Sun Blade 100 - Unix Gets Cheap

[@KeithAKris]

The Sun Ray wasn't just a network booted system, it was really just a modern take on the dumb terminal. The entire display was streamed over UDP from the host machine. Your whole session ran on the backend machine. Each user had their own X windows session. I worked for Michigan Tech in the early 2000s. I was part of a team that wrote some shims on top of the Sun Ray server software that allowed us to set up a system where a user could insert their student ID (which had a smart chip) into a terminal, do some work, remove the card, and pick up their session from any other terminal on campus. Everything continued to run in the background. They had a program where students could rent a terminal for their dorm room with a low monthly fee. The program never took off as PC prices plummeted and students preferred having a computer which could run games and other non educational software.

[@TheErador]

Bradford university in the UK bought a bunch of sunrays in ’07. The portable desktop session sounded really powerful, but i never got to use it as informatics did their own thing and we had dual booting windows 2k? and rhel6 machines, and i was finishing that year too. All the server machines ran sunos tho.

[@douro20]

Reminds me a bit of the X terminals of the early-mid 1990s.

[@hal970fx]

17:00 Correction, AMD64 in the Athlon64 was launched in 2003, and torpedoed Intel's Itanium maneuver to jettison x86 with the move to 64 bit.

That palette change thing when you enter/leave the "DOS window" is totally normal, I mean in the era when the whole desktop ran in 16 colours or 256, and such, and not true-colour like nowadays. So every window could have its own colour palette. It was the de-facto standard in Linux too for a while back to then, you have no other choice if the hardware couldn't do more colours or at least much slower (or maybe you don't have enough video RAM in that resolution you want it to do ...).

[@Δημήτρης-θ7θ]

The technical term is "colormap flashing". Unix workstations with 8-bits-per-pixel graphics use indexed color, which is 256 colors chosen from a palette of 24-bit RGB colors. The windowing system gives applications a shared colormap that has some of the 256 values already populated (for the UI widgets) and each application can add its own entries. This creates the problem that if there are too many color-heavy applications running at the same time, the shared colornap can run out of entires. A solution to that is using a private colormap in your app, where all 256 color entire are configurable, which of course makes everything else look completely wrong when your app is in focus.

[@Δημήτρης-θ7θ]

So, this explains the "colormap flashing" issue in the video: If you want to emulate a 256-color VGA card, you absolutely need every single of the 256 colors to be available (you can't have inaccessible color entries that belong to other apps), so a private colormap is used by the SunPCI app. BTW most image viewer apps also used private colormaps and they also flashed. When I was at uni I preferred the Sun Blade 1500 and Sun Ultra 25 boxes because those had 24-bits-per-pixel graphics (with 8-bit overlay planes/"hardware colormaps" for legacy apps) and didn't have the flashing issue the Sun Blade 100 had (plus the Sun Blade 1500 had an integrated speaker for your Flash player videos, woo!).

[@crgd23]

Came here to say this. But I'm confused why you would need to run with 8-bit colour in the first place, on hardware from 2000.

[@FarrellMcGovern]

That was a fun video! That stirs up memories...I had gotten out of working with Sun/HP-UX/Power by the early 2000s. At that point I built a custom Linux distro for a company that made medical office management systems running on an RS/6000 AIX server with DB2, and Windows workstations. My custom distro, along with a release of DB2 for Linux enabled them to transition to commodity X86 servers running Linux, and defenestrate the workstations. About 30 RS/6000 servers all across the US were replaced with IBM x86 servers, and about 5,000 Window seats were replaced by Linux. fun times!

[@AlexanderSchreiber]

When running the SunPCI UI, your graphics doesn't get corrupted. That very much looks like the X server runs in 256 color palette mode where in-focus windows could grab and modify the palette colors while they had the focus. So normally, CDE has focus and owns the palette, but the SunPCI UI, when it has focus, grabs and modifies the palette (presumably to fit VGA colors). The PGX64 graphics in the Blade 1000 does support 24bit @ 1600x1200, but I suspect the SunPCI UI might need palette mode? Never had a SunPCI to play with when I had a Sun Blade at a previous employer to play with (many, many years ago).

[@orincat10]

The university I went to in 2018 still had a row of these in one of the computer labs with the CRT's. These were all sitting directly across a row of circa 2016 Dells and 2013 iMacs.

[@WindowsG]

The lighting, the multiple camera angles, the editing and narration bruh this is so underrated. Actually well produced videos on "funny architectures" is so scarce tysm for making stuff like this, loved the video!~

[@CelGenStudios]

Thanks!

[@Seacat17]

I wish I could see a SPARC computer network in it's full power... Both server, client and just terminal parts.

[@themaritimegirl]

15:55 - Looked like a Quantum Fireball to me :) As of at least 2018 one of my EE professors was still using a Sun Blade 100 in his office. He checked and wrote email using a text-based program in the terminal, and he did some web browsing on it, and used it to update university web pages that he was the admin of. I forget what web browser he used - I think it was Firefox. He had it, a modern PC, and a modern Mac all on a KVM, but he used the Sun the most.

