The idea anyone would be running a Sparc in 2007 for performance . . .
Some time around 2003 my boss had a Sparc machine as his desktop, though this was widely viewed as unix nerd nostalgia even then. As a junior I got a PC. It turned out my PC built the project 5x faster than the Sparc managed. After this I don’t think we bought much from Sun except one of those big tape drives, and lots of Dell servers appeared instead.
This is part of the reason why Linux ate their lunch. For the price of one Sun server, you could get 4 Dell servers that ran Linux, and they were faster. Granted, you didn't have all of the redundancy that was built into these higher end Sun systems or the really good support, but hey you had 3 extra machines as a backup.
Around that time I was working as a Solaris admin, C/C++ systems programmer and software packager, our manager gifted us all a SunBlade 1000 in my final year there, although we all used Windows laptops for our day to day work.
I got blank look when I asked "why?". Sure they were snappy, and you could run StarOffice on them, but really there wasn't a lot that they were useful for in our day to day work. Nice machines to be sure, but completely extraneous. I already had a fleet of Sparc build servers running everything from Solaris 2.5.1 through 2.9 which I used to build and package open source stuff for our corp servers. Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere.
Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks. BTW, even Linux lose benchmarks to windows often times.
We used a Sparc Ultra 10 for a Authentication server in 2000, it supports concurrent 100K users without any issue, obviously you need to write your own software, but the server is super stable. And yes, we use cheap x86 + Linux for all sorts of thing from 1996 and it was quite faster but you can not trust it the same way as a Sparc.
I'm sure this end-of-the-line machine had its merits. But if you want the cool of Elvis before he got fat, go back to when a SPARCstation 1 running SunOS 4 was new.
The contemporary PC running MS-DOS or early Windows was just a toy by comparison.
I was one of those annoying unix “I know this” kids except from early exposure to a pizza box Sparcstation, not SGI. That was in the era when Suns sold strangely well to people doing lots of color processing work. (I think you can blame Kodak for that). When the PC ran rings round the Sparc at work I fully understood how far they had fallen.
Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working, in a way that 2007 Linux would not; however RAM was dropping in price at the time and this wasn't much of a concern as a result, for desktops at least.
Yeah - my AlphaServer DS25, which is five years older and has dual 1 GHz Alpha CPUs, can keep up quite well in many regards with a dual 1.5 GHz Sun Fire V245 (which is very similar to the Sun machine here).
SparcOS was an awesome unix. Linux was respectable as well, but the hardware story in 2007 was much more shitty. Hardware vendors pretty much ignored linux, going for windows as I recall.
So if you just wanted a good Unix environment, SparcOS was it.
Java/ZFS were both Sun products, and we're still using them today. Just not SparcOS. Sun tried with Project Indiana, but they were getting outpaced by Linux and the open source movement.
No, if you just wanted a good Unix environment in 2007 you would buy an x86 workstation with Linux preinstalled which existed from multiple vendors/VARs. Or Mac.
I was specifically talking about the corporate experiment of deciding to go that hard for open sourcing your crown jewels, and Oracle has notably discontinued their participation in that experiment.
Small addition: there were also the x86-based Sun 386i models, running up to SunOS 4.0.2.
(The Sun 386i didn't get SunOS 4.1 nor Solaris 2, at least not at our site, where we had a few sitting around in empty cubicles, and occasionally used for random things.)
Just to add some nuance: SunOS up to version 4 was strictly BSD-based with vendor enhancement. "SunOS 5" became Solaris 2, and conversely, SunOS 4 was retroactively dubbed "Solaris 1".
Solaris 2 and up were derived from System V release 4, which had actually merged the best of System V with both Xenix and BSD, so rather than being purely AT&T Unix, SVR4 was promised as the best of all worlds, with some ability to pick and choose which variety was in play, based somewhat on provision of both types of utilities in separate directories, and appropriate libraries and APIs.
SVR4, IMHO, was the best and most stable Unix, and the right choice for vendors to adopt in those days.
funnily enough, solaris 2 was also identifying as sunos 5 depending on what tool you used to query.
sun's pivot from bsd to at&t was a very nice and clean change (I was the one who ended up upgrading our sunos servers to solaris when the time came in the 90's), sequent's switch was a nightmare.
I still miss my e4500, though, but not the noise or electric bill.
I miss Sun hardware, especially in the sun4c era. Everything was so solidly built and well thought out compared to a lot of PC hardware. The IPC/IPX is still one of my favorite form factors.
I still have an IPC on my desk as a monitor stand. In 1996 I used it as a router for my 24hour 56kbps modem connection, serving all of 204.94.173.x - I was paying tlg.org $145/mo for my Class C address space, and all my home machines were just hanging out there. that is the internet I really miss.
