Oh my that brought some real memories back. My first real programing job was in 1989 on a Sun Sparc 1+ Identical to that. Writing imaging C code for an industrial app before photoshop.... Loved that box.
Oh my. Yeap, definitely check polarity and voltages on used stuff.
At least it wasn't as bad as someone at my high school (c. 1995) who plugged a Centronics printer into a Mac SE external SCSI connector and released the magic smoke™ of both.
"Bad magic number" brings back some PTSD of trying to get a Sun Server working in like 2001. My friend and I futzed with that thing for hundreds of hours.
Thank goodness I gave up physical retrocomputing as a hobby ages back. Oh, I've held on to my display piece IIe, and framed the motherboard of my high-school 486, the first machine I ever built myself. Past that, though, these days everything is emulated or virtualized. Leaded solder fans and museumists are welcome to the rest!
Those SPARCstations were noisy, slow, and power hungry. I wouldn't be running them either which is why I got rid of mine which were in the attic for a decade.
Yeah, nostalgia or historical learning is one thing, but these things can’t even browse the modern web (processors can’t handle modern TLS ciphers and our phones have higher resolutions that these can drive). You will be hard pressed to even run modern-ish server-side code that doesn’t use encryption. Even OpenBSD, which tries to cross-compile on as many architectures as possible to expose potential bugs, had to give up on sparc32.
[delayed]
I still fire up my old SPARCbook 3000ST (Solaris 2.5.1) in case I need a hit of Sun UNIX nostalgia from back in the day.
And whenever I give a presentation at a venue that has a projector with VGA input, I'll do the presentation from the same SPARCbook.
Oh my that brought some real memories back. My first real programing job was in 1989 on a Sun Sparc 1+ Identical to that. Writing imaging C code for an industrial app before photoshop.... Loved that box.
Worth the read if for no other reason than to see the disk ejected in zero gravity.
Oh my. Yeap, definitely check polarity and voltages on used stuff.
At least it wasn't as bad as someone at my high school (c. 1995) who plugged a Centronics printer into a Mac SE external SCSI connector and released the magic smoke™ of both.
"Bad magic number" brings back some PTSD of trying to get a Sun Server working in like 2001. My friend and I futzed with that thing for hundreds of hours.
Good memories from uni working with those (and other Sun) machines. I still have many of them and last I checked (during covid) they all still work.
Thank goodness I gave up physical retrocomputing as a hobby ages back. Oh, I've held on to my display piece IIe, and framed the motherboard of my high-school 486, the first machine I ever built myself. Past that, though, these days everything is emulated or virtualized. Leaded solder fans and museumists are welcome to the rest!
Those SPARCstations were noisy, slow, and power hungry. I wouldn't be running them either which is why I got rid of mine which were in the attic for a decade.
Yeah, nostalgia or historical learning is one thing, but these things can’t even browse the modern web (processors can’t handle modern TLS ciphers and our phones have higher resolutions that these can drive). You will be hard pressed to even run modern-ish server-side code that doesn’t use encryption. Even OpenBSD, which tries to cross-compile on as many architectures as possible to expose potential bugs, had to give up on sparc32.
They will eventually just take up space.
You see a Duesenberg in a museum sometimes, too. We even still say "doozy."
I have mixed feelings about the openboot font, specifically that most times I saw it my life was actively sucking.
Other than that it's very nice for a console font. Why don't we have PC BIOSes with that font, eh?