[@cromulence]

Great video, thanks KZbin algorithm! Regarding VGA capture, there is thankfully now a cheap way to get pretty decent VGA capture super cheap - just get one of those super cheap HDMI capture devices ($5~10 from eBay/Amazon) and a VGA to HDMI adapter to plug into that. It's a little unwieldy, but you'll get 60fps capture, or you can do 640x480 at 30fps uncompressed too. A lot of VGA to HDMI dongles only do standard resolutions and balk at things like 720x400, so if you do need any non-VESA resolutions, you can get a used Extron RGB-HDMI 300A for around 50 bucks. But all definitely try one of the cheapo dongles first - it's surprising what you can get now! I have an Epiphan VGA2USB and it has been superseded by the aforementioned setup. What's more, no proprietary drivers required either - standard USB UVC support!

[@CelGenStudios]

I am working on that. I have one possible solution in the mail right now so I'm hoping that is a major improvement in future videos.

[@EricJorgensen]

Yes. I bought a USB3 HDMI capture device that records 1080P 60fps and is the size of like a FireTV stick. Cost $17. I use it with an hdmi microscope for watchmaking. I have some cheap aliexpress vga-to-hdmi converters that i need to try out with it. Basically I am pretty sure that you could get a really good vga capture setup for like $30 total.

[@crgd23]

720x400 is a standard VGA resolution, though. That's 80x25 text mode.

[@marklawrence2417]

I worked on Sun systems for (too) many years, when I first started on them the engineering was like most of the servers/workstations were excellent but went down hill as NY/Win2000 took over the lower end. Solaris however does look old (other GUIs can be added) - however compared with even Win 11/Server is very rock solid, will run for years & at the time could support WAY more CPU cores/RAM - hence the 1000's still in use today. These workstations were used for developers of the servers or for specialist requirements.

[@yjk_ch]

There is a video about SunPCi done by NCommander a while ago. He installed Windows 2k, NT 4, and 98, and also shows all kinds of quirks it has. Though that weird palette issue wasn't present.

[@JohnGotts]

I started with Linux in 1994. By 2000, the writing was on the wall for proprietary UNIX systems. The smart choice was either Linux or Free/Net/OpenBSD. The only reason why you would need to hang on to these dinosaurs was if you had some special application. At my first full time Linux job in 1999 we had to buy a Sun workstation to support a piece of software. It was a huge bummer because that software would have run fine on Linux, but the financial organization was unwilling to do the port. I used all of the proprietary UNIX variants because I worked for an engineering school through 1999, so I was familiar with all of them. Linux was refreshing and new and better than all of them with its GNU tools. Even in the mid 90's a top of the line PC running Linux for $5000 would do just fine compared to a $20,000 HP or Sun workstation. The only problem was companies being unwilling to do ports. There is a gee whiz factor I guess with these workstations but UNIX people were moving towards Linux so they just aren't very compelling.

[@philiprobar]

Multiple Linux distros is the same problem that doomed the priority UNIXs. That’s why we finally have Flatpaks, etc.

[@Chalisque]

At uni, late 90s, we had an account on a Solaris machine (a room full of NCD XTerminals) and 20MB of quota. So one thing I did was to download and compile WindowMaker and use that as my window manager rather than CDE. Gimp was also small enough back then that I could compile it within my quota. I really should have spent less time geeking with Unix and Linux, and more time on my studies, though I did graduate.

[@gaxiola1701]

In 1999 to 2000 my group had Sun Ultra 1s and Ultra 5s just to run a Green Hills cross compiler and remote debugger for an in development consumer electronics device. The development experience was like a 5 to 10 year in the past time warp. A few of the engineers did more with their Solaris machines but I just used it for the necessary toolchain and didn't do much customizing besides tweaking the terminal and changing the desktop wallpaper. I stuck to my Windows machine for day to day email, docs and even code editing where I could.

[@llynellyn]

I was like "oh cool somebody else is still rockin a Laserjet 4" then I realised it was part of a retro themed set xD

[@CelGenStudios]

PLOT TWIST: I actually still use that printer! It's networked! :D

[@Arivia1]

@@CelGenStudios new viewer but i had a feeling. i'm like "there's no way someone like that is going to have a battleship printer like that around and not use it!"

[@CelGenStudios]

@@Arivia1 Heh. It will take some effort to pry that from my hands.

[@jirkazima1126]

Regarding the color palette changes - your on-board Blade 100 graphics chip PGX64 (ATI Rage XL) has its own 8 MB of memory. Thus, you can switch from the 256 color palette mode to 24-bit true color (check the "m64config" command) and remove the issue.

[@andycristea]

Windows did the same thing in 8 bit mode.

[@jirkazima1126]

​@@andycristea Definitely. The limitation was similar on Windows PC, but the way it was handled was a bit different. Windows would change palettes depending on the active window rather than the cursor position. Additionally, the way that Windows rendered graphics made it possible to find the closest match for any missing colors when using a palette for a different program. As a result, instead of having all the colors be wrong everywhere except for the active window, the color depth was simply reduced accordingly. I recently came to appreciate this after working with various other platforms that have 8-bit graphics. That being said, I still think that SGI's handling of 8-bit color modes is my favorite.

[@andycristea]

@@jirkazima1126 yes it did it on click, not on hover. I dont have any experience with SGI. How did that work?

[@Δημήτρης-θ7θ]

The ATI Rage XL on the Sun Blade 100 is indeed a PXG64. Which begs the question: Why Sun didn't enable 24-bit by default? From hazy memory, 24-bit graphics in CDE required the presence of 8-bit overlay planes ("hardware colormaps") for legacy apps that expected to find the traditional 256-color colormap arrangement, otherwise legacy apps wouldn't work, and if the Rage XL doesn't support 8-bit overlays, so that's probably the reason why: make sure legacy apps work and let users try 24-bit at their own risk.

