Sun Remarketing Catalog Summer 1988 | Hacker News Reader

Sun Remarketing Catalog Summer 1988

archive.org

74 points8bitsrule31 comments

This may be the very catalog from which I ordered my first Mac. I seriously considered the Lisa Professional, but when I learned about its non-square pixels I opted to pay the slight premium to get a used Mac Plus.

Shortly after that I got a modem, and via an early an BBS purchased a 20MB hard disk (external of course) from a guy in California. Just mailed him a check and trusted.

Thar hard disk stood almost as tall as the Mac, and had an overheating problem. So I hung the fan from my old Apple 2 on it and this kept it cool. The fan, however, introduced some EMF interference on the Mac screen, so I had to put a sheet of aluminum foil between the HD and the Mac.

Good times.

During the 1980s there was direct corporate name overlap in the computer industry between Sun Remarketing, Inc. and Sun Microsystems, Inc. with no corporate relation between them:

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

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

Different times indeed! Today it is obvious that batteries of lawyers would descend, cease-and-desist letters flying far and wide.

I remember when there was a line of great Sun automobile diagnostics gear:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV_-B3qI6Dk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEDMuzj4GKM

In today's world of tech convergence a company in that field with that name would also need to lawyer up.

Coincidentally, I just watched this documentary yesterday on the Apple Lisa [1]. Or maybe OP watched the same. In any case, it heavily features Sun Remarketing, so people might find it interesting as well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZjbNWgsDt8

This was interesting to me because I thought Sun had purchased the remaining Lisa inventory when, in fact, they were selling it on consignment.

Still, a shitty thing for Apple to do.

An interesting thing about the Lisa, was its clock used 4 bits for the year and so could only accept dates between 1980 and 1995.

[0] https://lisafaq.sunder.net/lisafaq-hw-io-cop421_clock.html

OP sure did! ( and wondered at Apple's brutality, and those prices.)

Super interesting, thanks for digging it up!

Add 1.5 Megabytes of RAM to your Mac for only $799!

I do not currently personally own any machines with 1TB of RAM; indeed, I think that the total quantity of RAM on working machines in my house is about half that.

So perhaps I'll be buying a 1TB RAM machine in four or five years.

8GB was a little lot fifteen years ago. I don't think 1TB ram will be common in five years, except maybe for IA model training.

I see that NEMIX will sell me 4x64GB DIMMs of ECC DDR4 for $357. A TB at that price is $1428, so now I need a system that takes at least 16 slots. A used DL360g9 with 2x 10core CPUs is $220, so I can put together a decent high-RAM server for home use for under $2000. Not bad. I just have no use for that right now.

I'd love a laptop with 64G worth of slots. And a huge battery.

Ah, for a world where the Apple III was one of the best business machines around.

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_applelisasarketingCata...

For those who don't know, Jobs got to the Apple III design before anyone could stop him:

https://www.cultofmac.com/541415/apple-iii-overheating-mothe...

> Steve Jobs insisted that the computer not feature a cooling fan. He also dictated the Apple III’s size and shape, without concern for what this would mean for electrical engineers. This resulted in the overheating motherboard, and Apple’s “just drop your computer” workaround.

https://www.techjunkie.com/apple-iii-drop/

> One such flaw was overheating, which could cause some of the system’s integrated chips to move or dislodge as they expanded. An obvious solution would be the addition of fans and adequate ventilation, but Jobs hated the relatively loud fans found on many computers of the day, and didn’t want to mar the Apple III’s design with ugly vents. So the Apple III shipped without any fans or vents, relying instead on a design that utilized a massive aluminum heat sink that formed the base of the computer.

> Without proper heat dissipation, computer magazine BYTE reported in 1982, the Apple III’s “integrated circuits tended to wander out of their sockets.” Owners of affected systems would begin to see garbled data on the screen, or notice that disks inserted into the system would come out warped or even “melted.”

> These problems affected Apple’s own employees, too, with one of the company’s early engineers, Daniel Kottke, picking up his Apple III and slamming it down on the desk out of frustration. To his surprise, the computer “jumped back to life.”

> Apple’s support engineers offered Apple III customers a similar solution:

> Apple recommended users facing problems with the Apple III lift the computer two inches and drop it, as this would set the circuits back in place.

This is awesome :). On page 8 I found the "Peronal Computer Toolkit" that my daughter gave me many years ago, and that I still have sitting in my desk drawer (minus about half the tools).

On the subject of Suns and Macs:

What, no GatorBoxes?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20007875

>DonHopkins on May 25, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Sepa...

>There used to be a bug in the GatorBox Mac Localtalk-to-Ethernet NFS bridge that could somehow trick Unix into putting slashes into file names via NFS, which appeared to work fine, but then down the line Unix "restore" would totally shit itself.

>That was because Macs at the time (1991 or so) allowed you to use slashes (and spaces of course, but not colons, which it used a a path separator), and of course those silly Mac people, being touchy feely humans instead of hard core nerds, would dare to name files with dates like "My Spreadsheet 01/02/1991".

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

From the Unix-Haters Handbook:

https://archive.org/stream/TheUnixHatersHandbook/ugh_djvu.tx...

Don't Touch That Slash!

UFS allows any character in a filename except for the slash (/) and the ASCII NUL character. (Some versions of Unix allow ASCII characters with the high-bit, bit 8, set. Others don't.)