Same! My IPC served my domain using Solaris on a nailed up bonded ISDN circuit until someone filled the root disk trying to patch the rpc.cmsd remote exploit. After that it was BSDs until I settled on OpenBSD.
I have been thinking about getting an old IPC or IPX and swapping out the internals with a modern PC motherboard and components, but only if I can do it cleanly. I haven't done it due to not having enough free time and... it just feels wrong to me in some way.
Ah the trouble of finding a unix workstation with a pristine case and thoroughly cooked interior so you don't feel bad about gutting it for a casemod. Call me when you find one.
When I arrived at CERN back in 2003, there was a pile of Sun workstations on a corner from my office, waiting to be dispatched to computer heaven.
Most folks were either using the new OS X, or Windows, with a custom Linux distribution on the servers, eventually replaced by Scientic Linux distribution.
There were still some Sun stations kind of serving the X Windows sessions on the restaurant area, and even those didn´t last much longer.
Late 90s / early 2000s was when Sun workstations changed from very expensive but well constructed proprietary machines to very expensive PCs with cheap internals and unusual processors. However I still got an ex-university Sun workstation around 2002 for free (or a token price?) which served me well as a desktop machine for years and years. It eventually died of the capacitor plague that (to be fair to Sun) affects just about everything from that era.
Setting the SPARC bits aside, I feel like the Ultra 20/24/27 machines were well-constructed 64-bit x86 machines with regular AMD and Intel processors and ECC memory and reasonable fans and so on. I don't remember how they were on price, but I feel like they were not outrageous when compared to similar lines from Dell or HP at the time.
The pricing was the other Sun problem. It was a super grimy negotiation to get them down from their ludicrous publicly stated pricing to what you could actually get them for, which was more reasonable, you just wanted to clean yourself afterwards.
In the UK Sun had done some deals of the type that in North America are dominated by IBM (banking infra etc.), so they were probably absolutely milking those clients and giving the rest of us more slack than they wanted to let on.
I wanted on of these sooo bad. I've always had a softspot in my heart for SPARC. I loved working with those systems at work. I used to have a second hand T5440 that I got off ebay for super cheap, I think it had 128G of RAM and 256 threads!
I always salivated over Sun SPARC workstations. I'm kind of sad to hear that the specs of the last SPARC workstation were so … low… but I guess time destroys all things
As a sysadmin, the only thing I miss about Sun hardware and Solaris was how reliable it was. My record for uptime was over 6 years on a Sun Blade workstation.
While not quite a Sun system, I still have my Tadpole Viper. The only thing that runs on it in a straight forward manner is OpenBSD; even Solaris needs patch discs. I'd still use it regularly if only web browsers would work. I still prefer its keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever owned. It's the machine I was using when I finally was able to overcome my previous difficulties in learning C. And I even got to diagnose an endian problem.
When I was looking for a not-Solaris OS, OpenBSD was the only game in town for it. Literally. Somebody maintaining the UltraSPARC OpenBSD port decided to support this oddity specifically. Nothing else, including NetBSD, would work.
I feel such nostalgia for Sun hardware. I've had several sparcstations over the years: a SparcStation IPC, SparcStation 5, and an Ultra 10. I still have the Ultra 10, and put OpenBSD on it the other month, after replacing the NVRAM chip.
I just booted up an old Sun 3/80 a little while ago for fun. Needed a new NVRAM chip (and had to figure out how to reprogram it). Used an SD to SCSI adapter, as the old hard drive was toast. Finally used tftp to network boot it off a linux VM, and install SunOS 4.1.3. Then played around with it for a bit and thought, "man, I used to think this slow as molasses machine was fast." I looked over at the 3/50 and thought about trying to boot it, but thought better of it. I've got a Sparc 5 I could try, I guess, or the SGI Indigo... I think there's a DECstation 2100 buried in the pile somewhere too.
It was fun to see the bit in the video about the Tadpole SPARCbook 3000XT. They are incredibly rare compared to Sun desktop workstations, but a lot of fun. I wrote about the 3000ST model: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...
The idea anyone would be running a Sparc in 2007 for performance . . .
Some time around 2003 my boss had a Sparc machine as his desktop, though this was widely viewed as unix nerd nostalgia even then. As a junior I got a PC. It turned out my PC built the project 5x faster than the Sparc managed. After this I don’t think we bought much from Sun except one of those big tape drives, and lots of Dell servers appeared instead.
This is part of the reason why Linux ate their lunch. For the price of one Sun server, you could get 4 Dell servers that ran Linux, and they were faster. Granted, you didn't have all of the redundancy that was built into these higher end Sun systems or the really good support, but hey you had 3 extra machines as a backup.