[@50shadesofbeige88]

Great video! I love that purple shade of beige. I can't believe I only JUST now found your channel. I look forward to watching your variety of videos on various retro goodness.

[@vincei4252]

My second job out of college I had a brand new Sparcstation 20. On my first day I accidentally emptied a piping hot cup of coffee into the keyboard which proceeded to make the workstation go nuts. We had a service agreement with Sun and they came out and replaced the keyboard same day. Ah, the memories. No one ever found out it was the new guys cup of coffee that disrupted the morning.

[@ford1546]

incredibly well made video. I like the way you talk and explain. you look so relaxed in front of the camera 👍

[@tomhekker]

So happy to see this recommended to me by KZbin. Great video and explanation, I love old UNIX workstations!

[@jessicam.4148]

Even when they were working the sunPCI cards were slow and buggy, and not great to use. Sun did release a 2nd version of the pci card which had updated hardware, and would have been what a blade 100 would most likely be equipped with. The first generation pci card would be commonly used with the ultra 5 workstation. Which is another cost reduced sun workstation(vga and ide as well), the predecessor to the blade 100.

[@SenileOtaku]

I have one of these machines, a tenant left it behind when they moved out (it had been from whatever major failed investment firm he had worked for). It was missing the keyboard and mouse, so getting into OpenFirmware is a major pain (you essentially have to force it to fail out to the prompt). I put in a couple larger (compared to what was in it) IDE drives, and swapped in an IDE DVD drive, and managed to load whatever the latest Solaris was. Tried to offer it out to any open-source project needed an UltraSparcIII machine for development, but never got any takers. Last time I booted it up there was some dead battery-backed PROM, so I can't make use of it at all now (yes, replacement chips are available, I just don't have anything I could use it for). I was accustomed to CDE from working on AIX. But I think the later Solaris version I ran on it had GNOME2 or something similar, so no trouble with the desktop color switching (that was such a pain when I was in the test lab on an AIX Control Workstation and I'd bring up a GUI application from the Linux box back in my office).

[@CelGenStudios]

This one also had a bad Dallas module. Strapping a new battery onto it isn't the hard part but good lord they really make is a nightmare to reprogram it from the console.

[@matthiasmartin1975]

Yes, the sun Java desktop was just gnome 2.x with a purple theme.

[@TheErador]

You can still get it to boot with a dead battery, you just have to set the mac address and serial in openfirmware and checksum it and it's good till you remove power entirely

[@CorporalDanLives]

Damn dude it's awesome to see this, my buddy had one of these back in 1996 if I remember correctly, used it as his home PC.

[@InternetDude]

I love that HP printer in the background, back in my IT days (ahem 2000's) we used those in the office, they were a real workhorse. Really fast printer.

[@chadlawson9346]

Hey I’m from a finance company and we had one of these (laser jet 4 or 5?) had jet direct external device for sharing. We used it for MICR toner on some check printing

[@festrella.barros]

Greetings from Brazil. I’ve worked with different Sun stations from the IPX, SPARC10, SPARC20, then ULTRA5 and BLADE150. The first one I saw with IDE HD was the Ultra 5. I was amazed to see their remote installation process from ARP capability. You also didn’t showed the ROM environment. That is comparable to the BIOS, but with much more capabilities that you can only see today into the Dell idrac or comparable HP solution. Also, you haven’t said about how robust this hardware is. No PC is capable to endure so much. Also, the Operating System is rock solid, if you compared to DOS, Windows 3.11/NT, or later on Windows 95 (this one crashed after some operating days all by it self).

[@VK2FVAX]

If you want to prevent Operator Flapping Error when things beep at you. Type STOP-A, then power-off. If you wish to divine other commands of the OBP type "sifting words"

[@CelGenStudios]

I'm saving "Operator Flapping Error" in my vocabulary.

[@DamianMontero]

Fantastic video. I loved the history as well as the live showcase. You're a great presenter!

[@CelGenStudios]

Thank you!

[@chrissingleton6029]

Fraser Health (BC, Canada) used lots of these Sun Ray 1's throughout the province probably 20 years ago or so... saw lots of them in various clinics.

[@BrassicGamer]

Didn't know you had a KZbin channel until now! This is the kind of system that would get me really excited on paper, but your demonstration has definitely warned me off, thanks. I'll stick with my SPARCstation 5. Thanks for the video!

[@CelGenStudios]

I'm everywhere! ;) I'm a bit more of a fan myself of the older pizza boxes and the lunchboxes but those are almost strictly SunOS and Solaris 2 machines.

[@applesushi]

I managed so many SunBlades (some with PCI cards) - this brings back memories/nightmares.

[@matthewstott3493]

I have one of these Sun Blade 100's with kb/mouse, 20" Sun CRT, in working order. Original Solaris 8 discs. 500Mhz SPARC with two 30GB HDD's. It was fun when the delivery arrived at my home with a pallet of boxes and of course no loading dock. They were not shipping UPS/FedEx it was full freight. It is quite heavy. It was capable of booting Linux which not ironically, outperformed Solaris.

