Hasty Briefsbeta

How many SPARCs is too many SPARCs?

5 days ago
  • #Sun-Microsystems
  • #vintage-computing
  • #SPARC
  • Author rescued a collection of vintage SPARC-based workstations from potential landfill.
  • Collection includes Sun Fire V100, Sun Netra T1, SPARCstation 1, SPARCstation 2, and others.
  • Sun Fire V100 (2002) has a 500MHz UltraSPARC-IIe, 1024 MiB RAM, but failed to boot from a Debian CD.
  • Sun Netra T1 (1999) features a 440MHz UltraSPARC-IIi, 1024 MiB RAM, and detailed POST output.
  • SPARCstation 1 had power supply issues, while SPARCstation 2 units showed signs of life but had problematic hard drives.
  • Some machines successfully booted Solaris 7 from an external BlueSCSI device.
  • Author plans to explore remaining machines (SS10, SS5s, SS20s) in future posts.