End the line: The last Sun Sparc Workstation

[@RetroBytesUK]

Some of you have may may have noticed the graphics card keeps changing between shots. Just to clear things up, it comes with a PCIe card form ATI. However I don't have the cables to capture its output, but I have a Sun PCI-x graphics card with a VGA port I can capture, so that card got swapped in/out while I was filming, hence you get to see a couple of graphics cards in the video. You can have both graphics cards installed at once, for the console you have to pick one to use, but you can run multiple X server instances (1 per card) to have a multi monitor setup. If you don't set it your self openboot will default to the card in the PCIe slot over the PCI-x slot.

[@colinstu]

Should be able to find a DMS-59 to Dual VGA or DVI cable cheap online so this card can be used. Shame they only included a low-end card though, that really was purely just to get you two display outs cheaply. Wonder if you could instead source/find a better card that's compatible and skip the dongle entirely.

[@klocugh12]

Hi, what songs do you use in your videos? I love that kind of vibe!

[@unmanaged]

but will it run doom?

[@swrzesinski]

@@RetroBytesUK It is PCI graphics card, not PCI-X. PCI-X graphics cards/accelerators are near impossible to find.

[@BitrotSystems]

You monster😮

[@wombora]

We had Joy, We had Fun but then Oracle bought Sun

[@pizzablender]

Sun was already in decline when Oracle bought them. But then it was over at once. But then again, I was at an ISP, and so quicker to adopt Linux than perhaps other industries.

[@keyboard_g]

Its frustrating that these machines can survive the field for decades and get destroyed in a day in shipping.

[@RetroBytesUK]

It absolutely is, you buy these things to help preserve them, then discover in doing so there is now 1 less of them in the world.

[@WooShell]

I have a fully-stuffed Ultra45 right next to me under my desk.. 2x 1.5GHz US3i, 32GB RAM (yes, even though Sun never officially supported it, 4GB sticks work in that board).. and you couldn't pay me enough to part with that box.

[@eehawkee]

Oh nice catch, I'll have to try and get my v445 up to 64GB then!

[@BravoCharleses]

Why do you find it so valuable?

[@agsel]

I also have one with dual 1.6, 8GB RAM and the XVR-2500. I have a complicated love-hate relationship with the machine but can't really see myself ever parting with it.

[@quademasters249]

@@BravoCharleses Yeah, a $300 used HP Z4 G4 workstation would smoke it.

[@James76767]

@@quademasters249 That is entirely not the point of owning it.

[@hessex1899]

I work at a big corp. We still have 120 420r's running in production. The one has an uptime > 4000 days. :)

[@RetroBytesUK]

Oh wow, that's a long uptime for any machine. Its been a long time since I've seen a 420 in production.

[@j_taylor]

Those servers are ancient, but great to see them still going! I thought of the 420r as the slightly better 450. Solaris can be rock stable. At one job, I upgraded RAM in some Ultra5s as my first task, then left them alone. They were still up when I left 6 years later.

[@alzeNL]

if you ever need a DevOps / Sys Admin let me know, preferential rates to work on Sun kit would be available :D

[@sgtunix]

That's impressive. Could you tell us a bit about the workloads they do?

[@hessex1899]

​@@sgtunix I can't go into great detail but a legacy element manager for a kind of niche type of device is involved. Replacing them would be expensive and the result would be not as good as what is already in place. So we just segment them off and keep them happy. :)

[@NotJustBikes]

I've considered getting a machine like this, just for nostalgia reasons. In the late 90s I used a SparcStation at work and although I also had a PC, I used the Sun system 90% of the time. I really enjoyed using Sun hardware, so it would be fun to go back to it. To this day I still map caps lock to control (as god intended) on every computer I use, and I even named my cat Sparc!

[@NotJustBikes]

(My previous cat was called MIPS)

[@Katky1]

and the award for the video i thought was least likely to have a NotJustBikes comment goes to..

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@Katky1 that just means you haven't noticed him commenting on other retro computing stuff ;)

[@MostlyPennyCat]

My previous cat was called Max.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

But my _current_ cat is called... Penny! 😊

[@alzeNL]

I was a Sun / Solaris engineer for 10 years, in that time I worked on ipc to massive clusters - I loved them so much, i miss the ipc in particular. Seeing boot net - install again really made me day - I setup jumpstart servers all over the world to run the same boot / install, we ended up with fully automated Oracle cluster installs. Jumpstart was a god send and whilst it took a reasonable amount of work to build the jumpstart and scripts, boot net - install - such happy times.

[@icepee9252]

Sun and Solaris pioneered technology that is now pretty mainstream. ZFS the main one.

[@Sidicas]

ZFS is mainstream? since when? I use XFS and ext4+

[@JonasLomp]

ZFS is really the first thing you think of in connection with Sun? Ever heard of Java? Also VirtualBox was from Sun, but Java is the best fit for you point.

[@thingi]

Docker / Containers and very clever virtualisation far ahead of vmware at the time would not have existed without Solaris for inspiration. Those are biggies.

[@adamsfusion]

@@JonasLomp VirtualBox was originally from a small company called InnoTek. Beyond the logo swap, the biggest changes to it didn't happen until after Oracle acquired Sun.

[@icepee9252]

@@JonasLomp Yes, but were they pioneered on Solaris like ZFS was?