This feature is great — especially in versions of Unix based on Berkeley's Fast File System, which allows filenames longer than 14 characters. It means that you are free to construct informative, easy-to-understand filenames like these:

1992 Sales Report

Personnel File: Verne, Jules

rt005mfkbgkw0 . cp

Unfortunately, the rest of Unix isn't as tolerant. Of the filenames shown above, only rt005mfkbgkw0.cp will work with the majority of Unix utilities (which generally can't tolerate spaces in filenames).

However, don't fret: Unix will let you construct filenames that have control characters or graphics symbols in them. (Some versions will even let you build files that have no name at all.) This can be a great security feature — especially if you have control keys on your keyboard that other people don't have on theirs. That's right: you can literally create files with names that other people can't access. It sort of makes up for the lack of serious security access controls in the rest of Unix.

Recall that Unix does place one hard-and-fast restriction on filenames: they may never, ever contain the magic slash character (/), since the Unix kernel uses the slash to denote subdirectories. To enforce this requirement, the Unix kernel simply will never let you create a filename that has a slash in it. (However, you can have a filename with the 0200 bit set, which does list on some versions of Unix as a slash character.)

Never? Well, hardly ever.

    Date: Mon, 8 Jan 90 18:41:57 PST 
    From: sun!wrs!yuba!steve@decwrl.dec.com (Steve Sekiguchi) 
    Subject: Info-Mac Digest V8 #3 5 

    I've got a rather difficult problem here. We've got a Gator Box run- 
    ning the NFS/AFP conversion. We use this to hook up Macs and 
    Suns. With the Sun as a AppleShare File server. All of this works 
    great! 

    Now here is the problem, Macs are allowed to create files on the Sun/ 
    Unix fileserver with a "/" in the filename. This is great until you try 
    to restore one of these files from your "dump" tapes, "restore" core 
    dumps when it runs into a file with a "/" in the filename. As far as I 
    can tell the "dump" tape is fine. 

    Does anyone have a suggestion for getting the files off the backup 
    tape? 

    Thanks in Advance, 

    Steven Sekiguchi Wind River Systems 

    sun!wrs!steve, steve@wrs.com Emeryville CA, 94608

Apparently Sun's circa 1990 NFS server (which runs inside the kernel) assumed that an NFS client would never, ever send a filename that had a slash inside it and thus didn't bother to check for the illegal character. We're surprised that the files got written to the dump tape at all. (Then again, perhaps they didn't. There's really no way to tell for sure, is there now?)

Mac OS X solves this the fact that OS X doesn't allow / but allows : and that HFS+ doesn't allow : but allows / very practically: it simply maps between the two!

So what happens if I copy a file named 'Toad: The Hoppening' to an HFS+ file system?

You will destroy the entire universe.

On the file system, it is stored as "Toad/ The Hoppening", in OS X it is displayed as "Toad: The Hoppening"

Here is some more detail, https://www.usenix.org/techsessionssummary/challenges-integr...

This is generally not true. Most unix utilities handle filenames with spaces just fine. It's mostly at the shell where people get mixed up about quoting spaces - so while it _appears_ that the problem is with the utility, it's really just the shell assuming that space is an argument separator.

It sounds like perhaps in the 1980s though, this may have been less true?

Could be. I'm definitely a 90s-and-later unix kid. I wonder when -0 was added to `find`

Edit: The quote is actually from the Unix haters handbook, published in 1994. I don't remember too many horrors with spaces in filenames from back then, but, er, it's been a while. find | xargs was a known problem case but that's why it got -0. Most of the rest was the familiar horrors of shell scripting.

It was equally true if you exclude things that couldn't work, like `xargs` without `-0`, but people were less careful about quoting. `shellcheck` didn't exist until 2012 (going by its copyright notice).

Wow, I recently saw some old car catalogues from similar era, cars and computers used to be so so expensive!

Were cars really? Hard to do an apples to apples comparison but there are so many safety and other features in cars that didn't mostly exist then. Cars do tend to last longer today, especially in areas with salt on the roads in the winter, but I'd be surprised if their purchase prices were less today in general.

Computers certainly. In the mid-80s, a very middle of the road PC or PC clone would probably be close to $10K in today's dollars. (Of course, the Lisa was known for being--overly--expensive and engineering workstations were pricey as well. Individuals mostly wouldn't have bought either.)

> In the mid-80s, a very middle of the road PC or PC clone would probably be close to $10K in today's dollars.

In 1988, you could get an XT clone for about $1000-$1500 in today's dollars or a really nice 386 clone for the equivalent of about $5000. A fully loaded fast 386 clone with monitor, 1 Meg of RAM, and hard drive would be about $7000.

(See this old Computer Shopper: https://archive.org/details/computershopperataridecember1988...)

$1k in 1988 is ~$2600 today.

https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

Computers definitely were. Cars not so much.

Jaguar E-Type (1968): £2,250 (~£32,000 today) Mustang (1968): $2,602 (~$23k today) Mini (1959): $1,340 (~$14k today)

As a kid in 1983, I knew exactly what Mazda's truck cost, although it had inexorably increased to $5,995 by the time I had this jingle memorized.

https://youtu.be/SOjL-3oJlCM

Without watching the video, "Sakes Alive!" has been floating in my head for 40 years.

FYI not Sun Microsystems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com