[@dave_lawrence]

What a find! Really well produced and great content. I subscribed immediately. Thanks so much

[@malch2843]

It was very rare for the Sun Blade 100 to ship from the factory with the Sun PCi card fitted, they were usually sold as a separate X-option and as far as I can recall not that many were shipped compared to the amount of Sun Blade 100 shipped, at least that was the case in the UK. At the time it was cheaper and better to buy a cheap PC and run it along side the Sun machine. The Sun Blade 100 was also assembled in California. I know a Firewire webcam was used during the production process to test the functionality of the Firewire ports. Ncommander did a good KZbin video about the Sun PCi card, you might want to check that out. Edit. The Sun PCi card works far better with its own dedicated monitor.

[@dglcomputers1498]

Interestingly in the UK RISC machines were not uncommon and were what a lot of kids would have first experienced, the Acorn Archimedes range and later Risc PC's. Used a lot in schools as a follow on from the BBC micro and some were even had extra BBC badging, weren't necessarily the cheapest but not the most expensive either, available in keyboard wedge, desktop and one laptop variant, had their own expansion system, network and used their own OS that resided in ROM (Unix was an option at one point I believe). Excellent machines and a somewhat decent amount of software made for them. The later RISC PC and A7000 had standard PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports and the BBC used loads of systems for TV graphics and playback control. Ended up with the PC/OS side of the business being sold to Pace who made STB's and the real cash cow being the processor side that became ARM Ltd. Interestingly it also had hardware and software options for running MS-DOS/windows from the first model, originally it was just a software program as the speed of the ARM processor could emulate an 8086. Amazing what was created by a small money starved company from Cambridge, whole OS/GUI/PC architecture including their own 32 bit CPU that's had some success!

[@kyle8952]

The problem with Acorn was hubris. They were a small company with very little reach outside of the school market (and the schools were becoming really interested in teaching standard PCs), but they insisted on doing everything from scratch. This made sense in the 1980s when hardware was actually pretty simplistic, but they insisted on staying that way in the pentium era when rivals were spending huge amounts of cash designing processors, graphics chips, etc. They totally ran out of steam with the RISC PC. Everything propriatary in a decade where a computer went totally obsolete every 18 months, there was just no way for them to keep up with that pace of development. They foresaw that a little and so tried to make the RISC PC very modular and upgradable, but things accelerated so quickly that it just became a bottleneck. What's the use of a 266Mhz processor stuck on a 16Mhz motherboard with prehistoric ram and onboard graphics without 2D acceleration? It's a shame because their case design, their OS and their CPU were great. But they killed themselves by refusing to adopt PCI and all it's cheap graphics and sound.

[@dglcomputers1498]

@@kyle8952 Quite, the expansion bus and support chips were their downfall, thy just didn't have the cash for proper development. Also other stupid ideas meant the rather nice A7000 case could not take an expansion card and a CD-ROM drive?!?

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

I have a memory from the introduction of the Sun Blade 100: it basically swept the floor with the older low-cost SPARCs and it was possible to use cheap PC components (RAM/disks though the nr 1 thing to do was get a fast SCSI HBA and a SCSI disk-that ATA design wasnt fast.) Sun had a beneficial upgrade program for customers so at the time ZTH went and replaced their older machines with blade 100/1000 the students and staff was also allowed to buy blade 100 at a discount - so many went with that so the manager for the upgrade program saw all of her budget for this DISAPPEAR (her budget payed for the difference between normal price and the customer price.) Higher ups at Sun had to do something - they probably refilled her account and told her to be more restrictive the next time....

[@SockyNoob]

I'm glad people are talking about the absolutely bizarre options for budget machines of non-x86 systems back in the day.

[@ButilkaRomm]

I have learned to love the design. It is maybe the cheapest Sparc you can try nowadays. Memory is standard, but needs to be unbuffered ECC. If not for the x86 card it is a nice authentic machine.

[@Davedefeat.]

Great video! Can’t wait for your next one!

[@kenharbin3440]

The eject floppy icon was for dismounting/closing the floppy file system, then you ma y pushed button to eject. You always have to dismount removable media before removing it.

[@CelGenStudios]

That seems like a little bit of a kludge.

[@foobar1979]

@@CelGenStudios Older sparc machines had auto ejecting floppy drives.

[@bitterseeds]

@@CelGenStudios Like dragging a floppy or CD to the trash to umount and eject? Come on. SMFH.

[@Geardos1]

very good and informative vintage computer video, subscribed

[@97.7FM]

19:48 Why pictures loading so slowly? I did think it's bug)))

[@bdhaliwal24]

Far cry from the Sparc 10 and 20s which were built like tanks

[@nfcpro]

so was the Blade 1000/2000... the last TRUE UNIX workstations...

[@nfcpro]

Worked for British Telecom back in 1998/1999.... we had loads of Ultra's all over the place... hundreds of them.... some were used to run Firewall-1.... ahh the old days!

[@nocturnal0072]

Is the connector on the PC card by any chance a "PC/104" connector or even a "PCI-104"?

[@NeoJ4K3]

I'm always so hype about new videos from you, granted this is the second time ive watched..but still lol

[@CelGenStudios]

Well, I try to be consistent and not too weird.

[@NeoJ4K3]

@@CelGenStudios hey, never be ashamed of you. Also keep up the good work. You are consistent in quality an interest. Love it. How's the Eagle been? I've been wondering if it still has been serving you well. Just appreciate your uploads :) be proud of them

[@CelGenStudios]

@@NeoJ4K3 It's been doing fine. I have a few Accessory Videos I would like to make. I just need it to warm up a bit more.