[@d.hughredelmeier1960]

As a Linux proponent, I felt bad that most of our wins were replacing Solaris rather than Windows. I guess Windows might have won over some Solaris users, but not in my world.

[@ponyote]

As someone who built and supported Sparc systems in the early 2000's, this is bittersweet for me. The big, chunky form factor will be missed. RIP.

[@PerMejdal]

My university still have 2 x X4600 for scientific computing, running each with 64 x 2.1 GHz cores and 512GB of RAM. Also 4 x X4500 for storage with each 48 x 2TB. We tried to use 4TB disk. But 512 bytes blocks * 32bit addressing = 2TB.

[@colinstu]

doesn't the X4600 only scale up to 8 socket x 6 core opterons? but usually spec'd 8x4. So it's not running "each" with 64 but each 32? Wouldn't a single modern EPYC chip absolutely trounce this entire infrastructure? Not to mention all the power to run 48x2TB... absolutely tiny in this day and age, could be done with a fraction of the drives. It's cool to see such long life from hardware but there's a time to pack it up and replace it.

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

With SmartOS you'll be able to set the ashift property to 12 on the zpool, and then you can use much larger drives. Time to upgrade to SmartOS!

[@noth606]

@@colinstu you're discriminatory and ageist huh, do you have something against older hardware? Did old iron hurt you at some point and you're trying to exact revenge against it? Try DOS commands in sh and when some basics worked assume everything did, try to play show off and fail? Besides, if you don't get what 48x2Tb do that a lesser number of bigger drives don't - well, you've got a lot more learning to do than I can pack into a comment.

[@PerMejdal]

​@@colinstu X4600 might not be the correct model, but they look excatly as a X4600. The servers each have 8 x Opteron 6272.

[@ralfbaechle]

That sort of limitation has a tradition, it seems. I installed a Sun E450 in late 1997. Big RAID array but the database software (Sybase) could only use partitions of 2GB so I ended up with an endless number of small partitions to be fed to the database. It was bad enough that I wrote a script to configure the large number of drives and partitions. Sigh. It also didn't help that the drives where dying faster than replacement were being shipped and RAID arrays rebuilt to the point where I ended up with a useless system. Seagate ST34371W 4GB internal and ST19171W external drives. These days if you search the Interwebs for information on Sun systems you're likely to be bombarded with guaranteed to be useless information about sun blockers, solar panels and possibly even less related items. Sigh.

[@McCavity2]

Man how I miss these things… I used to work as a freelancer in the early 2000s, including training and I occasionally would teach at Sun venues. The classrooms they had were studded with these beasts and they were so much fun to work with ❤

[@ImKinoNichtSabbeln]

Your sponsor messages are just gorgeous! These are literally the only sponsors' messages I a) enjoy to hear, and b) see as a funny extra to your videos. And by doing this, you really put "PCBway" in my internal landscape of "go-to-providers". Damned smart move from PCBway to sponsor you. Very, very smart.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I have fun with doing it, and they dont seem to mind, or at least they have never told me off.

[@Ice_Karma]

No, Sun3 machines predate OpenPROM, and their boot firmware is very similar to contemporary Cisco equipment -- because both originated from the Stanford University SUN-1 design.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I really do need to get my hands on a sun3 machine, I only ever go to use them at uni as a regular user, so never got to admin one, or set one up. Which I would like todo at some point.

[@glitchwrks]

@@RetroBytesUK SunOS 4 on SPARC32 is essentially the same experience, so you can run that until a Sun3 becomes available :P

[@sterlingphoenix]

Oh my god the netboot thing has so many things I had BLISSFULLY forgotten about (:

[@chriswoods562]

Really enjoyed working for Sun in Germany. Fun times.

[@pizzablender]

They were excellent times... but at some point it went downhill. "I have an UnltraSparc 150 with a broken power supply, can you send us one under contract" and the response on the phone was "sorry what SunOS version are you running you must update it first".

[@RetroBytesUK]

@@pizzablender Darn that's fallen a long way. I always used to find the support from Sun excellent. They would normally have someone to us with spare parts the next day to fix what ever had died. Oftern the part was flown out from Sun Germany, motorbike curriered to our office just in time for the Sun engineer to arrive and fit it.

[@RetroBytesUK]

They also did that with the Sun x2100 which cost us less than 1k, which would explain some of Sun's financial issues.

[@NoTraceOfSense]

Any fun hotdesking memories?

[@K3lwin]

I have the privilege to keep working with SPARC servers to this day - starting with low-end V100's all the way to the huge M8 based machines. And let me tell you: among early RISC machines that are still around - SPARCs are the easiest to maintain and configure - and OBP is a major part of it. I never ever had to connect a display to configure anything: everything is fully accessible through ILOM and either serial or SSH. Nowadays these machines are mostly divided up into logical partitions (think virtual machines but on bare metal), each running an Oracle database.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Those M8 machines are abosulty massive. I do like their ILOM, I have a T5240, it does have one problem, well my one does as I dont have access to the updated firmware that fixes the issue, but the remote media stuff is completely broken, as in does not work at all. Oracle fixed the issue, but without a support contract I dont have access to the firmware update that fixes it.

[@K3lwin]

@@RetroBytesUK Yeah, Oracle do be like that, especially with EOL systems. Which versions are we talking about?

[@AnonymousDisparity]

I had a Sparc Enterprise server model 850. It ran a Quake server ;) Compiled pretty much manually but it worked.