Yeah people used to say in the late 1990s "Linux enthusiasts want it to kill Microsoft, but what it really is doing is killing Sun".
Around that time I was working as a Solaris admin, C/C++ systems programmer and software packager, our manager gifted us all a SunBlade 1000 in my final year there, although we all used Windows laptops for our day to day work.
I got blank look when I asked "why?". Sure they were snappy, and you could run StarOffice on them, but really there wasn't a lot that they were useful for in our day to day work. Nice machines to be sure, but completely extraneous. I already had a fleet of Sparc build servers running everything from Solaris 2.5.1 through 2.9 which I used to build and package open source stuff for our corp servers. Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere.
Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks. BTW, even Linux lose benchmarks to windows often times.
We used a Sparc Ultra 10 for a Authentication server in 2000, it supports concurrent 100K users without any issue, obviously you need to write your own software, but the server is super stable. And yes, we use cheap x86 + Linux for all sorts of thing from 1996 and it was quite faster but you can not trust it the same way as a Sparc.
I'm sure this end-of-the-line machine had its merits. But if you want the cool of Elvis before he got fat, go back to when a SPARCstation 1 running SunOS 4 was new.
The contemporary PC running MS-DOS or early Windows was just a toy by comparison.
I was one of those annoying unix “I know this” kids except from early exposure to a pizza box Sparcstation, not SGI. That was in the era when Suns sold strangely well to people doing lots of color processing work. (I think you can blame Kodak for that). When the PC ran rings round the Sparc at work I fully understood how far they had fallen.
While I'm sure they had their use case, the Sun desktops we had while at university in the early 2000s always felt sluggish.
The servers didn't seem much better. They'd handle a ton of users, but each would get the same slow experience.
The funny thing is that this is precisely what SPARC did to the VAX.
It now it seems likely that arm64 will do the same to amd64.
Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working, in a way that 2007 Linux would not; however RAM was dropping in price at the time and this wasn't much of a concern as a result, for desktops at least.
Yeah - my AlphaServer DS25, which is five years older and has dual 1 GHz Alpha CPUs, can keep up quite well in many regards with a dual 1.5 GHz Sun Fire V245 (which is very similar to the Sun machine here).
SparcOS was an awesome unix. Linux was respectable as well, but the hardware story in 2007 was much more shitty. Hardware vendors pretty much ignored linux, going for windows as I recall.
So if you just wanted a good Unix environment, SparcOS was it.
Java/ZFS were both Sun products, and we're still using them today. Just not SparcOS. Sun tried with Project Indiana, but they were getting outpaced by Linux and the open source movement.
No, if you just wanted a good Unix environment in 2007 you would buy an x86 workstation with Linux preinstalled which existed from multiple vendors/VARs. Or Mac.
SunOS/Solaris, I believe you mean.
OpenSolaris was an interesting experiment.
It’s still going, in the form of Illumos: https://illumos.org/
Kind of.
I was specifically talking about the corporate experiment of deciding to go that hard for open sourcing your crown jewels, and Oracle has notably discontinued their participation in that experiment.
sunos was the bsd-based sun operating system for 68k and sparc. solaris was the at&t based sun operating system for sparc and x86.
Small addition: there were also the x86-based Sun 386i models, running up to SunOS 4.0.2.
(The Sun 386i didn't get SunOS 4.1 nor Solaris 2, at least not at our site, where we had a few sitting around in empty cubicles, and occasionally used for random things.)
Just to add some nuance: SunOS up to version 4 was strictly BSD-based with vendor enhancement. "SunOS 5" became Solaris 2, and conversely, SunOS 4 was retroactively dubbed "Solaris 1".
Solaris 2 and up were derived from System V release 4, which had actually merged the best of System V with both Xenix and BSD, so rather than being purely AT&T Unix, SVR4 was promised as the best of all worlds, with some ability to pick and choose which variety was in play, based somewhat on provision of both types of utilities in separate directories, and appropriate libraries and APIs.
SVR4, IMHO, was the best and most stable Unix, and the right choice for vendors to adopt in those days.
funnily enough, solaris 2 was also identifying as sunos 5 depending on what tool you used to query.
sun's pivot from bsd to at&t was a very nice and clean change (I was the one who ended up upgrading our sunos servers to solaris when the time came in the 90's), sequent's switch was a nightmare.
I still miss my e4500, though, but not the noise or electric bill.
URL changed from https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/the-last-sun-sparc-workstati..., which points to this.
I miss Sun hardware, especially in the sun4c era. Everything was so solidly built and well thought out compared to a lot of PC hardware. The IPC/IPX is still one of my favorite form factors.