[@kozmokohler]

Ok but did you go through the Solaris 9 software repository? It is indeed a pretty minimal system but just like the network it should be highly customizable to exactly suit your employees needs. Not really sure what the licensing was back then on all the other stuff they wrote for Solaris. And as far as the x86 PCI card was there supposed to be drivers loaded into it? I would imagine you could run Windows 2000 on it but it would need to know how to talk to essentially what is the hypervisor running on Solaris to talk to any of that lower level hardware. They definitely had to have some kind of drivers to get that "client virtual machine" to talk to the network if it didn't have a NIC on the card or so you would think coming from a company that said "the network is the computer".

[@CelGenStudios]

If the software repository was a bundled disc like Silicon Graphics did with Applications occasionally, I did not have that at the time of the recording. If it is an online repository I'm not aware of that either. For as much as I gave CDE flak it really felt given the extra hardware that there was components missing, like why include Firewire and have no way to work with it as-is? Even AIX included a video input window on the 850. For the card the bundled installation package included little for documentation and for board-side setup of drivers, whenever you generated a new virtual disk it would have a Caldera install to template from. Seems odd to go that far to have a DOS setup auto-deploying and not preconfigure the rest. It wasn't like there was a lot of available options it could vary from.

[@PearComputingDevices]

What you got is the NLX platform spec based computer, it was an intel creation as a way to allow the Pentium II cpu to be used in a compact case like the NX was used for the 486 and Pentium CPUs, along with improvements in things like air flow and cabling it was also supposed to make servicing and upgrading a breeze and it did. We partnered with Gateway inc in 1998 to develop their NLX based systems that we in turn used to sell BeOS based computers after Be, inc stopped development of the Be box. Ours was called the BeOS workstation and came pre-loaded with BeOS 4.5 or 5.0 and we sold them in mainly to nerds and never had gone full production on these unfortunately and the platform itself never really took off and of course now Be, inc is long gone.. anyway interesting video for sure though. Good job with it. Fun fact Intel themselves abandoned the plaform with the Pentium 4.

[@stevec00ps]

I've always been intrigued by these and wondered if they were worth a punt on eBay... maybe now after watching this I will only be interested if VERY cheap :)

[@kozmokohler]

Really for enthusiasts these days who want to setup lots of backend network resources and clients for fun.

[@ArturaIndustries]

The form factor used in this system was called NLX. It was a low cost pc form factor made by Intel, so you could probably just slide a pc nlx board in and it would just work.

[@pigpenpete]

My first job in the uk had a fleet of sun ultra 5's (and a bunch of older and slower pizza box models) as their production platform for electronics testing. Everything was SPARC based. As far as I'm aware they're still using a SPARC based circuit simulation software on a server but all of the desktops have long since been replaced by generic Dells.

[@hyoenmadan]

14:06 That'st the PRAM/NVRAM battery. It is need to store OpenFirmware configuration data, which unlike BIOS firmware equipped PCs, is too big to be stored in the tiny CMOS clock memory area. Apple and NeXT did EXACTLY the same, but instead supplying their boards with 2 standard, almost harmless coincell batteries, they decided to supply a BIG, EXPLOSIVE and CORROSIVE lithium barrel battery from where they derived the two voltages to keep the CMOS clock and NVRAM working. It looks clunky, but actually kudos to Sun for no taking Apple single explosive battery barrel path.

[@opensourcedev22]

I worked with these as a student in university. The CS lab had these, while the general study areas had Dell.

[@greywolf271]

The alpha 64 bit micros were well established before 2000. XP1000s were able to run VMS, Tru64-Unix or Windows NT at that time. Even the floor standing Alphaservers had all these options available. All you needed for the Alphaservers was an Orchid graphics card

[@FLUFFSQUEAKER]

Great video! Hope this is the algorithm break-through for you, love this type of content :)

[@SockyNoob]

Haven't seen your name around in ages

[@sebastianbort8512]

Hello, nice content. Waiting for more.

[@dmurphynj]

Keep in mind, that SunPCi card wasn’t really anything new. It was preceded by the SBus-based SunPC card. That was a huge, huge improvement over WABI. And if you want to have some software fun, find MAE. Emulate a full Mac. Say what you want about the software, Solaris evolved into something pretty bulletproof. Even today, Solaris 11.4 will run for years on end. The early Solaris 2.1-2.4 days were a little rough though. :)

[@CelGenStudios]

I tried to buy one of those sbus PC compatibility boards back in the early 2010's but they seemed to hold value well. I think I eventually got two of these SunPCI cards for $10 each when I bought an Ultra 60 and some two SUN storage shelves from FreeGeek Vancouver.

[@michaelmichalski4588]

I haven't heard WABI mentioned for a very long time.

[@evertonshorts9376]

The Amiga 2000 had a card like that, called a Bridgeboard. They went from a 4.77mhz 8086 card up to a 486sx25. It could display on an Amiga screen, or in a window on the Workbench, or to its own monitor with a VGA card plugged into one of the Amigas ISA slots.

[@___.87________]

Omg that laserjet 4 on the back I wish I could have one. I have a sunblade 150 and a sunblade 2000 and love them

[@CelGenStudios]

Bomb-proof. Excellent printers. Even windows 11 will still print to one over the network. You can't go wrong with a rebuilt LaserJet 4 in 2023.