[@ChuckFinley-b1g]

Love seeing these videos. I learn so much about what’s outside Windows, macOS and Linux.

[@freddiemann5555]

What a dinosaur that is. I remember working with the first version of this workstation back in 1996 while working in Japan for a digital mapping company when GPS/Waze was still at its infancy. Thanks for the video.

[@Canleaf08]

At a German Hochschule, they had these in the software lab. With Solaris and CDE and the java desktop environment. In 2016!

[@LMB222]

9 years for a computer in the 2010's isn't much. My "workstation" - a tower PC comes from 2008, so it's 16 years old. I keep it for the powerful GPU I put in there.

[@blendernoob64]

My dad used to work for Sun in the mid 2000s. Along with SGI, Sun has this mystique and cool factor to them. Unix for life

[@aner_bda]

Man, this really brought back memories I have of setting up Sparc servers at my first job running Solaris 10. I remember the good old days of mucking around in OpenBoot, booting servers off the network and remotely installing Solaris on them.

[@RowanHawkins]

That COBOL shit just hangs around. I mean it is less than it used to be, but during your 2000 those people could just about make whatever requests they wanted for money because everybody was trying to get their COBOL set for the new millennium. If you haven't already done it maybe you should do something on the Y2K bug and how the hype around it caused there to be such a massive change that it became a non issue. I'm of the firm belief that if people weren't freaking out about the Y2K bug it wouldn't have gotten fixed as well as it did and then it would be as bad as the Freak Out people worried.

[@thegareth]

Yeah the y2k thing is the paradox of actually fixing the problem so it mostly didn’t happen. A number of nuclear reactors did shut down, which was more than 0…

[@autohmae]

The wait is for the 32-bit systems left for 2k38 ?

[@elcasey]

While it was at least a mainframe *modernization* project, I literally just spent the last two+ years building a DevOps automation platform (on Jenkins and using Ansible) to take COBOL written in the 80s (according the comments in the source) running on AS/400s (forgive me if I get some of this wrong, I have no mainframe background nor did I have direct access to the actual mainframe(s)), recompile it on Linux using MicroFocus Enterprise Server tools, and get it running on Linux. I guess until they write replacement apps? Who knows? EBCDIC is very alive. It's pretty sad.

[@RetroBytesUK]

That one is going to be interesting for code you cant just rebuild with a default int size of 64bit.

[@jamesdoe4515]

​@@autohmaeMost Unix variants,and Linux have already come up with a solution to that issue

[@r3dl0g74]

sun really saw a better future for us with open boot lol.

[@Torbjorn.Lindgren]

The part about needing 64-bit processors for 64-bit PCI-X is completely wrong - you need 64-bit BUS WIDTH on the CPU to implement it without trickery - which was not an issue since the original Pentium (1993) already had a 64-bit wide databuss which means this was common long before the initial version of the PCI-X standard (1998). And contrary to what you claim, 64-bit/100MHz (or 133MHz which this doesn't do) slots was NOT uncommon in servers and workstations when this was built, in fact you could make a good argument it WASN'T a 2004+ workstation or server if it didn't have multiple high-speed PCI-X slots (and it was common before then too). Basically the only question for a PC server was "how many and how fast are the PCI-X slots" (and PCI-E) and "are they hot-swappable" (yes, really!).

[@andrewfidel2220]

Yup, I remember the HP and IBM X86 servers I worked on that had the buttons to turn off individual PCI-X slots so you could hot swap failed cards.

[@WooShell]

Regarding Solaris: Only 11.3 is supported on the Ultra 45.. 11.4 (which should have originally been Solaris 12, but got renamed to get Oracle out of support contract obligations) had dropped support for the UltraSparc 3 and 4 series. Also, I'm severely annoyed that Oracle doesn't provide ready-to-boot install DVD images anymore, but only that whole spiel with setting up a boot server for JumpStart or Ai.. because "someone wants to reinstall their one workstation quickly" isn't a scenario that ever occurred to them.

[@mikechappell4156]

While the convenience of booting from dvd would have been nice, I assume they were still largely targeting businesses that would have the infrastructure in place already with other Solaris machines. You don't expect a lot of "I screwed it up, and need to reinstall," when most of your employees are users, not admins. A more typical use might be the harddisk failed and the sysop needs to reinstall, which, with the infrastructure already in place, sounds painless and easier with netboot than passing a dvd around.

[@WooShell]

@@mikechappell4156 they had DVD images for download years into the Oracle ownership.. so this was a conscious decision to end a service for their customer that can't have cost them more than a few man-hours for each service pack..

[@jfbeam]

Their target (and actual) customer base isn't "one workstation", but farms of machines. They'll have the infrastructure for jumpstart, and it's a simple process to add a new release. (I used to do the same thing with VMware. Yes, one can make a USB stick for single instance installs, but even for a one-and-done install, it's just easier to add it to the netboot server. Then I can do it to more than one machine at a time, and I can do it over and over again without needing to find that USB drive... If I had to build the netboot system, then yes, a USB stick would be way faster.)

[@CollinBaillie]

The opteron boxes were sweet. Deployed quite a few of them. I have a few of the Sun USB PC keyboards, and use one on my ryzen desktop. The others will be used as spares when my current keyboard dies.

[@partycatplays]

I'm having flashbacks to reconfiguring a sparcstation 10 that was given to my Dad when his company was otherwise going to throw it away. I had to wipe and reload the OS because they didn't give us any of the credentials for it.

