over 10k connections) was moving to using
| a BSD because of kqueue.
|
| We even went through a phase of email on OpenBSD before being
| bought by a company that insisted on Exchange.
|
| Linux didn't seem to pull decisively ahead of the BSDs until
| multicore x86 became mainstream. Up until then it always
| seemed flaky.
| wahern wrote:
| SunOS had /dev/poll, which the kqueue paper cited as prior
| art. https://web.archive.org/web/20000823103627/http://docs
| .sun.c... via citation 4 in
| https://people.freebsd.org/~jlemon/papers/kqueue.pdf
|
| For a brief moment before epoll came along it looked like
| Linux would get /dev/poll.[1] In fact, IIRC, epoll started
| as a /dev/poll implementation. I don't think Sun's
| /dev/poll ever saw much uptake because, aside from the
| limitations mentioned the kqueue paper, the pace of
| software development was much more rapid and dynamic in the
| FOSS and web worlds, and the center of gravity had already
| shifted to BSD and Linux.
|
| For better and worse, Linux developers seemed more inclined
| toward adopting extensions from SysV and SunOS/Solaris than
| from the contemporary BSDs.
|
| [1] See, e.g., https://lwn.net/2001/0712/a/devpoll.php3
| gnufx wrote:
| > Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks
|
| It certainly was from 2011 to 2019:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_computer
|
| > obviously you need to write your own software
|
| Kerberos ran fine for me on cast-off SPARCstation 10(?) which
| was well obsolete at the time.
| atlgator wrote:
| I developed cross-platform simulator software back in 2008. One
| of our platforms was SPARC. Still used heavily at the time.
| They tried to replace them with SGI Itanium servers and we know
| how that turned out.
| alsobrsp wrote:
| I had a Sun as my desktop until 2010 when my Solaris admin gig
| was eliminated. It was running KDE on three displays. Loved it.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| This was especially true for workloads that were hard to
| parallelize. Stuff that lent itself well to parallel execution
| was sometimes faster, though hyperthreads and multicore single-
| package CPUs took care of that a few years later.
| 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.
| testfoobar wrote:
| Hosted my own domain and mail server right under my desk...
| icedchai wrote:
| Same! I now have the /24 routed over a wireguard tunnel.
| About 5 years back I was able to register my own ASN and
| set up peering through a VPS.
| technofiend wrote:
| Same! My IPC served my domain using Solaris on a nailed up
| bonded ISDN circuit until someone filled the root disk trying
| to patch the rpc.cmsd remote exploit. After that it was BSDs
| until I settled on OpenBSD.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| Ditto here. I loved their hardware from that era up until the
| early 2000s. I still have a few dozen systems from those years
| in my basement. I tried getting rid of them years ago using the
| Marie Kondo method, but they all SPARC joy...
| mrmlz wrote:
| Hahaha :)
| arethuza wrote:
| I can remember carrying a Sun machine around for demos in '95
| or so - the IPX was easy to carry but the monitor less than
| easy. What I particularly remember is getting the occasional
| electric shocks from the monitor when carrying it (presumably
| from energy stored in capacitors) and being really careful not
| to drop it as our two person company only had one Sun monitor!
| systems_glitch wrote:
| My first homebrew wireless AP was an old SPARCclassic with the
| now-rare SBus PCMCIA adapter and a Orinoco Gold, running IIRC
| Debian Potato.
|
| Still a very cool form factor, though nowadays beware that the
| PSU is a cap goop timebomb:
|
| https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2017/07/24/ipc-recap
|
| I greatly enjoy the Sun3 and Sun4c/Sun4m era, always under
| SunOS 4. Probably because that's what I started on with my
| first UNIX account (Grex). Probably why I still prefer the BSD-
| style distros nowadays.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I'd say the most successful Unix workstation maker is Apple. By
| far.
| rbanffy wrote:
| Or better yet: NeXT. It's just that it renamed itself Apple
| after acquiring the company and the brand for one Steve Jobs
| (and getting 400 million as change).
| 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.
| fidotron wrote:
| The pricing was the other Sun problem. It was a super grimy
| negotiation to get them down from their ludicrous publicly
| stated pricing to what you could actually get them for,
| which was more reasonable, you just wanted to clean
| yourself afterwards.
|
| In the UK Sun had done some deals of the type that in North
| America are dominated by IBM (banking infra etc.), so they
| were probably absolutely milking those clients and giving
| the rest of us more slack than they wanted to let on.
| f1shy wrote:
| I had a very different experience. I was responsible for
| about 100 Sun servers in the early 2000. To get to our
| server room, I had to go through another datacenter, where
| all was HP. We had every single week 1 or 2 outages (power
| supply, disk, mainboard, memory...) all the time. EVERY
| WEEk! Meanwhile, the other datacenter had just a few visits
| per year, for upgrades...
| 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
| systems_glitch wrote:
| There are far better SPARC64 _servers_ available, but many are
| so incredibly loud (looking at you SunFire T1000) that running
| them outside a dedicated area is not practical.
