Getting and restoring a Sun Ultra 1 Workstation | Hacker News Reader

Getting and restoring a Sun Ultra 1 Workstation

rup12.net

86 pointsalexellisuk51 comments

I spent a summer’s worth of college kid shitty retail wages to buy one of these off eBay in 1998. It was by far the most expensive thing I’d ever purchased in my life. Learning Solaris inside out, including the forth prompt, let me bullshit my way into my first real job as a Unix sysadmin, which led to a pretty cool career in tech. I wonder what I’d be doing for a living right now if I hadn’t bought that ultra 1. Sun Ultra Enterprise systems will always have a very special place in my heart.

I hit the jackpot in 1999, when I was interning at a small brokerage in London as an IT gopher - the outfit a few floors below us had gone bust, and had just left their offices wide open, hardware heaped up for disposal. A coworker and I quickly whipped up an e-waste disposal flier, stuck it to their door, and lo and behold they were all too happy to have us take away all of their hardware for no charge. A lot of it went on eBay after being scrubbed, as I had rent to pay, but I ended up with a stack of sparcstations, an ultra 1, a few sgi machines and a bunch of decstations. I ended up selling the big sun servers (can’t remember models - one was about the size of a small refrigerator and styled like a 90’s Star Trek prop and the other was a full cabinet, and oh god they were noisy), but had a fascinating time setting them up and tinkering with them at home, and it was where I really first got to grips with unix sysadmin. Set myself up a small renderfarm, as I was dicking around with CG at the time, and later used a hodgepodge of machines to run simulations for my dissertation. I ultimately ended up repurposing the sparcstations into hysteresis testing stations and sold them to a pipeline company through the university. The rest, I still have, and when I have space (and power - I live off grid these days), I absolutely intend to burn many watts to have some fun reminiscing with long-past state-of-the-art hardware.

Those big Sun servers that are about the size of a small refrigerator and styled like a 90's Star Trek prop are probably Sun e450s. Fun fact: I am in the process of decommissioning a bunch of them from production use right now.

Yeah, that’s the puppy. Remember being impressed at how accessible the innards were. I think the big one was an ultra enterprise 5000 - never played with that one, we sold it straight from the premises, didn’t have any means of moving it, as most of this stuff, I was lugging around on the tube, and a seven foot tall server wasn’t going to happen.

It's amazing sometimes to see how much modern software compiles and runs without fuss on UltraSPARC systems. Projects like LLVM still include UltraSPARC, even if Solaris on UltraSPARC isn't horribly popular these days.

The number of packages for NetBSD on UltraSPARC is huge:

http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sparc64/9.0...

And while you wouldn't want to run stuff like Rust on a machine with 192 megs of memory, it's impressive that you can run Rust on a machine from 1995.

Back in the day I used to have to repair the CRT monitors for these. They were incredibly heavy and you could do yourself serious harm just lifting one from a box onto your bench. The reason for the weight was that once you had removed the plastic cover there were several layers (depending on the model) of metal screening around the circuit boards. An unusually good level of EMC screening for that time. I presumed these things were all built to military/govt spec to prevent TEMPEST eavesdropping ? Anyway removing all of that wasn't a quick job.

As for the IT part of the workstations I don't ever remember them going wrong they just ran & ran.

Even without TEMPEST considerations, once you got up to about 19" or so, CRT monitors got to be downright heavy. Then there was my folks' old TV set, a 36" flat-screen CRT monster that was difficult even for two to lift. That thick slab of glass on the front must have been half its mass. Moving it required planning.

Some of them had the hard disks that got sticky disk syndrome when turned off for a week (Christmas holidays) after years of service.

> they just ran & ran.

Until they didn't, usually right in the middle of a tape-out.

Nice to see this site is still around, though!

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/packages/solaris/sparc/

I had a lot of fun restoring this hunk of junk and trying to make it work. But there is still a long ways to go. Surprisingly there really NOT a lot of information out there on the Ultra 1. But do stay tuned for part 2.

Thanks for sharing this!

It saddens me to see the broken screen casing caused by careless transport. OTOH, if it still works I'd probably just use purple-blue gaffer tape to fix it, maybe even on all corners, to make it symmetric :-)

Uhm, are you aware of

Ultra™ 1 Creator SeriesService Manual at

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19127-01/ultra1.ws/802-4148-11/8... ?

edit: or rather https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19127-01/ultra1.ws/

I am! I used it extensively while fixing some of the issues here. It is nicely documented!

I believe that Sun (and SGI) machines using 13W3 connectors need a monitor supporting Sync-on-Green (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_video_sync).

Used to work at a place a long time ago with SGI Irix boxes connected to LCD panels; Iiyama panels supported SoG at the time and were the ones we used. Hope that helps, good luck!