[@lukasschmidt2777]

Was the harddrive of the sparcstation encrypted? Otherwise you probably could just boot into single user mode and change all passwords. I haven't verified if this also works on solaris but on Linux and FreeBSD you can do this.

[@partycatplays]

@@lukasschmidt2777 I can't recall, unfortunately - this was nearly 20 years ago

[@partycatplays]

@@lukasschmidt2777 looks like my original reply was lost to the youtube gods, so here it is again: I can't recall, unfortunately, this was 20-ish years ago

[@RobSchofield]

Blimey! I'd forgotten all this stuff, especially disk labelling. You've just taken me back to '96 and my Sparc IPX/SUNOS 4.1.2 days! I flew the coop after this to HP PA-RISC/HP-UX machines. Always liked SUN kit and I'm trying (and failing) to resurrect an IPX here. Always fancied a 45/500S - if only I had the money... Comparable to the DEC aPWS twin processor boxen of the time. Great video, very enjoyable!

[@DavidMiOo]

"the guy who normally does it was on vacation, so they just grabbed some muppet and handed him a box and some bubble wrap" 🤣

[@alexandredevert4935]

The native, by-default grid computing utility made me envious : this is a needed feature for any R&D business.

[@daonebest3001]

My dad worked at sun, and we had a lot of old sun hardware lying around the house. If fact we have loads of the sun Usb keyboards that you've shown and i'm typing on one right now that I still use with my gaming PC everyday.

[@Movies4118]

I use to love the Sun microsystem metal mousepads .

[@RetroBytesUK]

They where great with the pattern so the optical mice would work.

[@AndrewBeals]

Having to keep your mouse square to the pad, though, in the Sun 3 era resulted in wrist problems for some of us.

[@ericpeterson336]

I hated those. The printing on the pad surface would get eaten up by users perspiration, then they wouldn't work.

[@peterpanther8627]

Its exquisitely beautiful looking.

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

Lovely stuff. Also COBOL is LOVE. COBOL is LIFE. I used them at University I think. I mainly played the Roguelike LARN on it!

[@roberthealey7238]

I think Doom and other ID software products had Solaris/SPARC versions.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I do have a build of doom for solaris 2.6 although it dose by pass X11. There are probably much newer verisons out there that run ontop of X11 too, I'm sure I've seen someone running quake 3 on solaris.

[@jfbeam]

@@RetroBytesUK Perhaps, but ID didn't publish them.

[@birrextio6544]

The Sun version of doom had doom arena where we could see the stats of all players. It stopped to work when we changed to switched network.

[@blufudgecrispyrice8528]

My goodness, that is a good looking case. I can't wait for your Sun history video, but I'm already wishing they continued to supply hardware for UNIX through BSD and Linux ports.

[@amcluesent]

It's videos like this that explains why Windows NT was so successful

[@autohmae]

How do you mean ? This is great stuff, more advanced than Win NT at the time

[@netheritecraftondrugs5126]

I thoight you were spiffing brit for a second

[@LMB222]

​@@autohmaebut the price… Sure your Alpha or Sparc was much faster than a PC, but a high end PC with a system like Windows NT, although slower, had a much better price-to-speed ratio.

[@paul_boddie]

@@LMB222 At the time this machine came out, Alpha was effectively being end-of-lined by HP who had been duped into supporting Itanium and dropping Alpha and their own PA-RISC architecture by Intel. That PCs became more competitive was a consequence of the progression in performance of the x86 architecture, with AMD's introduction of Opteron and x86-64 being pivotal and actually mentioned in the video. And, of course, you could run Solaris and Linux on Opteron, with the latter in particular giving you all of those cost benefits. In other words, you could buy a high-end Opteron system and put Linux on it, and you would then have something more stable and scalable than NT, which is why most of the Internet services migrated to precisely this combination of technologies. The reasons why NT was so successful, however, are more to do with Microsoft's coercive business practices and a product that admittedly let people run existing applications in a more stable environment, despite an unending parade of security issues caused by various architectural flaws.

[@robertwatsonbath]

Nice. I really must get that 3/60 that lives under my desk working.

[@RetroBytesUK]

You should, if you can.

[@RowanHawkins]

The problem with it is probably that the BIOS battery has died and it's lost your Mac address. Hopefully there's still a sticker on the motherboard with the information so that you can try to replace it

[@RowanHawkins]

Oh and the other thing about that machine is if you have a different Sun 4m chassis. The only connection that the 3/60 got from the bus was power so you could actually slide a Sun 3/60 motherboard into a chassis with a spare Sun 4m bus slot. You would still need to make external connections because there's no data bus connections on the inside. You can run two completely independent systems in one chassis.

[@pizzablender]

That was a nice machine actually. After that I bought a SPARCstation IPC and the console was noticeably slower. The machine was faster though.

[@robertwatsonbath]

@@pizzablender The SPARCstation 2GX has a special place is my heart as I did most of my PhD work on one, wrote my thesis on an ELC. Running X11R5/6 rather than OpenWindows they were pretty decent at the time. I loved Suntools and the old SunCore graphics libs on the 3/60 though.

[@RC534]

Very nice. The ventilation design reminds me of a DEC Alpha XL266 workstation I once had the pleasure to be able to play around with 😊.

