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Comment by zeruch | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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, 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.

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