I still have an IPC on my desk as a monitor stand. In 1996 I used it as a router for my 24hour 56kbps modem connection, serving all of 204.94.173.x - I was paying tlg.org $145/mo for my Class C address space, and all my home machines were just hanging out there. that is the internet I really miss.
I hear you. For most of the 90's, I had my home network on a publicly routed /24, no firewall.
Same! My IPC served my domain using Solaris on a nailed up bonded ISDN circuit until someone filled the root disk trying to patch the rpc.cmsd remote exploit. After that it was BSDs until I settled on OpenBSD.
I have been thinking about getting an old IPC or IPX and swapping out the internals with a modern PC motherboard and components, but only if I can do it cleanly. I haven't done it due to not having enough free time and... it just feels wrong to me in some way.
Ah the trouble of finding a unix workstation with a pristine case and thoroughly cooked interior so you don't feel bad about gutting it for a casemod. Call me when you find one.
When I arrived at CERN back in 2003, there was a pile of Sun workstations on a corner from my office, waiting to be dispatched to computer heaven.
Most folks were either using the new OS X, or Windows, with a custom Linux distribution on the servers, eventually replaced by Scientic Linux distribution.
There were still some Sun stations kind of serving the X Windows sessions on the restaurant area, and even those didn´t last much longer.
Late 90s / early 2000s was when Sun workstations changed from very expensive but well constructed proprietary machines to very expensive PCs with cheap internals and unusual processors. However I still got an ex-university Sun workstation around 2002 for free (or a token price?) which served me well as a desktop machine for years and years. It eventually died of the capacitor plague that (to be fair to Sun) affects just about everything from that era.
Setting the SPARC bits aside, I feel like the Ultra 20/24/27 machines were well-constructed 64-bit x86 machines with regular AMD and Intel processors and ECC memory and reasonable fans and so on. I don't remember how they were on price, but I feel like they were not outrageous when compared to similar lines from Dell or HP at the time.
The pricing was the other Sun problem. It was a super grimy negotiation to get them down from their ludicrous publicly stated pricing to what you could actually get them for, which was more reasonable, you just wanted to clean yourself afterwards.
In the UK Sun had done some deals of the type that in North America are dominated by IBM (banking infra etc.), so they were probably absolutely milking those clients and giving the rest of us more slack than they wanted to let on.
I wanted on of these sooo bad. I've always had a softspot in my heart for SPARC. I loved working with those systems at work. I used to have a second hand T5440 that I got off ebay for super cheap, I think it had 128G of RAM and 256 threads!
I always salivated over Sun SPARC workstations. I'm kind of sad to hear that the specs of the last SPARC workstation were so … low… but I guess time destroys all things
As a sysadmin, the only thing I miss about Sun hardware and Solaris was how reliable it was. My record for uptime was over 6 years on a Sun Blade workstation.
While not quite a Sun system, I still have my Tadpole Viper. The only thing that runs on it in a straight forward manner is OpenBSD; even Solaris needs patch discs. I'd still use it regularly if only web browsers would work. I still prefer its keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever owned. It's the machine I was using when I finally was able to overcome my previous difficulties in learning C. And I even got to diagnose an endian problem.
> I'd still use it regularly if only web browsers would work. I still prefer its keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever owned.
You can just cheat: https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/08/12/vncfox-better-way-of-bro...
I wonder how well NetBSD would run on it. There're quite a lot of current packages for it:
https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sparc64/10...
When I was looking for a not-Solaris OS, OpenBSD was the only game in town for it. Literally. Somebody maintaining the UltraSPARC OpenBSD port decided to support this oddity specifically. Nothing else, including NetBSD, would work.
I feel such nostalgia for Sun hardware. I've had several sparcstations over the years: a SparcStation IPC, SparcStation 5, and an Ultra 10. I still have the Ultra 10, and put OpenBSD on it the other month, after replacing the NVRAM chip.
I just booted up an old Sun 3/80 a little while ago for fun. Needed a new NVRAM chip (and had to figure out how to reprogram it). Used an SD to SCSI adapter, as the old hard drive was toast. Finally used tftp to network boot it off a linux VM, and install SunOS 4.1.3. Then played around with it for a bit and thought, "man, I used to think this slow as molasses machine was fast." I looked over at the 3/50 and thought about trying to boot it, but thought better of it. I've got a Sparc 5 I could try, I guess, or the SGI Indigo... I think there's a DECstation 2100 buried in the pile somewhere too.
I owned an Ultra 60 at one time and I really liked it. It was a dual processor UltraSPARC II (or III) running at something like 450 MHz.
In one of my groups we had a Sun V480 and we ran all kinds of stuff on it and it never had the slightest hiccup. It was rock solid.
Fun times!
I'd say the most successful Unix workstation maker is Apple. By far.