I distinctly remember soldering a resistor to a Sun SBUS graphics card to make it send sync-on-green to an SGI monitor (both 13W3); I think SGI used SOG, and Sun didn’t.

Ah, OK - I stand corrected.

I thought briefly that I would not bother with VGA but use an X Server on a remote system to enjoy the Ultra. However then you would not be able to use the keyboard, which probably is half the fun? And does it have an optical mouse?

I used to have a Sun 3/60 at the end of the 90 gifted to me. It had a huge 21" black&white screen, and an optical mouse with two mouse pads with different grids, so you could pick the one you want for your preferred scroll speed.

That was my first DNS server in the University!

In fact it was the primary DNS for our University domain (uah.es).

I remember if you press the stop+a keys you get an ok prompt (the ROM monitor). You can debug the pci register from there and call a forth program to zconfigure the hardeare. Also it is able to netboot from a dhcs or rarp server and a NFS share (much faster than the CD).

I guess the only modern OSes that can handle this hardware today are NetBSD and OpenBSD.

I have some good memories of this and some sparkstation 2s were used for our 3D CAD course. They were in this darkly lit lab that made it all feel very serious.

I remember the mouse was optical but you needed a special mouse pad that had little triangles on it for the sensor to detect the movement. It was all way smoother than the 486 and pentiums that we used for the 2D CAD work.

I was a CS major around the time these were new, and we got a dozen of them for our computer lab. At the time we had a huge computer lab full of PCs (386's or 486's I think) and a darkened back room with a dozen SparcStations. At the time, I didn't know anything about Sparc or even Unix, but I did know that the English majors descended on our computer lab first thing every morning and took every available PC. However, the SparcStations in the back room were almost always available. I ended up learning, out of necessity, how to do my assignments on them, since computers were then still too expensive for me to be able to afford one of my own. Well, around that same time, a new research project called the World Wide Web was taking off, and they hooked all of the Sun workstations to it. I lucked into discovering "the internet" in the early 90's because all of the PCs were already taken.

When the first Raspberry Pi came out, I remember digging up benchmarks and - if I remember correctly - the $35 Pi was at least 4x faster than the SparcStation 20's we all fought to get neural net training time on in our grad school lab.

Shame about the monitor, I would have been pretty upset at that freight company.

I remember getting my IPX replaced by one of these bad boys, was quite an exciting day since the IPX was positively ancient in 1995, although we quickly turned them into dogs with VisualWorks and had to get more memory.

That crew was fun to work with, although it probably helped that we were young and stupid and getting paid what felt like bonkers money to work on sexy gear like a Sun.

Nice! Pet peeve of mine:

>"A side note: The screen looks amazing, I was blow away with the crispness of the 1280x1024 resolution on this monitor. I really wish it was just a bit smaller."

1280x1024 is the wrong resolution for a CRT, someone is sure to correct me but I have never seen a 5:4 aspect ratio CRT of that size. It is likely 4:3, so the resolution would be 1280x960. Or the next step 1600x1200.

Yet 1280x1024 was a really popular resolution on CRTs for some reason. 17" and 19" LCDs were the only real displays that had a 5:4 aspect ratio, at least in "modern" times.

I had several IRIX machines as my desktop workstation. They were 1280x1024.

Eg, https://sgi.neocities.org/oldindex.html comments "And everything looks pretty good on my 1280x1024 monitor." https://www.acc.umu.se/technical/hosts/irix.html shows several 1280x1024 machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_display_resolution#SX... comments "Super XGA (SXGA) is a standard monitor resolution of 1280 × 1024 pixels. This display resolution is the "next step" above the XGA resolution that IBM developed in 1990. ... SXGA is the most common native resolution of 17 inch and 19 inch LCD monitors. ... The 1280 × 1024 resolution became popular because at 24 bit/px color depth it fit well into 4 megabytes of video RAM."

I didn't do much with Suns but http://unixhq.com/websgt/ultra1.pdf comments about the Ultra 1: "Creator - Accelerated 24-bit 2-D/3-D graphics and imaging with 8-bit overlay plane,high-speed convolution, rotation,panning, zooming, color conversion, up to 1280 x 1024 at 76 Hz, stereo 960 x 680 at 112 Hz"

If it's the same 21" Sun that I had back in the days the native resolution is indeed 1600x1200. Sony Triniton tube, those screen were fantastic.

Mine could even do 800x600 at 160Hz, my first experience with high refresh rates. Felt like I could grab the windows and pull them out of the screen.

Given that it's a CRT wouldn't it be max resolution instead of native? The 800x600@160Hz would also be driven natively I assume.

I remember 1152x900 being the standard Sun resolution, that may have been before the Ultra though.

