SAVING a 30-year old Sun workstation! - ISP Series Episode 2

While we may have left on a cliffhanger in our first ISP episode, this might be our most extensive video to date. We get up close with the SPARCclassic, and delve into the hardware and software that will power our early-90s ISP.
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#90s #internet #technology
00:00 - Loading complete
00:24 - Preserving the history
01:05 - The SPARCclassic
03:24 - Starting the repair
04:52 - Power supply
15:45 - NVRAM
16:42 - Floppy drive
19:14 - Case
22:15 - Reassembly
25:56 - NVRAM programming
28:05 - Installation server
30:09 - Solaris 2.6 install
33:53 - First boot
35:48 - Connecting a modem
38:05 - User #1
38:59 - Outro
Huge thanks to:
Foudroie for the wonderful music from their album "The Journey"
Watch: • Foudroie - The Journey...
Listen: open.spotify.com/album/4K8Lc2...
Allem Iversom for the smooth sounds of "Chapter Two"
Watch: • Allem Iversom x Dontcr...
Listen: open.spotify.com/intl-fr/albu...
...and Downtown Binary for the mega "Astral"
Watch: • Downtown Binary - Astr...
Listen: open.spotify.com/album/1uGa6r...
Above music provided by Lofi Girl.
References:
Ashdown, Pete. Video Interview. Conducted by Serial Port, July 2023.
Jordiferrer (2012). CC BY-SA 3.0. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
cmnit (2007). CC BY-SA 2.0. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Thomas Schanz (2014). CC BY-SA 3.0. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Stephen Edmonds (2011). CC BY-SA 2.5 AU. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Erkaha (2015). CC BY-SA 4.0. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
The Internet. Computer Chronicles, 1993.
Processor Performance (MIPS). 2023. www.thekurzweillibrary.com/si...

[@jond1536]

I dated a woman that worked for SUN, she was an engineer working out of Portland, Somewhere in China and the middle east. bit wacky, but had a great sense of humor. She had a sparc at her apartment and would sit down and "go like the wind" She was a senior engineer and very smart. That sparc workstation brought those memory's back. Great video

[@theserialport]

Waiting is hard! We bumped up the Premiere time

[@ihartmacz]

Thank you. Would have been the wait though because this video was excellent. 🔥

[@ILikeMetricMusic]

Now the question is, did you post that comment using a 300 baud modem? 😅

[@Timi7007]

The effort and skill demonstrated in this video 🤯 The power supply restoration alone is where most people would have written this off as e-waste. Thank you for doing this, preserving history and showing the process!

[@mxg75]

3D printing a tiny piece of plastic to repair a dent in the case is going above and beyond with your restoration. I salute your dedication.

[@FintanMoloney]

This is fascinating stuff. Your content has made this very quickly one of my favourite KZbin channels. The SPARCclassic looks like a very well organised and built machine in such a small form factor.

[@tenalafel]

It was great at that time, if you could afford it. I worked in a company where it was the classic desktop and we could do so much with it. ( sadly the PC took over, and after we went to U5, we moved on to desktop PCs and then laptops ). And the screen, the 21" screens weighted a ton but were so sharp.

[@alexlefevre3555]

Restoring older hardware is a passion of mine... I am enamored with the fact that you completely serviced the floppy drive because the action felt "dull". The attention to detail is exquisite!

[@maartendeen8404]

Wow, trip down memory lane. I first fell in love with Sun when we used a 3/160 for internet access at college. Later at an internship we used Sparc Classics heavily for CAD (missile guidance systems) and at my first job we used them as print controller. I still have a bunch at home, IPC, IPX, Classic, ELC (love that one), SparcStation 5, 20 and a SparcServer 1000 with a SparcStorageArray. All so obsolete now but I can't make me throw them away,

[@Time4Technology]

35:27 The usage output shows a "-m" option (even with the normal skel system for the initial directory contents) similar to modern useradd implementations, I don't think you would have needed to create it manually if you used it.

[@joeyd7072]

Love seeing videos on early sun systems as I am a technician that works on these everyday. It turns out that, refineries still rely on these for their everyday processes!

[@NuculearFallout1]

I am absolutely glued to this serious , great stuff so far! For being such a small KZbinr your videos are fantastically put together ! Can’t wait to see the rest of this series

[@JimLeonard]

You guys are just hitting it out of the park with your content. Great history, great repair, great background, and accurate (I used and serviced these systems early in my career). You are banging on all cylinders!

