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Sun Sparc 5 Nostalgia
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.
What do you mean coming alive again? The ECE computer lab here at rutgers it still filled with them!
...right here. They also have Ultra 60s, 80s, etc.
The Army reading list
Note: The article says "just about any" standard monitor with an HD15 will work -- not so. At least on the earlier Ultra 5s, you had to be somewhat choosy with your monitor.
From personal experience;
Doesn't work:
MAG DJ530
IBM G70
Does work:
Panasonic SL70i
Panasonic E70i
Panasonic S70
Sun monitors (duh)
Sony 15", 17" (can't remember model numbers).
Symptom: No display with incompatible monitor, regardless of m64 settings.
Lesson: Try the monitor with the box before you buy it.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
It's not a SPARC 5, it's an Ultra 5. The former implies 32-bit, the latter 64. Not that anyone here knows or cares.
For those people who aren't old enough to know there is a difference, the Sparc 5 was the baby brother of Sun's Sparc 20, and was a sun4m machine. The Ultra 5 discussed in the article was a much later beast, with a sun4u architecture, and crippled horribly with various PC-isms including IDE and sharp case edges.
As far as their being useless, I bought one just recently for one of my students to use as a workstation to work on visualising the results of the modelling work that will be done in the coming year. For next to no money you can pick up a decent workstation that runs Solaris, often with a fantastic monitor. Outdated, Ha!
Nihil Illegitemi Carborvndvm
The article is about an Ultra 5 being resurrected, not a traditional sparc 5. Just so we're clear, the sparc 5 was among the Sun 4m CPU class while the Ultra 5 was a Sun 4u class CPU. The Sparc 5 is a 32 bit arch while the Ultra 5 is 64 bit. The Sparc 5 uses SBUS expansion cards, MBUS CPU expansion bay, has onboard 10mbit ethernet, standard SCSI II support, and usually shipped with a CG6 8 bit color card (not always). The Ultra 5 has a built in Sun IIi CPU, 100Mbit ethernet, PCI bus support, and IDE instead of SCSI disks. It also has an onboard 8bit ATI graphics adapter.
If given the choice I would take the Sparc 5 simply for it's greater I/O bandwidth alone. Actually, give me an Ultra 1 or 2, or a Sparc 20. Frankly, the Ultra 5 was a hunk of junk even on release. I wouldn't pay a dime for one of those. JMO. --M
I bought an ultra 5 a few years ago used, and it sat running Solaris at my email server for my home domain. Then I got sick of Solaris, since it reminds me too much of my days working at Genuity. Talk about nightmares... everytime I sat down at the computer I felt my old PHB asking me for a status update and a team schedule and to update my bug reports.
So I wiped Solaris off it and starting fooling around with Debian Sparc. But it seemed... cheesy... just wrong. This is my personal box. Debian just seemed too easy. So I bit the bullet and put Gentoo for Sparc on it. Gentoo is PERFECT for reclaiming older hardware. A little reading of man gcc, some thought about my use flags... ( mine are: USE="apache2 imap maildir samba xml -arts -avi -encode -esd -gtk -gnome -imlib -kde -mad -mikmod -mpeg -oggvorbis -oss -opengl -qt -sdl -truetype -xv -xmms -motif")
And a FREAKING LONG TIME compiling everything... and I have the Unix box I've always wanted. Mine. No one else's. I mess with it, beat on it, do things do it I'd never do on a production system. It's totally fun, and Gentoo Linux on the Ultra 5 has given me a reborn enthusiasm for Linux and computers in general.
it'll do just fine as a fileserver and entropy generator. and you cant beat the price.
nor can you beat the amusement of seeing what was left on the drives... mind boggling!
This line pissed me off:
Back then, 64-bits was more of a marketing tool, and in many respects, still is.
64 bit gave higher precision for use on CAD workstations. Anyone who every used a Sun workstation for it's intended purpose would know this.
-sirket
Unfortunately, you don't care enough to understand the situation. There's nothing to fix. 64-bit userland would only benefit a very very few apps (that needed more than 4GB of RAM), and would significantly slow down the rest of them. (I was actively subscribed to the debian-sparc mailing list for several years. Do some research, and talk to the sparc linux maintainers.)
I expect that this will come out in one of the promised followup articles on OSNews.
UltraSparc has a 64bit userland if you care to compile it. Currently the only distribution that I know of that provides one is the Aurora Linux distribution that is based off of RedHat 7.3. More information about the project is Here at the Aurora Linux website .
.
Currently its 64bit userland is limited to the C library and a few support libraries. This allows you to compile applications in 64bit mode so that they can gain the benifits of 64bit mode.
Most cases using 64bit applications cause the machine to be slower due to the doubling in the length of the addressing pointers and other factors. Better explination is available in their FAQ entry on this 64bit vs 32bit issue
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
When you say "Sparc 5" most people assume you mean "SparcStation 5"
To the average OSNews reader (and indeed to Eugenia herself) a late-90s Ultra 5 is an ancient computer. Such people would have absolutely no use for a SPARCStation, since (if you read any of her OS reviews) the only thing they're interested in is eye candy.
Me, I have a old NeXT Color Turbo, that's a 33 Mhz 68040, 32M RAM box running a BSD derivative, that is still as useful a machine as it ever was - the real business of programming, editing text files, hasn't changed much in 30-odd years. Only the kids who judge a box by what window manager or web browser it's running think any different.
The thing these kids don't understand is that back in the day, kit was built to last. Old SPARCStation 5's are dead reliable, and if you want a DNS, mail, a web server, a CVS server, whatever, they're perfect for the task. And you can get a lot done with a box like a 10 or a 20, they'll happily support 20 users running terminals, editors, compilers, etc etc. Only thing that's slow is their frame buffers. Buy a modern PC and it's useless in 3 years, it was never made to last.
It runs RedHat 5.2... No, really! I still have the CD. I also have a CD for SunOS 4.1.4, which I might load on it again one day.
It ran Solaris2 like a pig, btw...
Two 50 Mb Quantum HDD, 64 Mb of 9-pin DRAM DIMMs in four banks of four... Ah, those were the days. (NOT!)
Edith Keeler Must Die
Not true. I've been using a Logitech TrackMan Pro for several years now, with the aid of a nifty box that converts PS/2 devices (has an input for a keyboard and for a mouse) into the Sun connector. It was a Sun part number, somewhat obscure, but definitely available and useful. It's called the "Sun Interface Converter" and the Sun part number is 595-3692. I'd recommend you go looking for one if you are having trouble coming up with Sun Keyboards & Mice or if you want to use your Sun system with a standard KVM switch (which is what I do at home).
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Any nostalga computing /. posts should only include
1. stuff from 1990 or earlier
2. square peg in a round hole
2.1. ethernet in a c64
2.2. web server on a TRS80
2.3. porting modern software to old obscure platforms
3. Univac 1
Next week: Slashdot impressed when someone figures out how to use an ancient PIII/700. Yeesh.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.