[@crgd23]

The floppy should have worked - was it formatted for PC, and with a FAT filesystem?

[@CelGenStudios]

It should of been. I usually test format my disks before using them in a video, you know, just in case either it damages the drive or causes weird issues.

[@AliceC993]

Being completely foreign to this world of computing (I didn't start using computers until the mid-2000s and those were typical Wintel PCs) I have to say, for an operating system from 2002 Solaris 9 looks _positively ancient_ by standards of the era. As you mention with the other problems of software on a machine like this, it's really no wonder they eventually lost so much market share.

[@kozmokohler]

This system was really intended for professional enterprises; they wanted to limit what you could really do on the machines and have a granular user policy to increase productivity. You would need a highly software savy IT dept to manage and configure these machines back in the day. They were really powerful for their purpose if you knew how to get them going the right way. Sun was the proprietor of modern day cloud computing back then but the roots of it all really coming from dumb terminals and main frames.

[@jtricksdotcom]

Solaris 10 had Zones. In 2005. If you read what it is you will find many similarities with something called docker. Which is very known for the IT people now. Which was created in 2013.

[@kyle8952]

The other reason is that nobody used them for normal computer stuff. Meaning, the entire company was on windows with netware, or eventually windows NT. They ran microsoft office, and did mail with outlook express. That's what they were comfortable with. Sun, SGI etc workstations were these annoying "special" machines that you would reluctantly buy for your team of engineers or CGI artists because Windows PCs weren't fast enough. They would spend their entire life running one or two programs only. The workers would literally swivel their chair 45 degrees and use a normal PC for everything except that one program. So as soon as an ordinary Dell or Compaq was fast enough for the work, there was no reason to buy some annoying proprietary workstation thing anymore!

[@jfbeam]

CDE was always an ugly thing, and they never made anything better. There were alternative desktops -- which is where Linux has gone -- but people rarely bothered on Solaris, because you just needed to get the job done more than have something nice to look at.

[@jfbeam]

@@kyle8952 Indeed. Microsoft Office is what drove almost everything to the Windows/PC world. There was the brief time where Windows existed on PPC and Alpha, but it didn't last long. (and the Alpha used a translation layer to run x86 code.) Many of the niche applications that drove people to other architectures were quickly brought to Windows. Adobe used to be a premiere Mac software, but now everything they make targets Windows. What work load(s) would you run on Solaris, HP-UX, or Irix today? In my mind, just server software - database, web, email, file servers... (all things you can do variously in windows. even better in windows for windows clients.)

[@ordinosaurs]

I never realized how close to the DEC alpha Personal Workstation "Miata" the engineering was. Like the Miata, you probably could swap the motherboard in a pinch for a x86 board (don't know if Sun released a full PC in that box, DEC did). But overall, the Miata was fabulously engineered for its price point compared to this. Much faster too.

[@Ben333bacc]

There were 64 bit Pentium 4s. And the Athlon 64 was AMD's first amd64/x86_64 offering, they beat intel to the party which is why we often say "amd64". I think they had the tech in 2001, but it didn't retail till 2003 iirc. The Pentium 4 would have been 64 bit, on some models, in late 2004, maybe 2005. EDIT: September 2003 the Athlon 64 dropped. By February 2004 they had Pentium 4's /w the 64 bit instructions supported.

[@JdmFactoryINC]

I have Ultra 5 with PGX64 (which is pretty much what is onboard of Sunblade 100) + SUN PCI II running Solaris 9 and have no issues you pointed. No color pallete changes. SunPCI was actually designed to use external monitor, when you use it everything is snappy and even direct3d works just like it was a normal PC. You don't seem to have good understanding of what Unix and Sparc architecture was all about. They were actually comparable with PC's at the time as speed goes, they were not slower in any way. And they were way more flexible, stable and multitasking was much better. At the time, late 90's and early 2000 they were used by air traffic control, design studios, for simulations, by financial institutions and for scientific applications. SPARC is still used today, SPARC provides better security, scalability and encryption than many other architectures, you can run up to 100 VM's from one CPU etc. For certain applications like massive databases, enterprise solutions and storage it's hard to beat SPARC if you consider it's footprint in data center. That's what SPARC and Unix is all about.

[@CelGenStudios]

I was always under the impression the Blade 100 and 150 were the entry-level machines. They'll do everything the more powerful SPARC models can but with considerably less cache and costing...well, less cash.

[@jansaggiori7865]

At what I was told back then, when I bought 2 (with different LCD screen)... they told me it's a PC also, perhaps that just replacing the CPU it was possible to put an Intel chip and have a normal PC ? I was told it's a PC at the end... Thank you, it was nice to see it running again (and I still have all, the 2 with screens and keyboard+mouse). I also signed to get the source code of Solaris a little later.

[@boydpukalo8980]

I remember using Sun/HP/SGI workstations in the late 1990's at the University of Michigan as well as NT machines. I was writing C++ computational fluid dynamics code on both Unix and Windows. CDE looked just like what you showed. What drove me absolutely nuts was non-standardized filesystems/headers/libraries between compilers and operating systems. On Sun I recall also running SDRC Ideas and Unigraphics, both uber expensive 3D parametric CAD applications. I also recall lugging around a zip, then Jaz drive and connecting them to the SCSI controllers on both Unix & NT machines to share files with my own PC. Those were the days!

