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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 Outdated, Ha!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
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
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.
/.) even links to another discussion site as a story!
Oh yes, 64-bit has been not a luxury by a necessity in many industries for a decade now, anything that involves heavy number crunching - CAD, CAE, CFD, other forms of simulation, Monte Carlo runs in finance, physics models...
A while ago OSNews reviewed, IIRC, a new Sun workstation. The conclusion? It's crap because it's too hard to change the resolution or the colour scheme. Not one test they did was even remotely related to what a workstation is used for, they didn't even try compiling anything, let alone doing some MATLAB or solid modelling.
You can pretty much ignore any OSNews review of anything, in fact I've no idea why a discussion site (i.e.