[@MLX1401]

Satisfying board & mechanical design. The latching lever is just 🤯 Related tip for fellow tinkerers: if you need to repair broken plastic but can't access a 3D-printer, there's always the classic "superglue & baking soda" -method. You just need these two ingredients and a file and/or sandpaper. If the part is visible, finish with some paint (model paint is really good). I have succesfully repaired a broken record player hinge, battery compartment covers and one printer tray. The fix is very durable!

[@I4get42]

Yes! I learned that trick from an Adam Savage video not long ago and I was a bit surprised they didn't use it to fill around the 3d-printed part. As an aside, it works really well to patch a cracked fingernail until it grows out enough too!

[@ScottDuensing]

Ah, the memories. Except we built our ISPs on very early Linux boxes. Now I want a SPACclassic to play with!

[@kalon9999]

Amazing. I was about 5 years too young for all of this but these were very much my early computer experiences. This episode had amazing core memory refreshers, like "use telnet because ssh hadn't been INVENTED YET"...

[@TylerFurrison]

Never thought I'd see a smaller retro channel like this.

[@livefreeprintguns]

I had a SPARC IPX and it was the greatest little monitor stand/OpenBSD cable modem router I ever had.

[@nalle475]

Wow I remeber those days 😂. The sound of the modem and the at commands - wow. We used to run a lot of Sun stuff. The weight of the poxes compared to the PCs of the day was a indication of serious stuff. The “pizzabox” versions especially was hard to move around due to the odd shape and weight distribution. Seeing you booting up the machine brought back tons of happy memories and funny moments, like sleeping in turns under tables while setting up large database systems spanning into other countries.

[@ppokorny99]

Brings back so many memories. I used Adtran ISDN “modems” to provide access to the Sun systems at work. And wrote a whole provisioning system to install and upgrade our fleet of sparc and ultrasparc machines. Became so familiar with that Solaris install process

[@JayJay-88]

Nice to see an old Sun machine getting the love it deserves. 😍I bought my first SPARC in 1995 when I was 15 years old - a SLC (20 Mhz SPARC built in to a 17" B/W monitor). Good times.

[@Resaebiunne]

WOW! That was fantastic. This episode could easily have gotten a lot more technical, but the way you conveyed the information was fantastic. As an electrical engineer with a strong linux/UNIX/BSD background I'm hooked!

[@funjon]

This makes me nostalgic for my old SPARC IPX. I miss that little lunchbox.

[@kjetilv]

Really nice to see these deep dives into old tech

[@dhardison]

I was there in the 90s local dialup ISP. We didn't use Sun, but it's still nostalgiac for me 👍

[@tcpnetworks]

I had about 10 of these machines in the end. We ran RADIUS out of them to get user accounts working. Other ISPs I worked for - we transitioned to freeBSD.

[@dhardison]

@@tcpnetworks We began as a Windows shop, but switched to Linux for basically everything but the customer representative's desktops.

[@lgroschiensalle]

I've never seen a computer receive so much love... :P If people loved the Lord just half as much as this man loves his computer, the world would be a very different place.

[@yipperduigs]

US Robotic modem pictures at the of the video with Hayes compatible modems noises playing in the background.. Cant believe it! 😁😁 Loved this trip down memory lane 🤗

[@w9gb]

This brings back many memories …. and my solutions at that time. Had a SPARC IPX on my desk for network management, while installed early fiber-optic (multi-mode) backbone (Ethernet, FDDI capable). Fortunately, I was electronics (hardware) geek first - high school electronics teacher was from Motorola.

[@galnetdor]

I ran an early 90's ISP (Castle Network inNJ) and I used 3 Sun workstations as the main servers. Fun times. One of the services we offered was UUCP e-mail. This brings back some old memories.

[@dawnmitchell8213]

Videos like this remind me of just how much information I’ve forgotten from those days.

[@JapanPop]

I adored your care and attention to getting this iconic machine running and serving. Great to see this.There is a dearth of good Sun content on YT, so thank you!!

[@srobak]

Sojourn Systems - started in a janitor's closet at the Michigan State University Computer Science building selling shell accounts to non-CS students. Moved out of there within a year and into an office and added a modem pool. Quickly became one of Lansing & central Michigan's most popular ISP's. It was eventually acquired for ~8 million USD by Blue Marble ISP of Michigan which made them the 2nd largest ISP After Merit/MichNET.