[@nfcpro]

lugging the zip and jaz drives around.. LOL those WERE the days!

[@frustro4323]

I still rock 2 Sunfire V210's. Haven't found anything better at cross compiling with the Intel C compiler.

[@roberthealey7238]

One could use NetBSD on the blade, I do in my home lab, if you want to run more modern software like Firefox. Solaris 10 runs a little better on the hardware especially if you max out the RAM. Compare against a 20 year old PC for reference and it isn’t as bad. Most blades in day to day use were in environments that weren’t about pc/windows but custom software used internally and as a development environment for the SPARCservers that ran the universe at that time.

[@karlramberg]

Even if just this system is kind of crap, I miss the period where there where several hardware and operating systems manufacturers around. Now every system is a PC and it's 50 shades of kind of boring

[@canopus5498]

really nice case design

[@marygauffin7290]

The software isn’t horrible as such. Admittedly, Solaris is not my favourite unix, but on a unix eorkstation of the time, you got a unix, great for development, a shell, even an X11 server to support geaphical applications. Certainly somw graphical programs were included since marketrouds had the idea that all users wanted to point and deool, but they were never really intended to be used, just included as an alibi. It’s an entirely different way of working, and as for using integrated development tools where the underlying OS was interchangeable with ant other, you still have a much better shell to work with if you need to than you have on pre-NT windows. Today, I generally disregard ant icons and run everything from the prompt in linux. Tve screen show s shell, iIDEs and…toys. But I’ve used unix since system 3…old dogs, etc :)

[@Δημήτρης-θ7θ]

Scott McNealy and Jonathan Schwartz really thought they were competing with Microsoft and Apple, and that ordinary folk would be picking up UltraSPARC systems from Best Buy, hence the multimedia utilities such as Audio CD players and media players in Solaris 9. Yeah, weird I know...

[@byrons8956]

I have the Sun Blade 150 with a SunPCI card, and SunRay, which reminds me I need to setup the SunRay again. I pretty much use the Blade to manage my Sun Enterprise and other Unix/Linux-based servers and systems. I tossed Netscape to the side and just find or compile one of the Chromium-based browsers. I always wanted to see how far a could modify the SunPCi card with CPU upgrade kits I use to do with PC compatibles Oracle, boo boo

[@WooShell]

The Type 6 keyboard was absolute garbage.. to the point that people left it in the pack and bought adapters for the Type 5 to USB instead. The weak rubber dome keys make extensive typing feel like digging in warm mud. I never had a worse keyboard ever, especially not from a premium vendor. Thankfully, Sun noticed the many complaints and released the Type 7 a few years later, which was more or less a Type 5 with USB controller inside. Also, I'm quite sad that Sun stopped making desktop machines after the Ultra 45.. the T2 CPUs would have been great in developer machines with their many cores.

[@TheNovum]

Sun Ultra 5 user here, i envy the built in USB ports.. But DHCP problems? Never had any issues. I have cheated abit IDE to SATA adapter on my machine

[@SlexPiter]

Earlier UNIX machines doesn’t have DHCP. I thinking that’s the point.

[@foobar1979]

@@SlexPiter Solaris got DHCP in 2.6 relased in 97.

[@sbrazenor2]

Sun was one of those companies that made beautiful machines that were utterly useless for the average user. They were likely great for the applications they were made for, but they were pretty worthless if you wanted to do anything that required software that most people use. The fact that they were doing IPV6 instead of just IPV4 back in like 2002, is pretty interesting. Most people are still on IPV4.

[@SlexPiter]

Maybe someone know where can I get software fo HP-PA PA-RISC? I mean not the OS. It not a problem.

[@CelGenStudios]

There is an HP Visualize machine here and I could make almost a 1:1 copy of this video using that and it's the same issue: There is not a lot of "software" you can find for it in the open, exclusively for PA-RISC. Commercial titles like AutoCAD, yes but then you have to deal with licensing. I've found that through this era if you owned computers like this you either ran custom software on it. you ran very mundane software on it like an email server or you used commercial software with very tight licensing or distribution control.

[@SlexPiter]

@@CelGenStudios i have HP 712, HP 715 , B2000 and c8000. But software for this system that's a problem. For HP 712 you can find NextStep and find some software as well games. I just wanted to run something on it when i bring this system for retro event. Also i have IBM 43P and it's have same trouble. Stupid world of UNIX system 🤣

[@danw1955]

I have the original HP-UX 11i Ver. 1 Enterprise Operating Environment, complete with Support Plus Gold QPK patch bundles. Also have the HP-UX 11i Bonus pack with assorted application software. I don't know what licensing caveats you'd need to go through to make any of this work since I converted my J-series workstations and RP2470/A500 server to open source Debian HPPA Linux quite a few years ago. The only drawback is there are very few video cards that will actually support Linux, since HP won't release the code for the graphics cards to make them work with a GUI. To my knowledge, the C8000 is one of the few that will support an actual GUI under HPPA Linux. Hit me up in the comments if you're interested in that HP-UX package. I'll keep an eye out over the next few days.😉

[@SlexPiter]

@@danw1955 I'm already writing. I would be happy with any software =)

[@digitalvintage_ru]

@@SlexPiter absolutely agree! I have HP 712 and C3000 hp-ux machines, a lot of Sun machine and even same RS/6000 43p machine - and with little exceptions - only OSes and some console tools for these machines. Only SGI and Alpha are somewhat better with software - there is plenty of GUI software and even games for Irix and nice porting tools for Tru64.

