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Sun Sparc 5 Nostalgia

Posted by timothy on from the perfectly-good-electricity dept.

barl0w writes with what he calls "an awesome on-going story over at OS News about a Sun Sparc 5 coming alive again." Like the article's author points out, if you really want 64-bit computing, it's available cheaply on eBay.

3 of 363 comments (clear)

  1. Re:You can purchase an Ultra 5... by AKnightCowboy · · Score: 0, Troll

    Just beware that Ultra 5's and Ultra 10's have HORRIBLELY slow IDE buses (16 MB/sec or less). I don't believe they support DMA. You'd be better off getting a Sun Blade 100 or a used Ultra 10 with a SCSI card.

  2. Dear Lord ... by nbvb · · Score: 0, Troll

    My gawd, people have no idea what they're talking about.

    First of all, the article is about an *Ultra 5*, not a SPARCstation 5 (Which is what's implied by SPARC 5).

    Secondly, "old"? Geeze.

    The SPARCstation 5 *still* runs the latest-n-greatest versions of Solaris (Sol 9). It's still supported and everything.

    The same CD you use to load Solaris on that SPARCstation 5 will boot a Sun Fire 15k with 106 CPU's.

    Now *that's* scalable. :)

    I seriously can't believe people are considering the Ultra 5 as an antique.

    I still have a SPARCstation 20, and consider it one of my favorite computers, ever. It's got a super-elegant design, is rock-solid, and Just Works (tm).

    How anyone can "wax nostalgic" about an Ultra 5 is beyond me. They're not that old.

    Maybe for you PeeCee dorks who upgrade their video boards every 14 minutes, but to those of us who actually USE our machines for something, they're fresh as a daisy.

  3. Re:Boring, not /. worthy poster by 74nova · · Score: 0, Troll

    *disclaimer: this is based on the modding of "insightful" to the post. if it was intended to be funny, none of this applies.

    your soap box is rotting away it's so old, why dont you just step off of it and realize taht you arent superior just because you are old. you can have superior knowledge because of lots more experience, that is great. knowing about old hardware for the sheer joy of calling me a whippersnapper is just getting, well, old.

    it is most likely that i should humbly bow in your presence, ill admit that, but you requiring me to do so pisses me off.

    well, crap, there goes some more karma

    --
    use your turn signal! you people act like it's divulging information to the enemy