[@The98deville]

Last Alpha I played with was a Multia

[@williamkibira5789]

Thanks for this awesome showcase, now I have a good idea for what to look for specifically. I'll probably install Tribblix so that I can see how current development efforts are going and possibly use a new toolchain as a bonus for development. Looking forward to watching you next video.

[@paranoiia8]

I would love to get that case, and put some modern hardware in it for my daily work rig. As I hate all those crappy LED/glass/pseudo-fancy(cheap plastic looking) cases, as today even metal cases look like cheap plastic, like there are make two extremes of boring working station look or ugly ""gaming"".

[@RetroBytesUK]

The opteron verison come up every now and again on ebay at a reasonable price, and you can slide the whole motherboard out. I'm not sure what the power connector rangment is on that verison, but its got to be closer to a regualar PCs arrangment than the sparc version.

[@donwald3436]

All the black cases with black screws and black panels and smoked glass are so frustrating to my aging eyes, bring back the beige cases.......

[@sandrinowitschM]

Me too. I seriously wonder if there's not a market for old school style cases. I know there's the checkmate 1500 but it's rather limited and I just want a nice proper tower case.

[@bunnymaid]

I have aluminium cases from a long gone company called "Soldam". Possibly older than this one here. The only issue is that they were designed for significantly less heat output. No windows in the side or anything silly like that. No sharp edges either. Nice, but cooling a beast in there is not easy,

[@tantatheindian7068]

I think there is, especially for compact towers that can easy fit an ATX board what balances the airflow with the PSU within the central chamber. Which in turn compacts the height issue of most desktops. IONZ make the mesh pro which covers this idea but it is not all metal and could be better designed with more quality materials. The only other was the meshify2 compact, but finding the all metal version is a rarer commodity. But there is certainly a market for all metal cases for the age 40+ and over builders and PC users, who have outgrown RGB.

[@johnmccartney3819]

I was at Sun from 87 to 99; at first a sysadmin in the repair depot, later as a tech support engineer. The Ultra 45 is a beautiful machine, but I was gone before it came around. Oh yeah, I had my hands on Sun 3 systems galore, the very first SPARC had just come out when I started. Also Sun 2's, a whole different story.

[@modology]

Spark does not die with Sun. Infact it still lives on in many Fujitsu high end server.

[@OscarCastillo1]

Always wanted one of these. I used to have an Ultra 10 and Ultra 60 I bought off eBay like 20 years ago. They were built like a tank and had looked great.

[@magictuxcn]

We had about 50 of these at work（in both one-way and two-way configuration). At that time, SPARC CPU is already much slower compared to Athlon 64 or Core 2 Duos, and these workstations are much slower than HP xw6600 we purchased about the same time. We also had about 20 Ultra 27s with single W3550 , which may be the END OF LINE for SunUltra workstation. These machines are truly beautiful, it's a pity we have to recycle them last year.

[@samwalker7567]

They have a lot of value to collectors if I recall - recycle seems such a wasteful way to get rid of them!

[@magictuxcn]

@@samwalker7567 Cannot agree with you more! It's all due to our internal rules...Or at least I would try to put some of them into storage.

[@DarkSideofSynth]

Watching that knife 🔪.... yikes! The case is very reminiscent of the G5 PowerMacs of that era, both in- and outside.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Oh that thing is super dull, but just about ok to help open boxes which is why it was handy for pointing while I was filming.

[@DarkSideofSynth]

@@RetroBytesUK Yeah, no worries, just playing the freaked out guy ;) Have a nice weekend.

[@billmiller4800]

Yes, the Ultra M40 and Power Mac G5 cases look quite nice next to each other on my desk. Nice understated but clean designs.

[@DarkSideofSynth]

@@billmiller4800 I gutted my Power Mac G5 and use it as a cabinet for cables and stuff, one of the best designs ever.

[@chrisfratz]

I remember reading that Toy Story was rendered on a farm of sun machines, and it makes me wonder if they chose those because of that grid feature.

[@The98deville]

Was it sun or SGI, SGI was much more common in animation

[@chrisfratz]

@@The98deville The movie was animated on SGI workstations, but the final renders were done on Sun Machines.

[@37Kilo2]

I'm in love with the case. I was browsing eBay listings, because now I want one.

[@MrButuz]

I always loved sun stuff. So well engineered. I still use sun keyboards and mice today. It was such a shame Oracle destroyed them.

[@samshort365]

I still have my SunSparcs 5 and 20. Always wanted an Ultra. Thanks for the video and my new project.

[@theParticleGod]

The way you say "SATA disk" makes me think of Saturday, which reminds me of numerous songs about Saturdays, Saturdays... Saturdays

[@anasevi9456]

Very interesting machine, thanks mate. Reminds me of my old Quad G5 in a last of the line way... complete with the ability to use obnoxious amounts of ram for the time (mine was shipped in 2006 with 8GB, i put it up to 16GB of DDR2 in 2008)

[@applesushi]

These videos always trigger so many memories. As someone that would “Junpstart” Sun Ultras on an almost daily basis for many years, this is such a flashback.

[@wjadams2]

I worked for a college that was a Sun ASEC. We used Jumpstart for Ultra 1 workstations, then eventually Ultra 5 and 10s. We also ran java courses with Solaris 8 and 9 x86 on PCs. Such good times. Thanks for the nostalgia trip.

[@orangejjay]

I worked at AT&T for quite a while way back when and they had TONS of Sun Microsystems equipment. Whole cabinets of servers in the data center and workstations in the offices. They STILL use the servers too.

