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Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

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Vaughan Pratt designed the original Sun Microsystems logo, which is an ambigram (and also a swastikoid rotation group):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Pratt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram

https://www.famouslogos.org/logos/sun-microsystems-logo

It originally had a square orientation:

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jtWyvhXXKw8/WMhYGNM4huI/AAAAAAAAG...

John Gage suggested turning it 45 degrees (making it even more swastikier).

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TM7J2yqhR1E/WMhYGME0LaI/AAAAAAAAG...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage

That's the same John Gage who's on Nixon's Enemies List.

https://www.enemieslist.info/enemy.php?ID=463

Who even has such a word in vocabulary and first thing your mind came up with is ...

But hey, maybe youre just salty after googling Sparcbook and realizing how innovative Apple was with Touchbar XD ( which apple killed by using it wrong )

... What?

There's only one swastikoid logo more swastikier and cockier than the Sun logo, and that's Slack's infamous Penis Swastika Logo.

https://metro.co.uk/2019/01/17/slack-new-logo-looks-like-pen...

>Slack added: ‘The important thing about being a brand is that whenever people see you in the wild, they should recognize that it’s you.’

>So naturally, it decided to launch a new icon which has now been roundly roasted across the internet and compared to four phalluses arranged in the shape of a symbol that’s forever associated with the Nazi.

>Designer T Carter Baxter tweeted: ‘I know people at Slack and I know they’re smart, capable and caring people. But once you hear “swastika made of dicks” it’s kind of over for the new logo.’

I do respect that Slack stuck to their guns, so to speak.

I do miss the diversity of computing from back then. Today everything has converged on looking and acting almost the same, but back then there was so much more choice. Amiga, Atari St, Mac, SGI, Sun, NeXT, and a whole lot more.

Yep. Nowadays a new release is likely to take features or design away or backwards for seemingly the need to be different. Like the many times Microsoft has tried to take away the Start menu. Gnome 2 to 3. Etc.

Meanwhile Planet 9 tried to pull off a logical extension of unix only to be abandoned. Some of those ideas live on, but probably not as extensively as P9 would have allowed.

I think you mean “Plan 9”; in case anyone wants to search for it.

Yes sorry, long day.

A subset of us still use plan9, usually in the form of 9front.

Every time I think of Plan9, I get a little misty eyed and wistful. I'm just old enough to remembering time sharing systems and mainframes. These days looking at whats called cloud, I'm seeing a lot of the old architecture coming back, loosely speaking. Mobile devices are like the new dumb terminals, the browser is the shell, and the cloud is our mainframe. If you want to extend the analogy further we even pay for time in a convenient monthly subscription, whether that be Netflix's cloud or your favorite remote music service.

Circling back to plan9, it really was the ideal system, and for the way things are going these days, it's really only a matter of time before we see the return of Plan9 or something built in effigy of it. I say this with a straight face, from the filesystem to the network model, from top to bottom Plan9 was a new paradigm that extended on the original Unix system in ways we still haven't replicated today in a mainstream environment the way it was then. The way the network layer and system layer intertwined to form an actual everythings-a-file system was bonkers the first time I tried it, coming from the Linux world where this claim is often made and isn't always true.

Now that the 9 system is back in the community's hands it's just going to take one group to be the next Inferno, similar to redhat, and put on the suits and ask for money and youll see the rest of the industry start to join in. It might just be my tainted opinion as a Gopher, but we're letting good stuff go to waste, we should be evolving this technology while the creators are still around to give input about their vision.

Glenda will ride again, I just hope I'm alive to see it.

I completely agree! What are the features from the front end of P9 that you miss most?

Simplicity (im a TWM guy) also the way that acme is like a emacs from the future in that like the plan9 ui the mouse gets a lot of traffic. You can highlight words and instantiate them as commands, also one of my favorite features is preemptively drawing the space where my window is about to spawn.

Also, the color scheme is truly based, as the kids say.

NEXTgen hardware virtualization + QUBES OS-like usage of virtualization but made nice looking and frictionless to standard user. Thats the future we get.

Yes and which definitely feels like the OS equivalent of “since you all can’t get along on your own you each will be given your own OS-like namespace and have no direct interaction with one another.”

Ideal only if one doesn't care about high performance graphics or audio, which Plain 9 didn't had anyway.

Plan9 and EMACS have architecture which is antithetic to economic model of todays software industry, so in that sense im glad we did have windows95-like buggy macos (until atleast 10.4-10.5) XD

EMACS is essentially SAP+github+Office(including Visio and Power Automate) for your own offcloud usage. If you think about it.

How is it antithetic? Being able to “mount” external compute to a local terminal is a recipe for selling more hardware. I mean both PlayStation and Xbox can be locally streamed to a phone or tablet. Granted, it did take basically 20 years for those suits to come along to the idea.

The whole obsolescence through a glued on battery and all the other nastiness of modern mobiles does make a point though. They do want their recurring revenue streams for cloud resources. But that essentially moves the mountable resources to a provider.

