SPARCbook 3000ST: The coolest 90s laptop (2019)
jasoneckert.github.io
jasoneckert.github.io
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.
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.
This cannot be emphasized strongly enough -agreed!
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.
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.
It's is a great shame how many LCD's have been landfilled for want of a part that costs nickel.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
It also gains more features sometimes.
https://books.google.com/books?id=JDoEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&dq=i...
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
The O2 shouldn't need a PSU capacitor replacement yet.
If you want to give the SCSI disk a better chance, place it flat on a table and rotate rapidly, then stop. You should feel the spindle spin.
Hardware of this era is still quite reliable so I don't think you will have problems.
The fan is also a lot louder than I remember. Thanks for the tips sir, I'll try to get the screens running to see if I can find any fun data on the drive.
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
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.
Moving to Windows machines after that was a real drag, but the Mac brought me back to some of that UNIX magic.
Modern hardware and software feels so boring compared to all this madness...
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.
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.
I see what you mean. Let's see: IBM had (and has) POWER (Is RT/PC's CPU an ancestor of POWER? Or a different genus?) HP had PA-RISC, DEC had Alpha, Sun of course had SPARC. (Oracle still sells new SPARC hardware, yes? Although I doubt any true workstation-class devices.) Did Apollo have its own custom silicon? Who else am I forgetting from the Workstation Wars days?
Now that's 90s cool.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Containers are basically Java application servers, rebooted as language agnostic OS services.
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.
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.
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).
The answer turned out to be "nothing"
------------
The "conventional" UltraSPARC designs -- US IIi, US IIIi, US IV, and the canceled "Rock" project -- were just really very mediocre chips sold at tens of times the cost of a similar x86.
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?
The problem is that development costs rose and rose and rose without bound. Even if you could outsource fabrication, just designing your chip would bankrupt you.
HP, to their credit, saw the writing on the wall. The Itanium started as a joint Intel/HP project. It was HP's attempt to get Intel to pay for their new generation of chips, and sell it to the broader industry, in the hope they could have a new generation that would be (somewhat) backwards compatible with PA-RISC, but get off the treadmill of escalating development costs.
It was a clever plan, but as we know now, it didn't work worth a damn. Practically nobody but HP actually bought the IA64 chips. Intel quickly realized it wasn't worth any further investment and let HP's badly-needed chip series wither on the vine.
Sun didn't even have that much of a plan. They kept making chips they could not afford, and when "Rock" threatened to bankrupt the company... they just gave up. Even though giving up also threatened to bankrupt the company.
Which is why I'm saying with 20-20 hindsight it feels like they should have all just piled in on POWER. Of all of them born in that era, it's the only one still around. (Apart from ARM of course whose target was something else. MIPS is kinda just on life support.)
I don't remember the politics around the consortium there. I guess it could be that Sun and HP and the others just saw IBM as too much of a competition to want to be in bed with them. But given most of these vendors had shipped 68k arch workstations previously, I would have thought they'd be down with Motorola's offerings?
The problem in the end is these people all saw the other workstation vendors as competition rather than the actual competition, which was Windows/x86 (and later, Linux).
SPARC and MIPS were relatively open from day one but there were fewer takers than you would expect
SPARC had a number of licensees, but most of them chose to either re-use Sun software (Fujitsu, Solborne) or sell their chips directly through Sun (Ross, Weitek)
MIPS had many licensees but it ended up being bought by one of its most successful customers, SGI. Turns out, controlling the product direction is pretty important!
The point is, there were a lot of market forces piling up to drive people to play their own game, even it looks very silly 30 years on.
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.
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.
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?
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...
They did this with practically every one of their partners back in the 00s.
The pop up floppy drive on it is brilliant.
That's the 1997 equivalent of built-in DOCSIS 3 and a coax jack on the laptop.
I don't remember cable modems becoming commonplace until maybe 4-5 years later. (though there was a fair bit of overlap, of course)
In Amsterdam it was UPC, though that might have been their name later on.
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.
I still remember what a pain it was to get that 1-way modem working on linux. I had to print the documentation out from Windows, and then reboot. On the other hand, learning how to get that driver[1] to compile and loaded as a kernel module was very educational.
[1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/net/sb...
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.
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.
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.
Solaris, solid metal hardware, tens of thousands of $$ - just screams SIGINT to me.
Official link: https://triosdevelopers.com/jason.eckert/myblog/sparcbook300...
And previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19524130
SPARCbook 3000ST - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19524130 - March 2019 (98 comments)
And that's in 1997 dollars. Great perspective on complaints about how expensive Macbooks, which start at $1,000, are.