[@probablysomeonesomewhere]

you are very underrated, you did an amazing job restoring this machine and this video was amazing

[@christopherbartleson8918]

This is absolutely awesome. I'd love to do this as part of my home lab to hook up some old computers to the internet.

[@tammymakesthings]

Wow, that brings back a lot of memories. I lived in Silicon Valley during the first dot-com boom, and thanks to some friends I was able to score a SPARCstation IPC (or maybe IPX; I forget which) for my home computer for a reasonable amount of money. As I recall, the Sun 13W3-to-SVGA video cable cost me more than the workstation. Great machine for the time, though. I also remember setting up a “Custom Jumpstart Install” server for work, which was great. You could net boot a new Sun workstation, and based on the CPU type/RAM/HD size/subnet the server would automatically install and configure Solaris and a bunch of application software. The company I worked for was a hardware manufacturer and all our engineers had Sun workstations on their desks, plus we had a BUNCH in our labs, so that was a huge time saver.

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

You could run a fairly large Sun installation on two system administrators. More than a 1000 machines was completely ok.

[@davidmcfarland2531]

This takes me back to the 1990’s when I worked for an HP var. I had to learn enough Solaris in order to setup uucp to connect the customer’s hpux workstations in San Jose, Calif to their Solaris workstations in Puerto Rico. I set up uucp between their workstations to transfer CAD files at night. The users placed files in a directory, cron took care of the rest. Got a trip to Puerto Rico out of it. Everything worked out great

[@elektronischdev]

The sticker on the bottom of the machine saying “BZT” suggests that this machine was used by the German “Bundesamt für Zulassungen in der Telekommunikation” meaning “Federal Office for Licensing in Telecommunications” - interesting journey for that little buddy!

[@joeturner7959]

TLG started earlier, with dialup, but had machine crash, and the install disks were left on top of a tv. So... They were down for more then a week, but since they were such nice guys, we stuck around. That was in 1988. I was in Concord, and they were in Daily city. Long distance rates applied as well as the 11:00pm price cut.

[@larryroyovitz7829]

I like this series. I'm a subscriber! Glad to be here in the early-ish days.

[@PiddeBas]

The production quality on this is so good!

[@ricardog2165]

I had that exact model that I got from work when they were about to throw it out. I got it working with Redhat, but it was slow. Loved the keyboard. Shortly after moving to an apartment, I threw it out and I've been kicking myself over it ever since :( I remember accessing my university's Sun system remotely over PPP in the '90s. I discovered a library that tunneled all TCP/IP requests over PPP and let my local X-Windows Server display GUI apps running remotely on the Sun system. There was a method to apply this library to any app. It was awesome, I was probably one of very few people in the university using this system like that.

[@paulkhoury3160]

Nice choice on that Hakko desoldering gun. Used the same Hakko when I replaced caps in a Sun IPX PSU. Bought two SPARCclassics on ebay and they're my next project.

[@Graham_Rule]

That takes me back. At work I had a Sun 4/330 in 1989 which cost a little more than the flat I'd just bought.

[@mercster]

In the 90s I used ISPs that used SPARC... I also used one in college, and in the early 2000s I worked at a place that had a disused SPARC Ultra 1 that was going to the rubbish... I got to take it home :) Fun little system, I put RedHat Linux on it.

[@SirKenchalot]

UMG is the name of the bug; he had to do something to pass the time once he was trapped in there.

[@timkent]

I'm pretty sure they no longer included a C compiler after SunOS 4.1.4 as it was sold as a separate product called Workshop, but you can use GCC.

[@Lion_McLionhead]

A board from 1993 as clean as the day it was made takes us back to 1993. UNIX workstation videos remane extremely rare because they haven't fallen in price.

[@peptoyo]

Ugh... I hate being early to see this after you mentioned what's next and saw 10 hours after looking for that.

[@BertPdeboy]

Man! Super cool stuff! I really liked to see the restoration progress, and am genuinely excited to see follow-ups!

[@darknewt9959]

We had hundreds of these at the newspaper publisher I worked at in the late 90s. Also SPARCstation 5, 10, UltraSPARCs, and all the servers up to the E10k. Come the millennium we literally could not give away our old classics, 5s and 10s.

[@tombarber8929]

loving this series so far, can't wait for the next one!