And everyone took the effort to write proper native applications instead of something like Electron.

convert all JS to "native" via LLVM.... or just webassembly ..

programming languages are ONLY communication layers between human and computer, they are not some voodoo, gift from god, so these layers can be made to suit human needs.

instead of browser downloading blob from facebook, your package manager will dowload it, and that can be made over P2P (like torrent) because you do not need it in 0.000001 sec. it will sit in cache. and this can be signed with current certification authority ecosystem almost without change to provide safe downloads.

I miss this too. Both on the software and hardware side. We've lost a lot, though on the other hand computing is more mature now.

> I do miss the diversity of computing from back then

I’ve thought about this for a while. All sorts of different architectures, companies, protocol, etc. whereas computing seems to be a massive monoculture now. We basically only have a handful of operating systems, most of which are based off something from decades ago, basically only two architectures still succeeded and one of them just seems to be hacks piled on top of hacks, etc.

I get that there’s a reason certain stuff won out, but it’s just boring to me personally.

Even compared to not that long ago, I look at PC cases from 10-15 years ago and see a ton of cool and unique designs, anything from recent times seems to be reduced to “white or black case with flashy lights”.

In the Sun-3 (Motorola 68K) and early Sun-4 (SPARC) workstations, you got just the monochrome logo. It was nice and tasteful, fitting well alongside a large black-on-white serif console font.

Then the first time you saw an early Sun-4 with CG6 graphics boot, with the full-color 3D image, on that black-on-white console display, it seemed a little out of place, but cool.

The Linux boot logo of the Tux penguin might've been a homage of how Sun did their logo. (And when Linux got symmetric multiprocessing support, a Tux for each CPU/core, IIRC.)

The saddest Unix workstation boot logo was when the nice big elegant Apollo logo shrank, to reflect the company being acquired, and we lost a very noteworthy platform. http://www.planetmulti.de/v2/index.html?http://www.planetmul...

I’ve heard some of these had Forth in ROM, which would be fun to play with, but the only type of Sun machines I see in the market are later Sun Stations and I have 0 clue if those have forth as well.

The Sun SPARC machines I used in the 1990's used Open Firmware for booting. It contained a Forth interpreter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

Oh, the nostalgia...(disclosure: worked at Sun in the mid 90s)

I had a Sun SparcStation 20 in the mid 90's at work. I was some discarded equipment that nobody was using, that was just laying in a corner somewhere.

I put Red Hat Linux 2.0 on it from a CD-ROM.

I put a TFTP server on it, and used it as the server for booting an NCD X/Window terminal. Also something nobody gave a shit about.

I had GIMP running on it; at some point, people gathered around the cube to see that.

Being young, I was too much of an idiot to just take that gear home. It probably ended up in some dumpster somewhere when Nortel folded, long after I was gone.

On that same job, I also ported Quake to a HP-715 (PA-RISC arch). The frame rate wasn't good, but playable.

My last Sun box was a Sparc 20 IIRC, and I had that until 2007ish or thereabouts, before I gave it up. Sun is still one of the best companies I ever worked at, and I was there when the E10K and Java was released, really exciting times without a hint of the circus/surreality show the industry has become.

I'm envious! I was in college when the acquisition happened. I wonder how different the world of computing would be if that buyout didn't occur.

Not sure if the computing world would be that different, but maybe Oracle would have taken a humbling tumble (I loathed them years before they even attempted the buyout, as their corporate culture is too much like Lord of the Flies except "anyone not named Larry Ellison is Piggy" and I've rebuffed every attempt to be recruited by, purchase new or renew existing Oracle contracts. Rip and replace any chance I've had.

I had a SPARCstation 5 on my desk in 1997. I took an SBus graphics card out of another machine. It would boot just fine without it. Then I put it in my SS5 and connected a second monitor. People around me thought it was amazing that I could have 2 monitors on the same machine.

We got a few Ultra 2 machines and then an Enterprise 450. I still remember being so excited when it arrived on a palette and when we unboxed it it came with 2 wooden ramps that attached to the palette so you could roll it down to the floor.

One engineer got an Ultra 60 as his desktop but by 1998 we started replacing most desktop machines with Linux / x86 and running everything remote and displaying to our local machines via X11 with the Suns in the closet. We also had a Sun Enterprise 4500 with around 16 CPUs at the main office.

By 2003 we started replacing our Suns with AMD 64-bit machines and Linux. All of our semiconductor design software was already Unix / X11 so it was easy to port to Linux. Around 2004 the switch was complete and we never used Suns anymore. They just fell behind the price / performance curve and couldn't compete with Linux / x86-64 anymore.

Still got that Quake executable? The 712 here says hi (in a SAIC Galaxy 1100).

I have a BriteLite IPX, an UltraBook IIi and a Tadpole Viper badged as the Sun Ultra-3. However, I'm rather fond of Solbournes, the other white SPARC meat. The S3000's flaring orange gas plasma is distinctive. I should finish restoring the Series 5 chassis and all those Kbus cards I have in storage.

Nice collection! I’ve never seen the S3000 in person, but from the photos I’ve seen it looks amazing. Love the orange plasma on my IBM PS/2 P70/P75!

