I'm tempted to go back to my roots and pick up an old SUN workstation.
Always loved the hardware, and their keyboards were top-notch.

My desktop SUN for years was a Sparc 2 with a Weitek Power-Up CPU; I
think the aftermarket CPU doubled the clock speed. I maxxed out the RAM
and had the low-end framebuffer. 19" CRT monitor, a desk breaker.

Checking on the web, they're EXPENSIVE!

Looking at shoebox Suns like the IPX or LX didn't reveal a lot.

Widening my search, Ultra 2s or Ultra 5s are available, and
significantly cheaper. They also are much more powerful systems, and I'm
pretty sure the 5 takes PCI expansion cards.

That's not the point, though. :)




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Always loved the hardware, and their keyboards were top-notch.

I have two Sun Type 7 keyboards that I keep as 'backup', and my main driver is a Unicomp Sun Type 5 clone. Sun keyboards are perfect for Emacs users.

... Mistress: A cutie on the Q.T.

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On 05 Feb 2024 at 08:34a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

I'm tempted to go back to my roots and pick up an old SUN workstation. Always loved the hardware, and their keyboards were top-notch.

My desktop SUN for years was a Sparc 2 with a Weitek Power-Up CPU; I
think the aftermarket CPU doubled the clock speed. I maxxed out the RAM and had the low-end framebuffer. 19" CRT monitor, a desk breaker.

Checking on the web, they're EXPENSIVE!

I ran Kerberos servers on a -2 for years; SunOS 4 was nice,
but eventually we ditched it and went with OpenBSD. I had
something like 3 years of uptime on that box.

My desktop workstation for a while was similar: a 1+ with
maxed RAM and a big monitor. I liked the type 4 keyboards,
but the type 5's were sort of lame.

Looking at shoebox Suns like the IPX or LX didn't reveal a lot.

Widening my search, Ultra 2s or Ultra 5s are available, and
significantly cheaper. They also are much more powerful systems, and I'm pretty sure the 5 takes PCI expansion cards.

Yup. The Ultra 5 had PCI and, I think, IDE disks. That
was the signal that Sun had lost, for me. I remember a
sysadmin friend showing me an Ultra 5 or 4 next to a Pentium
machine from IBM: "yup, the Sun is twice as fast, but the
PC costs a quarter what the Ultra does." That was it: x86
was going to eat SPARC's lunch, and it did.

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tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

Yup. The Ultra 5 had PCI and, I think, IDE disks. That
was the signal that Sun had lost, for me. I remember a
sysadmin friend showing me an Ultra 5 or 4 next to a Pentium
machine from IBM: "yup, the Sun is twice as fast, but the
PC costs a quarter what the Ultra does." That was it: x86
was going to eat SPARC's lunch, and it did.

I lived through those times, too. I was a *BSD/Solaris admin in the mid
to late 90s, Linux wasn't quite ready for primetime.

In 2000, I managed a web site that ran a stack of cheap Intel linux
boxes running Apache with an Oracle/Sun back end. Sure, it didn't run as
well as a Solaris front-end, but you could buy a bunch of white-box
servers for the price of a Sun.

Then, a couple of years later, people thought to replace Sun/Oracle with Linux/MySQL, and it was all over.

Good times while they lasted, though.



... Towards the insignificant
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On 08 Feb 2024 at 08:14a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

Yup. The Ultra 5 had PCI and, I think, IDE disks. That
was the signal that Sun had lost, for me. I remember a
sysadmin friend showing me an Ultra 5 or 4 next to a Pentium
machine from IBM: "yup, the Sun is twice as fast, but the
PC costs a quarter what the Ultra does." That was it: x86
was going to eat SPARC's lunch, and it did.

I lived through those times, too. I was a *BSD/Solaris admin in the mid
to late 90s, Linux wasn't quite ready for primetime.

In 2000, I managed a web site that ran a stack of cheap Intel linux
boxes running Apache with an Oracle/Sun back end. Sure, it didn't run as well as a Solaris front-end, but you could buy a bunch of white-box servers for the price of a Sun.

Yup. Google ran into that exact same thing, and realized
that for the price of a big machine from Sun, DEC or SGI,
they could buy an enormous number of cheap x86 machines
and scale horizontally. At one point, we were even buying
manufacturer reject RAM for like 25c on the dollar (those
days are long gone, though). We realized that if you plan
for unreliability at the software layer, you can save a
huge amount on hardware, and we had the sort of scale where
the economics on that actually made sense.

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tenser wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

Yup. Google ran into that exact same thing, and realized
that for the price of a big machine from Sun, DEC or SGI,
they could buy an enormous number of cheap x86 machines
and scale horizontally.

That reminds me - I have a audiobook version of "Into the Plex", by
Steven Levy. It documents the early days at Google, and I think touches
on some of that. It's about time for a re-listen.




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