The Sun SPARCStation 20: A Generic 90s pizzabox UNIX workstation
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 เม.ย. 2019
- Ah Sun workstations...the workstations you could find easily at every university in the 90s and 2000s. If you ever stepped foot inside of a university during that time you were guaranteed to see at least one of these. Now just like CRT monitors, K-Cars, and any remaining hints of intellectualism at colleges they've gone the way of the dodo.
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This is the only 90s pizza box, that isn't generic :) It's a true SMP capable system with up to 4 CPUs. Back in the day, no other pizza-box formfactor system could do that.
I had a garage full of the Sparcs and accessories around the turn of the century, enough to run a small country. I loved the SS20. In fact, I used to use it as an early mediacenter for Internet radio. I also had the Basilisk 68K Mac emulator running on it. Sadly, I had to get rid of them all. I tried to give them away for free and no one wanted them. I even posted them online, nothing. In the end I left them out for a council clean up, a pile 8m long and 1m high. I still regret that decision.
Thanks! That was the first real computer (UNIX and blazing fast) I worked on in my college days, after crappy slow PCs with Win 3.1 on them. I love Sun, they have done so much good - released so much of their software and even hardware into the open source domain. Contrast that with HP and their UNIX technology - almost nothing is available in the open source, and even getting HP-UX documentation is getting difficult now...
NetBSD is pretty good.
Love these machines. They really bring that classic comfy Unix feeling. That crazy mouse brings back memories. Cool video. Cheers!
I am wondering if your SPARC20 was originally just a server class, because you needed to add a graphics card. Possibly why it seems slow.
My SPARC20 is "jacked" with 512Mb of memory, 2 x ROSS 150Mhz CPUs, 2 x 36GB internal SCSI drives, an internal SUN DVD drive, floppy, 10/100-scsi card, 4 port 10/100 card, and an LSI video card. It has always been loud, and consumes a ton of power. So much so, I stopped using as a personal webserver two months after getting it, many years ago. I am bummed to learn I missed out on ROSS 200Mhz CPUs. I am super-bummed that I didn't figure out how to make it a quad CPU configuration, by updating firmware. I just booted it for fun the other day, and my battery was dead. Did the battery hack, and am thankful to see how you programmed your replacement.
I had an SGI Indy IRIX workstation and I can confirm it was amazing, but dig deep into Sun's history. I think you will be impressed by their contributions. Sun kicked ass in the late 90's, early 2000's, and my industry totally rode on SUN hardware to drive our web presence in an industry that couldn't be down. Sun's scientists/employees are legendary. Take a look at the original employee wiki, it is impressive: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Sun_Microsystems_employees
That said, I am an open source guy now. Running quiet VMs on a super energy efficient system.
Loved the sparcs...
I did a lot of work on these machines the 80s and 90s. They were a big deal for tech industries.
Welcome to YiffGameReviews
OpenWindows as a desktop environment predates Solaris.
It was developed by Sun and a few other companies as the NeWS desktop system.
It ran on Sun 1 , 2 and 3 systems with the Motorola 68k cpus.
Back then it was mostly black & white ( no greyscale yet)
It might be only 60 MHz but it had a 64 bit processor when the PCs of that era were only 32 bit. I remember these computers running Solaris while PCs were running Windows NT 3.5 or 4.0 at colleges and universities.
i use to have one of them way back when with a 50MHz supersparc proc that i ran nextstep 3.3 on instead of slowlaris. if you haven't done so, you should give nextstep a try. it was quite zippy on the ss20 and i used it as my next box until i acquired an hp 712/60 then i gave the ss20 away.
Loved using Nextstep on my Nextstation slab back in the day. It was an excellent OS. Never tried it on a Sparcstation but I imagine that the performance was probably a bit better on it. I think the Nexstation only had a 32 bit Motorola 68030 processor.
I recall my dad using a sparcstation back in the 90s to design shirts (using a plotter). I'm curious as to what program existed for sun OS that would allow for design and plot? Very very curious...
I remember when HotJava browser was released in 1995. It was a really big deal, and for a while it was the only way to use java applets. I remember it was slow.
Overheating / throttling: CPUs and cooling back then was designed to run 100% forever. I think the Sparcstation in particular had a design flaw, it wasn't a general problem.
I was really surprised to find out that you were able to use U320 drive on SS20. I picked a couple of them up from eBay and plugged them in. Voula, these tiny quiet U320 drives work beautifully in SS20. So, I figure I would use it on my SUN Ultra 1 Creator3D machine but ironically, it does not recognize the drive. I would assume that the newer SUN U1 creator SCSI interface would also work but that is not the case. I also have U1 170 non-Creator machine (Ultra 1 Enterprise) without the Creator3D FFB slot. Apparently, these work with the U320. I wonder what the issue is. Have you had a chance to test the U320 drive in Creator3D Ultra1 machines?
You shouldn't focus so much on the mouse. I worked on these Sparc Stations back in the mid 1990's at a university laboratory and the Sparc20 was the BOM! Back in the day the old Unix guys I worked with would look upon the mouse with disdain and call it a "rodent". A real man uses the keyboard and Unix commands anyway...for example excellent word processors used back then like VI didn't need the mouse at all. Using the keyboard was always faster, more precise, and overall more effective. Today we are spoiled with using a mouse. Good video thanks for the blast from the past...
LOL, generic? More toward boring Dell or Packard Bell? Packard Bell!? Such as they are, sir, your observations are biased and uninformed. As workstations and servers, these were absolute UNITS in their day that ran most of the internet in the nineties. Their sleek, compact, modular industrial design is STILL a master class on how to build an enterprise workstation. How is this the first hit under SPARCstation 20? This capable and historically relevant platform deserves much better than a half-hearted "review" of a dirty, poorly spec'd, and taped together example.
Did you try the pizza box or is that when the pizza box form I'm looking for the old spark box
I don't know about 'generic', I think I saw somewhere that the SparcStation 20 started at $12k back then! I mean of course when they became obsolete after 5 years back then tech was moving so fast, they were not really wanted I'm sure. But now it's pretty cool to see compared to all these boring PCs out.
I think You misunderstand SUN in the university ecosystem: Yes they were expensive, but in the 1990s these machines did things no PC could even dream of: Even my lowly SparcStation 1 has network and sound (input and output) ON BOARD! Many scientific instruments, esp. those with big data volumes (at the time!) REQUIRED Sun workstations, just to capture the data and control the machines.
And remember: the separate data analysis software, handling the proprietary data format only runs on SUN workstations, too. A win-win. ;-)
Also: Sun had INSANE discounts for academic institutions, sometimes even "buy a $10,000 computer, get 1 for free" No, I'm not joking.
Those machines had a much longer life expectancy: At my university they bought a NMR Spectometer (Chemistry department) in the early 1990s with 2 SparcStation 5, they upgraded the NMR and the computers in the mid 2000s (Sun Blade 2000s).
The next upgrade was to PCs running RedHat Linux in the 2010s, tho. ;-)
The PC ecosystem, esp. in the 1990s and 2000s moved at a totally different pace than the UNIX (SUN, SGI, IBM, ...) world.
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