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539

I had a chance to play with a Sparc Ultra 10 that a Uni was getting rid of. I never had the time or chance to play with anything after that though. I did run x86 "solaris" for a while just to test it out. Guess that helped out like 20 years later supporting a POS NAS at a large org that no one had a clue what to do with. "Fun" times. I probably didn't have a clue how to really take advantage of the hardware at the time and even then it was not the most useful but it was interesting.

@stupidbird Not sure who else to @ Lots of us have worked on old stuff like this.

Archive: https://archive.today/QwQcB

From the post:

>The truth is, our desktop computers today would have been classed as supercomputers only a few decades ago. There was a time when people who needed real desktop power looked down their noses at anyone with a Mac or a PC with any operating system on it. The workstation crowd used Sun computers. Sun used the Sparc processor, and the machine had specs that are laughable now but were enviable in their day. [RetroBytes] shows off Sun’s final entry in the category, the Ultra 45 from 2007.

I had a chance to play with a Sparc Ultra 10 that a Uni was getting rid of. I never had the time or chance to play with anything after that though. I did run x86 "solaris" for a while just to test it out. Guess that helped out like 20 years later supporting a POS NAS at a large org that no one had a clue what to do with. "Fun" times. I probably didn't have a clue how to really take advantage of the hardware at the time and even then it was not the most useful but it was interesting. @stupidbird Not sure who else to @ Lots of us have worked on old stuff like this. Archive: https://archive.today/QwQcB From the post: >>The truth is, our desktop computers today would have been classed as supercomputers only a few decades ago. There was a time when people who needed real desktop power looked down their noses at anyone with a Mac or a PC with any operating system on it. The workstation crowd used Sun computers. Sun used the Sparc processor, and the machine had specs that are laughable now but were enviable in their day. [RetroBytes] shows off Sun’s final entry in the category, the Ultra 45 from 2007.
[–] • 1 pt (edited )

I had an ultra sparc station 30 for a workstation for 4 years and the reliability is insane. I ran that thing at one hundred percent load while simultaneously leveraging computing power remotely via X sessions from sunfire servers. It really is a shame they sold and got intel'd.

edit: added a zero after the 3

[–] • 1 pt

I had a Sparc workstation on my desk for about 10 years - ending about 20 years ago. The system-on-a-chip and uP test solutions I supported were 2Gb and up. I thought the Sparc was the most amazingly powerful system I'd ever used. Compiling/linking huge programs was a breeze. We also had DEC Vax systems and networked x86 PCs. The Sparc Workstation was king in my mind.

[–] • 1 pt

how to really take advantage of the hardware

Sun was a big iron company that also made workstations. The performance they could produce was a function of "everything is multi threaded," and the magic really started to happen with eight or more CPU. I never used those big girls.

Reliability was amazing. I had a SPARC 10 "pizza box" workstation that I rebooted once per year after taking it to the shop to blow the dust out with a 100psi compressed air line.

Toward the end of Sun I traded pizza box in on a Blade series workstation which was a delightful machine for me.

I used SPARC 10, ultra 1, E220 which was ultra 60 in rack server configuration, and the blade 1000.

What a great product and company to work with. They are probably gone because it wasn't run by psychopaths.

[–] • 1 pt

Never really had much chance to work with one of those, the last one I saw was relegated to a *nix boxen for some almost dead project at Ma Bell.

Such an ignoble end for Sun, but it's perform or be recycled. They didn't perform.