[@BAgodmode]

When you’re done with that sun sparc, feel free to send it to me.

[@pf100andahalf]

The detail on how it does networking, how to manage the networking to get the OS installed, and just everything else in general, is excellent.

[@billmiller4800]

I'm not surprised that the shipping was a bit of a failure, that case is a beast! I know my Ultra M40 arrived in 4 layers of bubble wrap and weighing in at a svelt 79lbs! Yours would probably work well as a NAS like mine is. Being able to hold 8 drives with reasonable cooling is nice. I've always liked the design of Sun machines, and I hope you enjoy yours.

[@DM78]

19:24 Small nit on DHCP being from a time after OpenBoot (1994) - technically true for the standard DHCP for IPv4 variety we use nowadays (1997), but a version of DHCP based on BOOTP (1985) existed since 1993 that was sufficient for setting up a system for network comms and some other neat things.

[@MostlyPennyCat]

At university, in 1997, if you were lucky you got on to one of the Ultra 5s rather than a SPARCStation 10 (I think?) And even if you were unlucky, we had all the address and dns entries for all of the Ultra 5s spread around campus and you would just start up an ssh session and fire up an X client and connect it to your machine. Even if someone else was already using it!! 😂

[@balisongman07]

I would visit the sprint campus lab to work on some equipment in there and up until T-Mobile took over, they had a sun server cabinet still running (doing nothing but still chooching away). T-Mobile got rid of it after they acquired everything and it was sad to see history go

[@kneel1]

my first big "real" job was at a famous ivy league University and we got a grant for $30k to buy this huge Sun tape-robot. But there was one Linux guy and two of us essentially kids (early 20s) who had NO idea how to set it up and configure it lol

[@MIK33EY]

I used to use one of those, well an earlier variant, every day back in the early 90’s when I worked for the Southern Hemisphere’s largest Pre-Press company producing catalogs for various supermarkets and chain stores in Australasia. (Show-Ads in Port Melbourne) There were about 40 of them in total. I retrained on the Mac’s which slowly but surely pushed them out. In those days we were producing film for printing plates to be produced for those curious - everything is basically digital or direct to plate these days. I have a head full of now useless techniques and processes. Show-Ads also used them for an extremely powerful for the time image manipulation program called Paintbox which was charged out at some ridiculous amount of money per hour - over $200AUD from memory at the time - huge bucks for back then. I do miss using a three button mouse.

[@GeoffSeeley]

Lol, back in the day I actually had to boot a Sun server from a remote tape drive to install the OS in order to recover from a subsequent backup. It worked!

[@karstentopp]

Oh my dear. Memories come flashing back. Sparcstation Voyager color. Good old times.

[@davidflorey]

I love the look of this workstation!!!! In Australia they still sell on the second hand market for the price of a small car

[@spacewolfjr]

This is such a strange occurrence, I was wondering this question randomly today after going down a rabbit hole on the history of SCSI when they mentioned some low-end machines using PATA. Good timing!

[@jimmylaw7380]

My first job after university was as a developer at an investment bank. They used Sun SparcStation 10's and 20's and we used to write 'Add-ins' for Lotus 123 spreadsheets and trading applications running on SunOS. PCs back then were still stuck running DOS with Windows on-top which did not provide enough RAM for the financial trading applications and spreadsheets back in the early 1990's. When Windows NT4 came along that change the trading desktop/workstation landscape completely.

[@MrWelshsean]

Fantastic video, really enjoyed the Jumpstart on Linux bit. Have been tempted to try that for a while, I might get around to it and boot my M3K off the network for nostalgia’s sake :-)

[@tech34756]

The problem I have with watching these videos is that they make me want to pick a Sun/Unix workstation, only the relatively high prices in the UK have stopped me.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Facebook market place is a great place for cheaper Sun kit compared to eBay, you normally have to go pick it up but that way it does not get battered like my poor Ultra45.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I got my ulra5 workstation for free that way, and my IPX for £30.

[@eolsystems]

Sorry to hijack this great videos comment section but we have a few workstations relatively inexpensive. Hope something might be interesting.

[@straightpipediesel]

The last real desktop application for SPARC was chip design environments, specifically Cadence and Mentor Graphics suites. When they ported that over to Red Hat on x64, that was it. IBM RS/6000's thing was high end CAD; CATIA and Unigraphics (NX).

[@Lion_McLionhead]

Best documentation of the open boot font. That was the 80's best fixed point creation. The Sun flight simulator was the best, but no-one remembers it.

[@binarydinosaurs]

Used to have an absolute shedload of Sun stuff but had to give it away during one of my many house moves. Bah. Your notes on the disklabel did bring me happy (?) memories of having to manually write disklabels for SCSI disks on DEC Ultrix and Alpha kit. Partitions from a-h with a=boot and b=swap, then g and h for usr and opt. If you had extra disks then you could use c for the entire partition. The only tools you had for manipulating these things were ed and bc, along with the disklabel command. Fun times.