| happycube wrote:
| Got curious and did a quick search - at least on this one
| sample a regular Core 2 Duo runs circles around the IIIi:
|
| https://www.glennklockwood.com/benchmarks/performance.html#s...
| 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.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Probably not especially difficult to port the platform-
| specific bits from OpenBSD to NetBSD, but also not trivial.
|
| A lot of the "wow, this actually Just Works on OpenBSD!"
| support is because one or more OpenBSD developer actually
| runs the given system. Supposedly that's why there's really
| good support for a large number of laptop peculiarities
| that NetBSD lacks -- OpenBSD devs are actually dailying
| OpenBSD on those machines.
| 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...
| systems_glitch wrote:
| In general, OpenBSD/sparc64 support is excellent. Up until a
| few years ago, we were still maintaining high security routers
| running OpenBSD/sparc64 on various SPARC64 products (mostly
| SunFire T1000 1U boxes). Even with the additional hardening,
| it's often faster than even NetBSD.
| 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.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I just booted up an old Sun 3/80 a little while ago for fun.
| Needed a new NVRAM chip (and had to figure out how to reprogram
| it). Used an SD to SCSI adapter, as the old hard drive was
| toast. Finally used tftp to network boot it off a linux VM, and
| install SunOS 4.1.3. Then played around with it for a bit and
| thought, "man, I used to think this slow as molasses machine
| was fast." I looked over at the 3/50 and thought about trying
| to boot it, but thought better of it. I've got a Sparc 5 I
| could try, I guess, or the SGI Indigo... I think there's a
| DECstation 2100 buried in the pile somewhere too.
| systems_glitch wrote:
| I need to build up a new SunOS install for my 3/50:
|
| https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2022/09/19/sun-3-50
|
| ...but yeah, the slow factor means it doesn't get bench time,
| the 3/160 almost always gets picked over the 3/50 for
| hacking. I'd still like to do a dataless install for the
| 3/50, I recently refurbished a Sun SCSI shoebox with an 80 MB
| MFM drive on an Adaptec ACB-4000 and that'd probably be the
| "best" use for it.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I was gifted an old Sparcstation, but it didn't have a hard
| drive, and while I had a suitable drive, I didn't have the
| cable - and then I looked up its performance, and never
| bothered to get it running. It would have been about the
| equivalent of a 486, when we already had Athlon 64x2 readily
| available.
|
| And, the future marches on, such as the DECstation 3000
| emulator that runs on an RP2040. [0] Seeing a cheap
| microcontroller doing something like that makes me laugh out
| loud.
|
| [0] https://github.com/rscott2049/DECstation2040
| icedchai wrote:
| This reminds me! I used to have a Sun 3/60 way back before I
| got the Sparcs. Boy those things were slow... Still, I
| learned so much from SunOS 4.x systems.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| It was nice to see the bit in the video about the Tadpole
| SPARCbook 3000XT. They are incredibly rare compared to Sun
| desktop workstations, but a lot of fun. I wrote about the 3000ST
| model: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-
| coo...
| neilv wrote:
| Amazing score, getting a Tadpole, especially in that condition,
| and for that price.
| gorfian_robot wrote:
| remember the e10000?
| nubinetwork wrote:
| I sure do... there was someone on YouTube who owned one, he was
| going to let people use it for giggles, but he seems to have
| gone AWOL... shame really, because I don't know how else people
| can get to experience such hardware like this without physical
| access.
| gnufx wrote:
| Jim Austin has one:
| https://www.computermuseum.org.uk/machines/sun_e10000.html
| drmpeg wrote:
| My homage to Solaris as an iPhone wallpaper.
|
| https://www.w6rz.net/solaris_iphone.png
|
| https://www.w6rz.net/solarisios.png
| masfoobar wrote:
| Always facinated with the SPARC, NeXT, or SGI machines back in
| the day. Being a kid in the 90s.. always felt like reaching for
| something that would I would never see let along touch.
| pantulis wrote:
| Not forgetting the DEC Alphas!
| systems_glitch wrote:
| Indeed, these were _the_ machines to have for a long time! My
| first UNIX account was on a SPARCserver 670MP (Grex, if anyone
| remembers that) and definitely colored my opinion of what a
| "real computer" was.
| neilv wrote:
| My R&D group at headquarters had our own 670MP pedestal, over
| against the far wall. That group also had one of those
| SPARCprinters (which offloaded the compute of printing to a
| very expensive workstation, sorta like Winmodems of the day).
|
| Before that, opposite coast, the company had a larger and
| older 4/390. Which historically performed all "server" tasks
| (NFS, email, even quietly a UUCP node). Eventually, 1GB IPI
| hard drive for it, arriving in a package the size of a
| person, wouldn't scale fast enough to storage needs, so we
| started getting multi-drive SCSI chassis, and hanging them
| off random Sun workstations in cubicles. Unlike the
| mainframe-like big fridge in the locked machine room. And
| some flaky Exabyte drives scattered around, each handling
| multiple workstation-turned-server nightly network backups,
| which backups would fail more often than they worked.
