[HN Gopher] A SPARC makes a little fire
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       A SPARC makes a little fire
        
       Author : zdw
       Score  : 85 points
       Date   : 2025-08-05 16:11 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.leadedsolder.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.leadedsolder.com)
        
       | burnt-resistor wrote:
       | Oh my. Yeap, definitely check polarity and voltages on used
       | stuff.
       | 
       | At least it wasn't as bad as someone at my high school (c. 1995)
       | who plugged a Centronics printer into a Mac SE external SCSI
       | connector and released the magic smoke(tm) of both.
        
       | cheschire wrote:
       | Worth the read if for no other reason than to see the disk
       | ejected in zero gravity.
        
       | donatj wrote:
       | "Bad magic number" brings back some PTSD of trying to get a Sun
       | Server working in like 2001. My friend and I futzed with that
       | thing for hundreds of hours.
        
       | anonzzzies wrote:
       | Good memories from uni working with those (and other Sun)
       | machines. I still have many of them and last I checked (during
       | covid) they all still work.
        
       | davidgerard wrote:
       | I have mixed feelings about the openboot font, specifically that
       | most times I saw it my life was actively sucking.
       | 
       | Other than that it's very nice for a console font. Why don't we
       | have PC BIOSes with that font, eh?
        
       | throwanem wrote:
       | Thank goodness I gave up physical retrocomputing as a hobby ages
       | back. Oh, I've held on to my display piece IIe, and framed the
       | motherboard of my high-school 486, the first machine I ever built
       | myself. Past that, though, these days everything is emulated or
       | virtualized. Leaded solder fans and museumists are welcome to the
       | rest!
        
         | sys_64738 wrote:
         | Those SPARCstations were noisy, slow, and power hungry. I
         | wouldn't be running them either which is why I got rid of mine
         | which were in the attic for a decade.
        
           | hylaride wrote:
           | Yeah, nostalgia or historical learning is one thing, but
           | these things can't even browse the modern web (processors
           | can't handle modern TLS ciphers and our phones have higher
           | resolutions that these can drive). You will be hard pressed
           | to even run modern-ish server-side code that doesn't use
           | encryption. Even OpenBSD, which tries to cross-compile on as
           | many architectures as possible to expose potential bugs, had
           | to give up on sparc32.
           | 
           | They will eventually just take up space.
        
             | throwanem wrote:
             | You see a Duesenberg in a museum sometimes, too. We even
             | still say "doozy."
        
       | TimMeade wrote:
       | Oh my that brought some real memories back. My first real
       | programing job was in 1989 on a Sun Sparc 1+ Identical to that.
       | Writing imaging C code for an industrial app before photoshop....
       | Loved that box.
        
       | jasoneckert wrote:
       | I still fire up my old SPARCbook 3000ST (Solaris 2.5.1) in case I
       | need a hit of Sun UNIX nostalgia from back in the day.
       | 
       | And whenever I give a presentation at a venue that has a
       | projector with VGA input, I'll do the presentation from the same
       | SPARCbook.
        
       | Stevvo wrote:
       | The title had me thinking it was first plasma at the SPARC
       | reactor. Unfortunately, not yet.
        
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       (page generated 2025-08-09 23:01 UTC)