[@denniseldridge2936]

Well this is a very timely video indeed! I just rescued four Sun machines from a company that was disposing of them, and so I've had my first exposure to dealing with Sun workstations. The main examples I have are the Blade 1500 and 2500, and I went into the world of Sun completely ignorant of how they work. I initially assumed they'd be similar to regular PCs and boot similarly, but nooooo lol. At first I got not output on the screen at all, but then learned that you need to plug in a Sun keyboard in order for them to produce video. I determined this by hooking up a bushman-style null modem cable (after finding out that you only need the TX and RX leads for simple text applications) to a real VT-520 terminal (another holy grail item I've always wanted haha). But I've had a very steep learning curve with the OpenBoot thing, which has been very interesting indeed. I'm now in the process of trying to install an operating system (Solaris 10 on the 2500), which is a whole trip unto itself. BTW, the video card you show at 12:34 is the exact one in the 2500. Thanks for this video 🙂

[@JamieCrookes]

Ahh, takes me back to 2002 when I first started buying these from eBay (solaris boxes in general). I never had a scsi cd so had to do all of them via network.

[@borlibaer]

I think René Rebe still supports Sparc 32/64 with T/2 Linux. (and many more - if you can, please support that project)

[@seanwieland9763]

That dude is amazing! He’s also keeping Linux on PlayStation 3 / Cell Processor going too.

[@rogerlevasseur397]

In the late 1980s to the mid 1990s I worked at places that put their software onto the Sun-2, Sun-3, and Sun-4 SPARC platforms. I remember the rollout of the Sun-4 SPARC platform and getting onto it and exploring what the CPU could do speed-wise. Such a long time ago.

[@ponaboy]

if you liked how well-done (almost) all of the SPARC workstations and servers were built...you'd be chuffed to see SUN's rack kit, as well.

[@PixPMusic]

OpenSolaris doesn't seem like it's evolved much beyond Solaris 11, and it doesn't seem like Solaris 11 is much different than 10 from a retro computing perspective I'm sure there are modern protocols that are supported, but it seems like the actual interface is just as antiquated

[@lindsaymobil22]

OpenSolaris is dead unfortunately, Oracle killed it not long after they took over Sun. It lives on however as part of the illumos project which does certainly share similarities with Solaris 11.

[@theantipope4354]

Oh god, I'd forgotten nearly all this stuff, & I don't miss it at all.

[@LossyLossnitzer]

You have a tadpole, lucky you. I started with Sun using NextStep on our SparcStation 10s and 20s,as well as Solaris but we used Aspex Solaris Servers. I loved Sun when they were Sun. I have just looked in my office and found 2 of these Ultra 45s; I wondered why I had a Sun USB keyboard kicking around which was useful because it was a HUB that you can put a mouse in it. I did not even realize they were there and sitting next to 2 Apple G4s. Both of them are really well designed types of machines. I need to see if I can find the installation CDs I can remember throwing away lots of Solaris 9 OS boxes away. I also have a T4-4 in my office which I do not use in my server rack.

[@roberthealey7238]

Much easier to use dhcp to NetBoot Solaris, Linux or NetBSD on late 90’s and up Openboot SPARCstations; diskless NetBSD in my case.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Its certainly easier, but less universal, that merhod is also much better documented compared to reverse arp and bootparamd.

[@geesharp6637]

OMG, I forgot about the Tadpole. Oh the memories. At work, my last Sparc was a dual monitor Ultra10.

[@RetroBytesUK]

The ultra10 was a nice machine.

[@usagold8]

I believe PowerPC Macs use some variant of Open Boot too. I have memories of trying to get an iMac G3 to boot using the “Forth” console. Not sure if the GPUs are compatible (I believe the Power Mac ones had some high-power connector on them) but it would be interesting to find out.

[@RowanHawkins]

I believe that card will work with a normal display. The power function checks certain pins not used in the dvi spec to be active before it turns on the high power to the card. The pro monitors are so hard to find on the used Market because they could only work with that card.

[@JackBender]

Interesting machine you've got there, at some point I found myself wanting an Ultra 45 too. I got myself a Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 instead, a headless 1U server controlled over serial or network lights out management. SATA ports truly are convenient, you can even dd an ISO to a SATA SSD and use it to boot most OS installers. That machine now happily runs Tribblix (an Illumos distribution), OpenBSD, Gentoo and Debian.

[@eolsystems]

Thanks for the video! Heres but a shamless plug but if you want your own sparc workstation we might have a few last ones in stock. We a pretty flexible on price as well. All the best //EOLSYSTEM

[@Choralone422]

Back in the mid 2000s I was working at a facility that was doing the initial processing of e-waste for a rather populous midwest US state. We had quite a number of late 90s Sun Workstations come through along with other interesting kit like early HP Itanium based machines in addition to TONS of PCs of all sorts and semi loads of other stuff. I always had to take a moment and marvel at how the Sun boxes were built and just how different they were to your typical PC, even a modern PC server of the day. These days the closest thing I personally own & use to a Sun Sparc Workstation running UNIX would be a Lenovo P520 workstation that runs BSD based TrueNAS Core and has an external SAS based disk array attached to it. In addition to being a ZFS based NAS I host a few Windows & Linux based VMs on it and so on. There's M.2 NVMe storage for the base OS and higher disk performance needs and loads of spinning rust on the SAS3 connections.

[@StrangelyIronic]

I run FreeBSD on a small chunk of my network of machines/SBCs at my house/workshop. Not really any particular reason, my main systems run openSUSE/Fedora, but FreeBSD is my main way of interacting with a Unix-like system that's pretty easy to get around and fairly flexible. I've had some Sun hardware in the past, but traded it off when my PC88/PC98 collection started taking over.

