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eschaton posted:Varying people have varying opinions on her. That’s all I’ll say openly. I don’t want to alarm you but someone has been using your account to say a fair bit more than that openly
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Oct 9, 2025 12:36
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Subjunctive posted:I don’t want to alarm you but someone has been using your account to say a fair bit more than that openly just not necessarily here in this thread
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Oct 9, 2025 17:37
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Dang it, I won an auction for a SPARCstation 5 on the opening bid. It's a really good price, don't get me wrong, but I was hoping someone would outbid me because I don't have time for another project right now and it'll just sit in the corner for the next few months. Now I have to figure out how to adapt my VGA/PS2 KVM cable to Sun's thing because the one thing I don't need is a separate set of HIDs. I'm probably going to put OpenStep on it just to be a weirdo.
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Oct 12, 2025 01:17
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some kinda jackal posted:Dang it, I won an auction for a SPARCstation 5 on the opening bid. Congrats, I love the SS5. I used one as my primary computer running NetBSD in the late 90s. Wish I kept mine. Please post pics so I can live vicariously through you.
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Oct 12, 2025 01:28
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cdc posted:Congrats, I love the SS5. I used one as my primary computer running NetBSD in the late 90s. Wish I kept mine. Please post pics so I can live vicariously through you. Are you me? I know you’re not because I ran Solaris on mine, but same, for everything else you said
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Oct 12, 2025 02:02
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Rest assured there'll be pics unless it's DOA. Trying to figure out what peak Solaris would be for one of these. Not sure I want to go above 2.6 on old gear. I said next/openstep, but my first job outta highschool was janitoring solaris on labs full of Solarii so we all know I'll end up there. Who am I to deny myself some nostalgia? I've had my eye on a few Ultra 2/5s as well for a speedier Sun. I had an Ultra 2 Enterprise that I dumpstered when I moved back to Canada because I had no more room in the car. My priorities were all wrong :< some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 02:28 on Oct 12, 2025 |
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Oct 12, 2025 02:12
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Beve Stuscemi posted:Are you me? I know you’re not because I ran Solaris on mine, but same, for everything else you said We are just different quantum occurrences of the same spirit.
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Oct 12, 2025 02:27
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some kinda jackal posted:Rest assured there'll be pics unless it's DOA. Trying to figure out what peak Solaris would be for one of these. Not sure I want to go above 2.6 on old gear. I said next/openstep, but my first job outta highschool was janitoring solaris on labs full of Solarii so we all know I'll end up there. Who am I to deny myself some nostalgia? Solaris 2.5.1 is the sweet spot IMHO, but NetBSD works really well on it too.
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Oct 12, 2025 02:29
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SunOS 4.0.3_U1
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Oct 12, 2025 13:24
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some kinda jackal posted:Rest assured there'll be pics unless it's DOA. Trying to figure out what peak Solaris would be for one of these. Not sure I want to go above 2.6 on old gear. OPENSTEP/Mach 4.2 will be great on it. SunOS 4.1.4 will be great on it. Solaris 2.5.1 will be fine on it. and modern NetBSD will be great on it. quote:I said next/openstep, but my first job outta highschool was janitoring solaris on labs full of Solarii so we all know I'll end up there. Who am I to deny myself some nostalgia? don’t forget that (if you can find it) you can run OpenStep for Solaris on it, too—that’d be Sun’s implementation of the OpenStep specification atop Solaris and X11 which includes all of the APIs, end user applications, and developer applications
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Oct 13, 2025 01:54
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I also had a Sparcstation 5 with matching keyboard, optical mouse (with crazy metal patterned mousemat) and CRT tonks ago but gave it away because I didn't use it. Of course I regretted that a while later, so when I saw an untested (and slightly beaten up) SS5 on eBay for pretty cheap recently I gave it a go and it works fine! It does have the slowest processor (70MHz I think) but has 256MB of RAM so when I try some things on it I'm sure it will cope OK  Re: adapters for a KVM, there's a Belkin Omniview Sun keyboard+mouse and video to PS2+VGA adapter which is specifically for using old Suns on PS2 and VGA KVMs, and it's cheap on eBay (in the UK at least). Reports on Reddit say that you may need one of the 13W3 to VGA adapters but it comes with such a lead which is supposed to do the job! (I've not tried mine yet but I shall do when I can conjure enough desk space for it...) Edit : I'm planning on trying it with two graphics cards and monitors because why not? Even a low spec SS5 with this sort of hardware would probably have originally cost decent house deposit money 
legooolas fucked around with this message at 08:57 on Oct 13, 2025 |
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Oct 13, 2025 08:55
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if you use an Avocent KVM of the right series there are Sun as well as PS/2 adapters for it
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Oct 13, 2025 09:36
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Ah yeah I have a rebadged avocent by Dell so I'll see if I can find the appropriate pod. And thanks for all the info gang! I guess posting in here got me a little more excited about this than I thought. Really looking forward to getting this now.
