How many SPARCs is too many SPARCs? | Hacker News Reader

How many SPARCs is too many SPARCs?

thejpster.org.uk

74 pointsnaves21 comments

20+ years ago during undergrad my OO design class had us writing C++ on Solaris. We were told that unless it compiled and ran on Sun we'd get a zero.

This was also before ewaste regulations came in and some engineering school departments would just throw decommissioned hardware out on the loading dock for people to pick over. One day a pile of SPARCstations showed up and my roommates and I grabbed them all.

We put together two working SS-5s by picking and pulling parts from about eight of them. Had our own mini Sun lab in our living room so we didn't have to go out in the snow and try to stake out an open machine in the engineering computing center.

I once did this type of "dumpster dive" for NeXT cubes. I managed to get eight perfectly working cubes. I then, feeling generous, started offering them up to my friends. Before I realized what I'd done, I'd given them all away and ended up without one. Oh well.

We had both SPARCstations and IBM RISC workstations running AIX. Our assignments were always graded on Solaris. But the IBMs had better keyboards, so I used those. The downside? I had a real knack for finding constructs that'd lead to a segfault in Solaris but not AIX.

I was too lazy to do things like shell into a remote Solaris machine to double check before submitting though. I was YOLOing before it was cool.

I had a SPARClassic at home in 1996! It was pretty underpowered, but it worked great as long as you didn't use X. I worked from my brand new PowerMac 7200 over ethernet to the SPARClassic, which gave me MacOS + Solaris as a development environment.

I wish I'd grabbed some of the PS2 devkits my university were throwing out, they had them all stacked up in an unlocked storeroom.

a friend of mine had a sun-3/xxx as an end table. (uncertain what model but it was about the size of an end table, probably with casters)

I owned many sparcstations. Once I bought a bunch of pizza-boxes for peanuts. Not many worked, but mix and match memory + graphics cards and some did.

Sorry to not have all the details handy, but if anyone in New England is interested in a smaller-scale version of this, I have in a storage unit around 45 minutes north of Boston what I recall to be around 3-4 old Sparcs, probably Sparc 20s. Similar story: not powered on in decades and I'd be happy to give them away to anyone who wants them and who avoids turning the process into a pain in the backside. Multiple 17" CRT monitors as well...

I'm not in a rush and you shouldn't be either, but if you can make use of them or just want them, my email is in my profile.

"My gain of shelf space is your loss..."

Ditto in kw.on.ca. A few Sparc pizza boxes and (IIRC) a 3/60, among other things (mostly DEC).

When my local inversity was throwing out their old SPARC stuff I filled my car to the point where it looked like a cartoon caricature of an overstuffed car.

I had two full racks of SPARC, DEC Alpha, SGI, and other trash, in my one bedroom apartment.

Now my experiment hardware is raspberry pi and RISC-V stuff (visionfive 2 & orangepi RV2). Much more manageable with space, noise, and power bill.

I did the same thing in college, in 2003 or so! I had a whole polyglot UNIX lab in my college dorm room; pizzaboxes, SGI Indigo 2's and an Indy, a NEXTStation, random PPC Apples, an Atari Mega ST 2... I remember my RA checked it out and he just looked at it and nodded. No clue what anything was, just "yeah, technically this isn't breaking any rules..."

I have 5 E450s, 20 sparcstations 5s, about as many ultra 5s + 10s and a few of those square older boxes. They all still work and i'm waiting for something. Such a nice machines, especially the E450s were dreamy at the time. I gave a demo where we should a 'cluster of EJBs', indestructible(...) software dev on 2 E450s. It was impressive, but stupidly overpriced... We made nice money but for me that era was about the hardware, after that everything because just 'PCs'.

I got my manager at my first job to buy an E450. I think it was around $40,000.

All of our chip design software ran on Solaris and we needed a new faster machine compared to the 200 and 300MHz Ultra 2 machines we had.

I remember it came on a palette and it was 3 inches off the ground. I wondered how we would get it off the palette. Then we started reading the instructions and it came with 2 wooden ramps that fit into slots on the palette and we just wheeled it down the ramps because the server was on caster wheels. We just rolled it into our server room.

I was 22 and it was just so cool.

(Apologise for the terrible grammar: got excited about SPARC but took somewhat too little time to formulate. I think it's readable anyway but definitely not great!)

I keep a SPARCStation 20 around for some nostalgia

NetBSD still supports it, and a wide variety of other SPARC systems https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sparc64/

There are semi-regular posts to the NetBSD port-sparc and port-sparc64 mailing lists from people looking to find new homes for SPARC systems.

Oh the memories, i worked like... 20 years ago! on EDS for the Sun Microsystems account as a Solaris System Administrator.

It's hard to explain how advanced was Solaris at the time, specially Solaris 10 which had something named "Zones" which were actually some initial form of containers. With Zones you could run another instance of the OS completely isolated from the main Solaris (the kernel was shared, but for your apps would look like a native OS). You could even run another Solaris version! that was a cool approach to migrate a really old solaris 8 app to solaris 10 without having to change the app code.

Zones, combined with Sun Cluster or Veritas cluster would give you the ability to migrate those zones from one node of the cluster to the other (with it's own lun -external scsi disk/volume attached-) giving you some reaaaaaly interesting and new approaches to system design.

You can think about it as your dad's kubernetes.

Nothing like that could be done in linux at the time, and no one would use linux for any critical task, only for lamp servers.

Time has passed.

I have an Ultrasparc workstation that I will need to unload soon, big and purple, vaguely near Chicago.

Craigslist is a last resort.

> "MORSE SPARCstation 2 - The second SPARCstation 2 has a MORSE sticker on it"

MORSE was a big Sun reseller in Europe in the 90's. I haven't heard their name since the dot-com bubble popped !

Having just bought a new-in-box (late 2008 manufacture date according to the sticker) Sun Type 7 keyboard with UNIX layout (and no Oracle logo!), this post hit me right in the feels.

Circa 2000 I clearly didn't think there was such a thing as too many SS5s: https://web.archive.org/web/20181004111934if_/https://people...

The "funny story" in the next article hit a little close to home for me.

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