[@rubiigen]

lovely to see one of these machines on display. SPARC sure was a lovely architecture

[@d.hughredelmeier1960]

Not really. It was perhaps the least beautiful of it's generation of RISCs. For some reason that I don't really understand, register windows were not actually a good idea. Alpha was quite nice. But being a Sun customer was much better than being a DEC customer.

[@paul_boddie]

@@d.hughredelmeier1960 The Am29000 also had register windows, and I suppose the idea made sense intuitively. There had even been a school of thought, realised by CRISP and Hobbit, that stack caching was the way to go, instead of having a large number of general purpose registers. Of course, such things probably don't play well with context switching, and that is how a few designs ended up supplying niches, as embedded processors or as computational accelerators, instead of becoming the next big thing in mainstream computing.

[@fuller9x]

looks like UEFI took a lot of the concepts of OpenBoot and brought that over to the x86 bios

[@straightpipediesel]

That was the original idea, but nobody actually implemented EFI bytecode. The UEFI drivers that run today are all binary.

[@maya20484]

It also reminds me of ACPI Machine Language (AML) which also lets devices to have firmware in a bytecode which can be executed in all (compatible) platforms or processor modes using an AML interpreter.

[@billyjhamlin]

I am on board with PCBWay cardigans.

[@autarchprinceps]

Can somebody explain to me what Oracle bought Sun for? They don't seem to have done anything with any of Sun's products after buying them, including not making any profit of it, or am I missing something?

[@AndrewBeals]

Java. Also, Sun's server hardware (and Solaris) was considered top-shelf at that point.

[@marcd6897]

I have learned they’re still heavily investing in it, but use it for their own datacenters. Not sure, can you also still purchase brand new servers?

[@autarchprinceps]

@@AndrewBeals They are not using Solaris though and never have or developed it much further. In terms of hardware, they have never done much with Sparc, and beyond that what is there in terms of "hardware"? The actually PCBs and boxes were likely manufactured by suppliers, so what the outside design? All those fields are basically cancelled, as are all those that were part open source, at least as far as Oracle involvement/support is concerned. As for Java, few enough people use the Oracle JDK and beyond that they have no means to make money of it really. When they tried to make some money from their JDK, everybody just switched to OpenJDK if not already on it, Amazon and co offered commercial support for it, and IBM open sourced it's JDK. Where in this is there a major source of profit or reason to buy it? This was not news at the time, it's why Sun was failing to begin with, but I'm honestly trying to understand their reasoning.

[@autarchprinceps]

@@marcd6897 Sparc was cancelled completely in late 2016 to early 2017, as were most of the team members doing any of the former Sun stuff. Beyond Java and Open Source projects that escaped/forked from what Oracle did (e.g. LibreOffice or MariaDB), there is nothing left that was Sun and is still being sold/developed by Oracle. I don't know which part of formelly Sun you think Oracle is still investing into in 2024, but it's definitively long dead. We know it is all dead/failed, that much is not in doubt, but it would be one thing, if that was only obvious in hindseight after a long struggle, but in the case of Oracle/Sun, I never saw them try anything, develop/expand on anything or even just promote any of the products. They bought it, and basically canceled it right after. That always seemed odd to me, if they just wanted Sun to fail, they could have just waited and seen the same result, without needing to spend money on buying it first.

[@RetroBytesUK]

Its very sad how Oracle failed to do anything much with Sun. They bought it mostly to secure their access to Java, as Orcale's database heavily intergates Java. The other part is most their big customers used sun, so they just could not have sun just disappear on them, it would have upset a lot of very lucrative contracts.

[@p1mason]

I think it's fair to say that the Wintel architecture - which was debuted by IBM in 1981 - eventually replaced every one of its competitors in the minicomputer, workstation, and microcomputer markets. But it still amazes me just how long the various competing architectures held on.

[@d.hughredelmeier1960]

That seems a little confused. There was no Windows in 1981. The original IBM PC predated Sun and was in no sense and engineering workstation. In 1981, we all used VAXes and that was the target Sun went after.

[@keyboard_g]

T2 Linux ports a modern linux kernel to Ultrasparc as I understand, allowing more modern software to run. I do understand the desire to run proper Unix though.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I do need to look at the T2 linux ports.

[@adam872]

I ran Sun machines for many years and as a sysadmin I never experience better in terms of admin ease and reliability. Things just worked and I was able to focus on my proactive and productive work, as opposed to fixing stuff all day.

[@CheapSushi]

I wish I had a bigger place to collect some of these just because I love the hardware designs of the PCBs and cases. Wish I could have my own personal museum of IBM, Sun, SGI and even some of the giant Compaq servers. Awesome video!

[@RetroBytesUK]

You and me both!

[@ctid107]

Loved setting up Sun workstations for training. Power them on and let Jumpstart do its stuff.

[@DextersTechLab]

Mate, respect for the Quantel shout out!👍 BTW i do have a Sun X4600 here i need to do something with, maybe one day after all the Quantel!

[@inf0stud]

I set up all of the stuff to boot an UltraSPARC 5 workstation on a laptop running Linux and it worked well. I think I installed FreeBSD on the UltraSPARC. Then I took the laptop to the TAFE (Technical & Further Education) college where I was teaching Linux as a casual. I pulled my laptop into the network port and about two hours later the network support person came into the class room and pointed at the network port. My laptop running faster than the Windows server system had been answering requests to every PC booting up with the one address I had configured. It caused chaos and soon the teaching network was separated from the administration network.