[@wingasm1468]

Need more of that lo-fi reassembly in my life

[@dshack4689]

subscribed the moment the modem started squawking it answering protocal at 38:10, gosh that sound takes me back! your video is an inspiration - i have 2 sunsparc server10's (and drives and keyboard and mouse and monitor, plus another spac station) from my job in 1995 that one day i need to refurbish and boot up. if you were in Brisbane Australia I'd actually donate them to you as I can see the care you take!

[@MarkyShaw]

Bravo my friend. Very well put together video! Love these series that you do. Always wanted to learn more about Sun machines as well. Great work!!!

[@drgti16v]

beeeep boooppppppp schreeeechhhhhhh I miss those sounds

[@Leftylove22]

You guys are sharing some great history. It really takes me back to so many memories! Love this channel. Subbed.

[@EricNusbaum]

Some early ISPs were converted BBS systems running Worldgroup/Major BBS with a piece of hardware called a "Galactiboard", which was an 8-port serial interface to allow for a huge number of modems. A single Worldgroup system could support up to 255 lines, which was pretty wild at the time.

[@theserialport]

MajorBBS was awesome and we want to cover it in-depth in the future!

[@domxgun]

Love the dedication and calmness you bring. I'm thankful the KZbin algorithm made me discover your channel.

[@PhilippeMarseille]

Wow.. that odd nostalgia "yay" I got when the dialup connection worked with the AT commands... Blast from the past!!! Amazing video production!

[@cbw56]

Just discovered this spectacular channel. So interesting!! Thanks for the quality content.

[@AlexanderWeurding]

Great work! Thanks for the content.

[@GuildOfCalamity]

One of the cleanest old floppy drives I've ever seen. Great series, keep up the good work!

[@ChadDoebelin]

thoroughly impressed, i'll keep watching! you earned a new subscriber.

[@ohasis8331]

Very good job on the rebuild. I was going to say "that brings back some memories" but I didn't remember anything till I actually watched this and then I remembered.

[@RealEngineer]

Great video!

[@its.bonart]

God, I am so happy I found this channel! In love with this series!

[@cidadaoPPT]

This channel is pure perfection!

[@youtube.commentator]

This is very interesting, thank you for sharing, subbed

[@ProjektSUN]

You should load that bad boy up with 128MB's of ram! ALSO, why not just use an ISO image on the ZuluSCSI to install on the virtual hdd?

[@theserialport]

That might have been easier, but we wanted to see the Solaris "boot net" install process and learn how it worked since it was widely used

[@laneium]

jort storm at the end really sold me on this

[@damouze]

This was amazing to watch. It does reminds me though that I have a Sun Blade 100 workstation with a defective ID-PROM... I have had the replacement part for ages, so it should be possible to fix it.

[@johnclement5903]

The EE-Prom in Sparcstations do not fail per se; it's only the internal battery for the DSxxxx clock/calendar. But, since the battery, clock/cal, and eeprom are all potted into the DIP plug, ya gotta replace the whole !@#$# thing

[@forbiddenera]

38:29 mmm sweet modem sounds.. and man.. dialup into bbs to use telnet takes me back! That's how i started on the net!

[@JamiesHackShack]

Enjoyed it! Keep it up!

[@Ubermeisteryyy]

Very well made video! And your skills are impressive. Happy subscriber.

[@geesharp6637]

Wow does that bring back memories. I haven't done a Solaris install in years. Totally forgot about the CDE desktop. The best day was when I got my UltraSparc. Great job.

[@awksedgreep]

This really takes me back. Thank you for putting this together. I had a hand in building 3 ISPs. The first was just customer service web apps for a cable ISP. The second was all the services for a cable ISP. The third was rebuilding a nationwide cable ISP complete with a DWDM dark fiber backbone. Only thing I would change in your series is installing 2.5.1, not 2.6. We never took the time to upgrade because 2.5.1 was considered "dial tone" Solaris.

[@nicksmith4507]

Good work. Nice machines at University and looked great in a tower with the matching CD and external HDD

[@jn_gutierrez]

Excellent.

[@greob]

Amazing!

[@richardlincoln886]

Back in the day the firmware/boot into Forth fascinated me and I tinkered on the one machine at work. The 'OK' prompt. Used to write compiler/interpreters for Forth on any system I touched back then - micro 6510, 68k, IBM Mainframe LoL. Obsessed. Forth being the ultimate terse/syntax-less language.

[@minombredepila1580]

Amazing content and very professional. I immediately subscribed :-)

[@goatjuggler]

Awesome content. I'm sitting on a SPARCstation IPX that I bought off an AT&T programmer that I've been meaning to restore so this helps a ton!