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Oct 13, 2025 12:21
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Am I reading this right that the S24 frame buffer only supports 1024x768@70Hz, 1152x900@66Hz, and 1152x900@76Hz? You can't hook it up to a modern monitor that only supports 60 Hz?
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Oct 13, 2025 16:54
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That'd be my assumption. I'm hoping that I can come up with something that will support it, but the fallback will just be finding a different sbus framebuffer I suppose.
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Oct 13, 2025 18:24
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that’s correct, unless you’re using a Sun video card with a programmable dot clock and you actually program it (sorry I don’t remember which have programmable clocks) the (once) high-end LCDs that I use—NEC MultiSync LCD 1990SX, HP LP2465—work just fine with the Sun frequencies and have a 1:1 mode that works great for the 1152×900 resolution
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Oct 13, 2025 18:30
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eschaton posted:the (once) high-end LCDs that I use—NEC MultiSync LCD 1990SX, HP LP2465—work just fine with the Sun frequencies and have a 1:1 mode that works great for the 1152×900 resolution I'm pretty sure a ton of monitors quietly support higher refresh rates at anything other than their max resolutions. At a bare minimum they all support 70hz for VGA boot mode.
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Oct 13, 2025 18:41
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From my experience with old Macs that output similar modes this is correct. 75hz I had mixed luck with but 66hz worked with basically everything I tried (e: and 75 did work with some, it just wasn't a guarantee).
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Oct 13, 2025 19:01
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Someone order a stack of pizza boxen? A lot of the old UNIX wars hardware I accumulated over the years has gotten donated, sold, or scrapped but a lot of Sun stuff has survived just because the form factor.
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Oct 13, 2025 22:57
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Ugh, I am super jealous. I loved my old SS5. I have one now but the motherboard is dead and the replacement I bought on eBay is unsurprisingly also dead!
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Oct 13, 2025 22:59
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As of last check (~2 years ago) with one exception all my old Sun hardware is still running. The only exception was, I guess you'd call it ironically, the most modern platform...an E250 whose power supply decided to give up the magic smoke. The SPARC 5s most recently were servers for the home network, circa the early 2000s. The E250 was actually in use as a backup server (connected to a DLT library) until somewhere around 2014. For whatever it's worth that's better reliability than I've personally had with old AXP hardware (although that might be influenced by the fact that a bunch of my alpha stuff was third-party; I still have a Personal Workstation and, implausibly, an ES40 that are still running). And I think roughly half of the SGI power supplies gave up the ghost at some point.
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Oct 13, 2025 23:35
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SubG posted:Someone order a stack of pizza boxen? Ah yes that would have been me! Can't find a SUN KVM pod for my Avocent system so I broke down and did the thing I said I didn't want, snagged a cheap Type5 keyboard and mouse. Long term I still want to put it on the KVM. Found a tindie that has a ps2 to Sun adapter but they're out of stock right now. I figure I can wait. That's two devices I need to adapt to my KVM now. The SS5, and my Vaxstation VLC. e: It's going to suck so hard when my SS5 arrives from eBay and it's actually dead. some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Oct 14, 2025 |
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Oct 14, 2025 00:40
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SubG posted:Someone order a stack of pizza boxen?  I just really love those machines.
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Oct 14, 2025 00:46
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The 3/60, SS2, and SS20 are perfect iterations of the Sun workstation concept. Sleek pizza box with huge capabilities for the era but simultaneously somewhat commodity. If only Sun had released a multiprocessor-capable SunOS 4 that could run on the SS20. The closest you’ll get is modern NetBSD, which will actually be pretty drat close (and within 10% or so of the performance of SunOS 4 on the same hardware)—but it’d be even better if NetBSD’s SunOS compatibility was sufficiently complete to run the entire SunOS userland including SunView and XNeWS.