| arethuza wrote:
| I was offered a Xerox Lisp Machine to take home by a former
| employer in the mid 90's - I wish I'd taken up that offer!
| wkat4242 wrote:
| HP-UX was very nice too. I used to love its desktop, VUE (that
| was later boringified into CDE).
| bionsystem wrote:
| I have fond memories of my $veryfirstjob doing my
| $veryfirstprojet, end of life of old SPARC machines (replaced
| with Solaris Zones on T4/T5 for which I automated the
| deployment). Some of those machines had multiple years of uptime,
| I wish I had recorded all of those but I remember at least a
| couple of 1500+ days. Those things wouldn't die.
| axpvms wrote:
| Nostalgia. I had a SparcStation 20 back in 2003 I got for free. I
| ended up getting NetBSD running on the thing, but for some reason
| I had to patch the boot floppy with a patch file I got off
| comp.os.bsd.netbsd for it to actually boot. Of course it was
| basically useless and I never really used it for anything, but it
| looked cool.
| fevangelou wrote:
| Good luck downloading a firmware upgrade for these. Oracle
| requires a subscription nowadays, even if there are security
| related issues that the firmware resolves. And mind you, it's not
| a $29 subscription.
| Sidneys1 wrote:
| A couple years ago I got a reply to a Craigslist ad I had posted
| looking for 90's and 00's era computers people were looking to
| get rid of. This guy said he used to run a small website starting
| around 1995, and had a couple "SUN servers" taking up space in
| his storage unit that he'd love to get rid of.
|
| He was a bit of a curmudgeon, going on about how his business
| partner screwed him out of a "seven-digit payout" when his domain
| eventually got bought by some Japanese company. But a minivan
| rental and some elbow grease later I had a whole pile of hardware
| that he was all to happy to be done with: A Sun SPARCstation 20,
| a Sun ULTRA 1 Creator, an Axil Ultima 1 (a third-party Sun
| clone), an gorgeous amber Wyse CRT terminal, and a few other odds
| and ends.
|
| I wrote a more detailed list on my blog [1], but so far all I've
| managed to do with them is get the drives out and cloned and the
| ULTRA 1 running (an involved process as the internal BIOS memory
| lost power long ago, wiping such transient properties as "what is
| my MAC address".
|
| [1]: https://sidneys1.com/retrocomputing/2022/06/03/retro-
| roundup...
| mikeruiz wrote:
| Love those terminals, was just thinking about looking for one!
|
| I remember that the programmable MAC address feature
| occasionally came in handy when dealing with recalcitrant /
| braindead software 'entitlement' schemes vendors would
| occasionally require.
| Sidneys1 wrote:
| I absolutely adore the terminal. It appears to have several
| VT-compatible modes, so should be very usable with modern
| Linux. Except I don't have the accompanying Wyse keyboard
| with the appropriate setup keys required to switch
| compatibility modes. Gotta trawl ebay for one one of these
| days...
| porphyra wrote:
| I was excited to read about cool hardware including a gorgeous
| amber Wyse CRT terminal, and disappointed that there were no
| pictures whatsoever on the blog post.
| Sidneys1 wrote:
| Yes, I got ahold of these just weeks before moving to a new
| state. Things have been a bit chaotic since then. Here's a
| video of it booting, though!
|
| https://youtu.be/lGCLvFzGYX8
| shrubble wrote:
| The Sun Rescue email mailing list has people who can help (I'm
| on the list also); much lower volume than in previous years but
| still helpful.
|
| http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org
| vmilner wrote:
| The power button in the top left corner was so prone to being hit
| by ones knee in its underdesk location almost all of them in my
| office had little polo/lifesaver shaped guards jerryrigged to
| stop it...
| imoverclocked wrote:
| I worked on building Debian packages en masse to Nexenta back in
| the day. I really loved zones+zfs+dtrace which were incredibly
| well integrated together. All of those technologies live on in
| some form but none of them are nearly as well integrated as they
| were on Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris.
|
| My favorite video of the time is still a guy screaming into a
| rack of spinning rust and watching read latencies spike on the
| drives nearest his mouth.
| gnufx wrote:
| > a guy screaming into a rack of spinning rust and watching
| read latencies spike
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
| imoverclocked wrote:
| That's the one! :) Uploaded by Bryan Cantrill no less.
| nazgulsenpai wrote:
| I just love the way this chassis looks. It's such a simple,
| minimalist, industrial yet elegant design. A thing of beauty.
| mooktakim wrote:
| I worked for Sun Microsystems as a placement year. The first time
| I saw Sun Rays, I couldn't believe it wasn't already used
| everywhere. We had badges that let us go from desk to desk, from
| one building to another, and even to our home, without losing the
| session.
| twoodfin wrote:
| It was used widely, it was just called Citrix.
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