Any chance you might be willing to help out by sending me some firmware or logo data? For the little B&W logos it could be as simple as typing “sun-logo 200 dump” at the ok prompt.

Let me see what I can do this weekend. The Sol PROM is more limited but I may be able to make it cough up something.

Email me if you like (username at gmail) - would be nice if we could make this work!

I managed to acquire a Sun E3500 from a former employer, which is almost the size of a bar fridge. It used to throw enough heat to keep my house warm. Unfortunately it was noisy as hell. The ethernet transceiver died at some point and I couldn't be bothered replacing it, so it just became a bedside table until I finally disposed of it.

The first computer I owned was a Sparcstation 1, bought used in 1993 or so. I was a sysadmin in DEC oriented place (running Ultrix & OSF/1), and missed SunOS from my university days. I used it mainly as a terminal. I replaced it with a Pentium Pro running FreeBSD after a few years.

Same. I left early 2000's. At one point I wrote a an OpenGL game which ended up on the demo CD that came with the Ultra workstations. It contained a big 3D Sun logo that I created by manually writing the appropriate code in C. It was easy once I figured out that the dimensions of the logo are all very nice even values.

The game itself should still be available on one of those discs. Perhaps someone created an image of it.

archive.org does have some ISOs of sun / sparc software try look it up XD

Would that demo be on one the Ultra Pack collections? Archive seems to have the first volume but it seems there were several released. Sadly they are super hard to find even on eBay.

Yes. It definitely wasn't on the first volume. I'm pretty sure of that.

Same, 1988-1992, then Tadpole until 1996

Me too. Left during the second round of layoffs in 2002 I think. Worked with Suns at university previously.

I remember the original logo, CG6, and TurboZX/Leo. I don't recognize the others.

Here's some Solaris wallpaper.

1920x1080

https://www.w6rz.net/solaris.png

750x1334

https://www.w6rz.net/solarisios.png

Here is an old surrealistic brochure I scanned and posted to archive.org about the Sun-4/200 Series Supercomputing Workstation with 10-MIPS Processing Power.

https://archive.org/details/sun4200seriesbrochure/mode/2up

They had racks full of those brochures and others just as weird for the taking, in the lobby of Sun Building 1 in Mountain View (2550 Garcia Avenue, now the Intuit building), around 1987 or so, when I was a summer intern.

It's only the original I like. The rest are way too "look mom, my first raytracing project!" for me. Tacky.

IIRC, one of the screen savers on SPARCstations was Conway's Game of Life, with each 'cell' being the SUN logo. I loved it at the time.

As the logo is effectively a diamond, the cell pattern was rotated 45 degrees which was also cool.

Technically the SPARCbook/SPARCbook 3 logos aren’t Sun Workstation boot logos.

They are just product branding or?

Tadpole was a different company, making SPARC portables.

SPARCbooks were made by Tadpole, not Sun.

In that same vein, I should dump the RDI boot logo on my sparcstation5-compatible PowerLite laptop. It was a pretty nifty stylized eclipse, sadly lost around the time the company merged with Tadpole.

True, of course - but they may as well have been made by Sun, since they use Sun's custom ICs and were basically a SPARCstation in a laptop form factor: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook-teardown/

True of course. In the beginning it was just Sun fb logos; later I added the clones and laptops but didn’t want to rename the repository.

https://github.com/mdehling/sun-fb-logos/blob/main/HOWTO.ado... describes how to dump firmware images; I assume after that getting these is as easy as pointing binwalk or something at it?

Unfortunately, no, at least not in all cases. For some of these the logo was in Sun RasterFile format or in a simple (width, height, colormap, data) format. In other cases it took a serious amount of reverse engineering to extract the logo: For the RasterFlex-HR logo I had to read the colormap from the hardware directly because the firmware never initializes it.

It's really a nice idea to save and collect these little history artifacts. In the same way, I wonder if we can extract the serif monospace font used on these workstations.

IIRC this font is available in the linux kernel. Every time I build one for my laptop I set it as the system's text-mode font because it makes using a 1080p screen in 15" quite nice (and I usually have to spend some time debugging why nvidia drivers have fucked up again (damn switchable graphics))

This is fun. Reminded that used Axils were a big deal for me in the 'lets compile the virtual hosting mod into Apache’ days, putting more than one client on a box!

Wow, I love how these represent some of the top of the line graphics of the day. It takes me back before live-rendering of CGI equivalent graphics was commonplace.

Were they really all this low-res?

They looked better on CRT displays of the era

I’d believe it. It’s my understanding that a current iPhone app icon is almost the same resolution as the first Macintosh screen. Crazy times! Have to remember that the old CRT screens took pixelated images and gave the a smooth glowing look.

Well, I thought the logos were sort of splash screens meant to be displayed full-screen. Perhaps the very first Mac did, but I can't believe a Sun workstation would have a 100-pixels display.

Good CRTs indeed make everything look amazing though. E.g. a 240p video can look beautiful on a 19-inch Trinitron.

Yep. Standard Sun resolution for the longest time was 1152x900. The little B&W logos are 64x64 and most of the newer ones are 100x100 so like 9% of the screen width.

Looooove XVR logos. Timeless.

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