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Comment by bradleyy | Hacker News Reader

Everybody hating on the IPX, but I have so much nostalgia. Yes, my friends who ran a repair shop kept employed fixing them, like transmission shops survive on minivan transmissions.

That era hardware (although I ended up with a fair bit of experience on the whole Sun 3/4 lines)... I had just gotten out of the Army, didn't know what I was going to be when I grew up, and the future was so terrifying but bright.

It's a good thing that I don't horde (except cars, that's a problem), because I'd have racks of these things. Named after Star Trek characters, not because I care about it, but because that was the naming convention at one of my first "real jobs".

IDK, maybe nobody else thinks this way, but I'm really glad to see someone fixing one.

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> Everybody hating on the IPX

Most of that is misguided. The IPX was the high volume, low cost, face-for-the-user Solaris box during exactly the moment in the mid 90's where Intel and Microsoft took over and Sun and the Unix vendors lost the plot.

People remember it as a ridiculous $15k joke that was half the speed of the Pentium 100 you ordered out of the back of Computer Shopper.

But when the IPC and IPX were released, SPARC was still ascendant (Intel's flagship was the 486/33!), "PCs" were still running Windows 3.1 (or just DOS), Linux didn't exist yet, and they were the best computers you could get. Well unless you were a graphic nerd and tilted to SGI instead.

I very specifically remember salivating over these boxes, which were legitimate upgrades over the SPARCstation 1/1+/2 machines which were groundbreaking in the late 80's.

I remember the java station 1 as well which was running byte code natively in an IPX-like box. That thing really was so horrendously slow out was basically a paperweight. I had the chance to play with one when it was just new but it was like a joke or something.

Maybe that gave the form factor a bad name because all their good stuff was in pizza boxes.

I had one on my desk and eventually a collection of Sparc 2, 10's and a V in my garage. I miss the keyboard and Sun OS 4, the Trinitron display and working on difficult engineering problems on those machines.

Nobody misses the terrible optical mouse with the blue metal mouse mat though! You are right, the keyboards were great.

I do. At my first job it looked so technical! Sure they were a bit rubbish but at least you didn’t have to pick all the hair and gank off the rollers and balls all the time.

Oh yes I remember that one. Wasn't it the type 4?

The type 5 was a better mouse (with ball though) but as I remember the keyboard was a little worse.

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