> 1280x1024 is the wrong resolution for

Nope. Fairly standard for SPARC systems, going back to (at least) 1992:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_10#Graphics_suppo...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_20#Graphics

* http://www.sunhelp.org/faq/FrameBuffer.html#SX

OmniOS is a still actively maintained Solaris derivative - maybe that will run? https://omnios.org

All OmniOS releases are for the x86-64 architecture only.

Maybe http://www.tribblix.org/download.html would be more appropiate.

For even more geekyness https://github.com/itomato/lubu

Looks like OmniOS isn't currently offering a SPARC port, nor is OpenIndiana. https://www.openindiana.org/

Tribblix would be an option, though. http://www.tribblix.org/

I actually ran OpenIndiana on white-box hardware for a while, before Ubuntu started shipping ZFS. Except for KVM being Intel-only on Illumos (is that still an issue?), and AHCI hot swap being dangerous on a live system, it worked well enough for me to live with the aggravations. The SMF hackery needed to start up VirtualBox VMs on boot was not fun.

With the monitor, you could try using a 'hot staple welder'. Its the sort of thing usually used with car bumpers, and I'm not 100% sure the plastic is right for these things.. But it might be worth a try?

https://www.amazon.com.au/Stapler-Bumper-Plastic-Repair-Stap...

I will definitely give this a go! Looks interesting!

When I started college in the fall of 1993 we had a lot of Sun SPARCstations around. They were older IPC and IPX machines. Around 1996 we started getting SPARCstation 4 and 5 models.

I developed my senior design project (a neural network with GUI for OCR - Optical Character Recognition)

It would take about 10 seconds to determine what character you you drew with the mouse

The entire department had a big presentation day when all the faculty and people from businesses showed up to see our projects. I helped set up the auditorium the day before and we were unboxing brand new UltraSPARC I machines to use for our presentations.

Our project ran so fast that I thought something was wrong. Everything went well but right after the event we literally boxed the machines back up. I thought that it would have been great to have those while we were developing the project.

A month later in June 1997 I started my job and we had even faster UltraSPARC II 200MHz machines and then got an Ultra 2 300MHz box

If anyone in Germany (or close) also wants one, there is a full Ultra1 on eBay (just with a more manageable LCD screen): https://www.ebay.de/itm/114800428000

I have no connection to it, only mentioning it because they seem to be quite rare.

Oh I am so tempted right now! If nothing just for that monitor!

Hm. Rather 640MB RAM vs. your 192. That would be nice to have.

Edit: and a quad port ethernet nic, and a second graphics card!1!! Dual Head!

Nooo! I am not in Germany now! But maybe I can grab it when I come back :D

Recently I got my first Sun SPARC workstation which paid for itself as I use it for maintaining 25 years old C++ Solaris 8 software for a customer. It is slower than the server machine but with maximum RAM it can run the full application and is very useful for quicker debugging.

I also put an SSD on it but it did not improve the compile times: the full source code fits comfortably in RAM.

With an XVR-500 I got from someone in Italy it even runs OpenGL applications nicely. I would have loved to have such a machine at the time when they were current, and although it takes room in my small apartment it does spark joy every day.

Send the monitor casing to this guy. https://retrohax.net/commodore-sx-64-keyboard-restoration/

I have the same model. The idiot that I bought it from decided to pack the keyboard on edge underneath the main unit so it arrived with a bit of a kink in the chassis and a cracked case.

I am very sad for my cracked monitor!

I'm sad for you too. In the past, with cracked plastic enclosures, I've had some successes (with lots of failures) fabricating new 2-piece enclosures from fibreglass (not expensive at all).

If you have a lazy Saturday coming up, it might not be a bad idea to try it (look at some of the youtube fibreglassing tutorials).

Oh! I will have the chance to do this sometime soon! If I give it a go, I will update!

Please do. While my experience with glassing new enclosures is spotty at best, one or two of them came out very professional looking.

It would be great if you can show that glassing is a viable way to restoring old stuff while keeping the same period look.

>> How long does it take to install an OS off two CD-ROMs (around 1.5 GB in total) with a 2x CD-ROM drive? A LOT!

By the time Sun hardware was cheap enough for me to buy, the software was more expensive than the hardware. So, I never got to install it, only ran what was included.

Wasn't there a way to do a network install, or connect an external SCSI HD and install the OS from there?

You can run the X server on your local linux with a modern monitor and run the X clients over the SSH from the Sun Ultra 1.

Or better yet, login right into it with your Linux X server.

Does anybody else see some names printed on the graphics card (sorry, framebuffer) PCB just above the TurboXGX chip? I can see Curtis and Chris crossed out, and Tony...

As for the monitor case, you could send it to guys who do heavy car detailing services. They know how to weld and renovate plastic.

Wife saw my look at this page and she says, our office probably has a few of these laying around.

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