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Oct 14, 2025 08:00
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Yeah, 3/60s were everywhere back circa the Morris worm. The academic department I was working for around then more or less skipped the sun4c's, so the "standard server" went from being a 3/60 to a SPARC 10, and a little later a couple of SPARC 20s. I rescued one of the 3/60s from getting scrapped when we cleared out a warehouse of unused hardware but ended up leaving it in my office when I got a different gig so it's long gone now.
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Oct 14, 2025 10:01
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Ok since I'm waiting on my delivery I'll poke the Sparc gurus with some questions. Is there a compatibility layer that lets sun4u+ workstations run 32bit sun4c/d/e/m binaries? Pointedly, f I have software that was contemporary to a SS5, would it be a no-go on an Ultra5? I'm a little hazy on how this works. I ask because while I'm waiting for my sun4m SS5, there's a bunch of cheap Ultra5s out there too. I know they're not as cool and feel a little PC-y, but I wouldn't say no to one in my collection at the right price. Just wondering whether I need to expect some software to not work with it outright. It makes sense to me that the opposite would not be true, that obviously a sun4m wouldn't be able to run a 64bit sun4u binary, so this is really just me wondering whether an Ultra machine is limited in what it can run, which I would IMAGINE is not the case, but I live to learn every day.
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Oct 14, 2025 22:22
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In general 32-bit binaries should be compatible across the various sun4 machines, not counting poo poo like drivers. Solaris 2.5.1 is a 32-bit OS, for example, and you can compile (not cross-compile) poo poo on an Ultra 2 or whatever and it'll run on a sun4m machine like a SPARC 5. It's been a lot of years so I might be forgetting a bunch of gotchas, but I don't remember there being as many compatibility headaches with Sun poo poo as there was with, for example IRIX. I also might have a Ultra 5 around here looking for a good home, but I'd have to dig it out and power it up to see if it's still running. Cosmetically it's not as pristine as the SPARC 5s and 20 I posted because for some reason the plastic on literally every Ultra 5 I've seen yellowed, like, a couple years after they were made.
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Oct 15, 2025 00:32
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reading about SPARC was the first time I recall encountering the idea of register files and hardware register renaming. where was that first done?
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Oct 15, 2025 00:35
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Subjunctive posted:reading about SPARC was the first time I recall encountering the idea of register files and hardware register renaming. where was that first done? quote:It was developed by Robert Tomasulo at IBM in 1967 and was first implemented in the IBM System/360 Model 91’s floating point unit.[1]
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Oct 15, 2025 00:45
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gracias! I miss reading old papers. you don't see sentences like this very often in modern ones quote:The distinction between source and sink will become
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Oct 15, 2025 01:01
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also I like that the paper seems to be aimed squarely at the set of humans who need to design a floating point arithmetic unit. I wonder if there were more of them then or now
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Oct 15, 2025 01:02
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There are way more people working on FPU design now than there were then, but there are way fewer FPU designs being worked on now than there were then.
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Oct 15, 2025 03:59
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Looks like the Interim Computer Museum will have some systems on display at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo: https://retrogamingexpo.com/computers.php
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Oct 16, 2025 00:48
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Octane2 get. Someone please take away my credit card.
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Oct 18, 2025 17:25
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I’ll take your card but I have to warn you I’m gonna use it to buy things like sparcstations and sgi gear
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Oct 18, 2025 17:55
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Beve Stuscemi posted:I’ll take your card but I have to warn you I’m gonna use it to buy things like sparcstations and sgi gear I'll take it but in the feral decaying state of Canada I'm gonna use it to buy things like food and clothes
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Oct 18, 2025 18:02
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Arivia posted:I'll take it but in the feral decaying state of Canada I'm gonna use it to buy things like food and clothes Yer not gonna believe the status of Canada compared to the States
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Oct 18, 2025 18:15
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If Canada is feral, what is the US? Rabid?
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Oct 18, 2025 18:42
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Aunt Beth posted:If Canada is feral, what is the US? Rabid? Yep. Canada is broken but isn't trying to export the broken elsewhere. The US is definitely contagious.
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Oct 18, 2025 18:52
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some kinda jackal posted:Octane2 get. Nice! Big purple workstation with slick graphics, what are the specs for yours?
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Oct 18, 2025 19:02
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