[@henrymckelvey5214]

That is why I use OpenBSD on my two SUNBlade 100s

[@EricJorgensen]

"some reason" the graphics corrupt = the window is using a different colorspace than the desktop. This was a standard xwindows thing in the long long ago.

[@Artemisgoldfish]

The second battery strictly remembers the machine's last power state. That's it.

[@s8wc3]

I think that's an NLX format system. kinda neat

[@p1st0ls44]

cool video. My brother had a sunray

[@PearComputingDevices]

Apple even suffered the problem of making systems that look absolutely beautiful, but software that was less than fantastic. Don't get me wrong Mac OS 9 and early OS X looked beautiful, Mac OS 9 had many inherent problems and was typically not very stable while early Mac OS X demanded tons of ram and storage space while not offering much in software without using Mac OS 9 software, totally defeating the purpose. It wasn't until Mac OS jaguar did things really start to come together for Mac OS X and the beautiful PowerPC architecture. I still own a MDD 1.25 ghz model that can boot in to OS 9 natively and Mac OS X because of it. It's beautiful hardware, and probably best of both worlds with the software too. Out of all the non x86 vendors Apple probably handled this the best they could but even Apple came up a little short.

[@JanoJ]

One Major innaccuracy, that is actually relevent to this. The Core2 was NOT the first "x86" based 64bit CPU. That would be the AMD Opteron 64 (servers) followed very quickly by the AMD Athlon 64 (desktop/mobile). This is why the x64 arch is still to this day often refered to as AMD64. Why relevent to this conversation? Sun themselves started using the Opteron on their systems, and moved solaris to AMD64.

[@vurpo7080]

There's a lot of names for the architecture. AMD originally introduced it and officially calls it "x86-64". Because AMD created it, some places (like for example many Linux based OSes) call it "AMD64". When Intel took x86-64 and implemented it in their own CPUs, they call it "Intel 64". And to make everything worse, Microsoft went and called it "x64", which makes no sense.

[@CelGenStudios]

Drat! I knew I forgot a chip! Sorry.

[@mikethemaniacal]

i must be a blade 100. i lose my mind when i wake up too.

[@charleshines2142]

The quality of that keyboard sounds similar to that of HP and Dell. If you ever saw their computers in a store even the mouse feels like there were a zillion corners cut in production. The keyboards are small and look like the worst things you could ever be doomed to typing on all day and the mice are so light they feel like they have no internal structure at all. Now what is so bad about the mice you may be wondering. Any mouse that did not come with those computers (bought separately with a good keyboard too) feel a hundred times better. The mouse that HP and Dell ship with their desktop is so light it feels like a good sneeze may budge it.

[@TradieTrev]

The end was a pisser! What an odd piece of computer hardware, I loved to know how modern Linux performs on it.

[@CelGenStudios]

There were a few flavors of SPARC64 linux that made it to the Blade 100 over the years (Notably Debian) but I have not really looked into anything modern.

[@thiesenf]

lol... "finally we come to the CPU itself" *the view changes to the chassi*... Oh... so you're a "12:00 flasher" as well... :-) And ofcourse you used the CD tray as a mug holder?

[@chriskalkman3815]

Capacitor bloat alert! there's one behind the CPU heatsink.

[@CelGenStudios]

Ah! someone finally spotted that!

[@ran2wild370]

That was the disaster. CDE was a ghost from the 3.11-Hell in WindowsXP era. Patch management was way too difficult for novices who had gotten accustomed to things like apt or urpmi.

[@blu3_enjoy]

Oracle Blade is really impractical compared to other desktop pc solutions

[@apojoga]

50 years of progress and we end up with Unix and Java.

[@leonidas14775]

No Killer App seems to be a common theme with failed hardware platforms.

[@meskes4059]

So… Sun had their own version of the OrangePC card. Interesting.

[@boardernut]

Perhaps a bit to late to comment here. I still work with Solaris after 2+ decades so I know a thing or two. You are mostly missing the point here with these late Ultra Sparc machines, particularly the low end which includes the Sunfire Netra v100 and X1 (almost the same architecture). Most enterprises which had a data center filled with Sun hardware needed replacement for aging small Sparc Servers (5, 10, 20 32bit SuperSparc pizzabox workstations and servers) that were completely end of life and support, so Sun Microsystems offered these cheap x86 alternatives in an effort to stop companies the migration to linux for simple solutions suchs as firewalls, small webservers or middleware services and X clients

[@CelGenStudios]

Hmm. I never thought of them as stop-gap systems.

[@jaimeduncan6167]

Pretty interesting.

[@AORCrazy]

A fine piece of HW but it was unfortunately unfinished. If they just put 24bit color card in it, leave OpenWindows for the main GUI and wrote a bunch of software for, it would be a hit... but they didn't, don't know why. You actually can use this machine today but you have to write yourself software for it 🤣

[@herdware]

Annoying that it's such a pain in the butt to fix the NVRAM in these compared to the older versions of OBP. EDIT: I always loved the Sun hardware, never was a fan of Solaris.

[@Inadvisablescience]

Near the end, it sounds like it is sending out Morse Code, then flatlines.

[@97.7FM]

Smart people living in USA!

[@WizardNumberNext]

AMD became 64bit in 2003