[@semisolutions]

Super! Love this

[@nibrobb]

I am eagerly awaiting the next episode 😁

[@JamesHalfHorse]

Fascinating. I was set to follow this plan in the mid 90s but the funding backed out. Worked for a dialup isp later in life as it was winding down more that people switched to high speed from the phone company we couldn't compete with.

[@JoeHamelin]

Takes me back to my days at Wolfenet in Seattle.

[@CollinBaillie]

The information super highway! Awww yisss!

[@Fifury161]

I managed to bag a suite of these along with the longer thinner unitsm back in the early 1990s. I still have them, but now with only 1 set of peripherals and 1 huge CRT. I also salvaged a lot of the memory modules out of those longer thinner Sparc stations - the modules use UDE like connectors and look like someone welded DIMMs together (back to back and side to side - they are thick!) They did all work and I did have the CD drive and still have a few hard drives, but alas no software or time/inclination to do anything with them!

[@Guitarhero1000]

Damn. One of my new favorite KZbin channels.

[@tylerljohnson]

I spent a few years as a sun systems engineer & later a programmer using both the pizza box sparcs and the lunch box machines. great to see one again. Also, I've got that same BK multimeter!

[@princesswalt4010]

Very cool video! This made me go check my stash and cuddle with my Sparc IPX in that same form factor. After I bought it used in the early 2000’s, I had the same fun of net booting SUSE Linux, and used it as a dev system to write code using Xemacs. I’ve wondered for a while now if it would even power up… it’s been sitting in a pile withs it’s Spark Station 2 sister for about 20 years completely unused. I still have one of those awesome soft touch sun keyboards with the giant “Help” key!

[@hannescampidell]

the 5v rail like this is perfect

[@altamiradorable]

In the mid '80, I had an HP3000 mini-computer. I connected a few 2400bps modems made by a company that "cloned" Hayes modems. I used a thinMAU adapter to connect to DSL internet. People at HP told I cold ne be done ! But it worked ! I was even able to create a interface from Ethernet to Token ring. One of my client was really happy when they learned about this. They wanted an high-speed transport to synchronize files between two mainframes.

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

For some reason or another, many at HP by that time didn't know what could be done on a HP3000. They very basically afraid of how to take care of MPE and HP-UX and how to extend and improve.

[@altamiradorable]

@@TheStefanskoglund1 True ! One thing I learned afterwards is that management was afraid that clients would migrate to IBM using this method!

[@Silanael]

Oh, this brings back memories..

[@DFX2KX]

And you're even planning on letting people TELNET into it. That's neat!. Man I wonder how many BBS servers and MUDs where ran on workstations like this as soon as they ended up on the used market.

[@ratmdex]

This channel is exactly the niche market I needed.

[@stonent]

I had a SparcClassic in the early 2000s. I had installed OpenBSD 2.7 on it with Apache, MySQL, PHP, and the PHPBB2 online forum. Not bad for 50Mhz and 48MB of 72pin RAM.

[@alzeNL]

ah, hearing that modem - the nostaliga is strong with this one, subscribed !! - was a sun/solaris engineer for 10 years, bounced around the world building from the ground up to fully remote net boot installs, what a lovely OS solaris was - remember the forth interpreter in the boot prompt :D my own pet peeve with sun, why oh why on the keyboard have the power switch on the top right, how many times that got knocked. Seeing this lovely machine restored reminded me of my first sparc machine, with CD, DAT Drive and Sun Monitor. I worked for an ISP in Central London, the onwer dontated it to me. I live in a nearby seaside town, my commute was on coach. I had to carry the lot and the monitor from near Oxford Street to Embankment, but it sure was the envy of alot of people back in my hometown when I got it up and running - that huge sun monitor !!!

[@tibbydudeza]

I visited one of our first to home ISP's here in South Africa since my mate worked there - this was during the days of Mosiac WWW and Windows 3.1s and Trumpet Winsock. They used Livingston Port masters and a bunch of USR Robotic 14.4K modems in the closet lying on top of each other - the heat generated was substantial - a few used to die on a monthly basis.

[@BNGamesYT]

Ive got my original Packard Bell childhood hard drive with Win 3.11 in a Packard Bell that is basically the same model as what I had in 93. Really want to try connecting with this when its ready.

[@sjanssen]

As a noob in repairing pcb's and parts, this is really educative and very well explained

[@apricotcomputers3943]

Friggin' genius maaaan!❤🎉