hckrnws

What's with all the retro hardware stuff going on?

I owned a couple of Sparc 1s back when Sparc 10s were cool and they were ancient, then! I'm talking like 1996? I don't even remember now. I had scrounged up a bunch of cast off Sparc hardware because I was obsessed with UNIX at the time and UNIX machines were hard to get near unless you worked at a big company or a university. Linux was in its infancy but was already making fast inroads to the UNIX market, particularly SCO, which was pretty much already out of business by then (kept alive for lawsuit purposes). HP-UX was huge, along with Solaris, which the Sparc 1 could run with a little effort (as opposed to SunOS, which was already pretty much obsolete).

Anyways, I had the Sparc box going for quite awhile and a friend at the time who worked in the campus switch room hatched a plan where we would hide it under the drop floor and make it into a DNS-less (IP only) pirate Ftp site, complete with a, um, ok, STOLEN, 1GB SCSI drive, which at the time, was a fairly expensive item. We operated the pirate ftp site for a couple of years. I don't know what happened to that box because I subsequently moved many states away and I think my friend just kind of lost interest and turned it off, probably scrapped it in the end. Linux killed off all the desktop UNIX platforms shortly thereafter. I doubt anyone could get away with adding some random node to a university network these days due to all the monitoring, but back then nobody gave a damn. It was truly an amazing time of discovery and quasi-illegal (and totally illegal) behavior.

There's something thrilling about spinning up an old machine... it's like resurrecting a digital dinosaur. You're back in a time when systems felt strange and commands were different (especially on older UNIX). Everything was slower, but somehow more intentional. It's like stepping into Jurassic Park: you're not just using old tech, you're interacting with a living fossil. It's a glimpse into the DNA of modern computing, and it's a lot of fun!

I have mixed feelings about the openboot font, specifically that most times I saw it my life was actively sucking.

Other than that it's very nice for a console font. Why don't we have PC BIOSes with that font, eh?

I still fire up my old SPARCbook 3000ST (Solaris 2.5.1) in case I need a hit of Sun UNIX nostalgia from back in the day.

And whenever I give a presentation at a venue that has a projector with VGA input, I'll do the presentation from the same SPARCbook.

Worth the read if for no other reason than to see the disk ejected in zero gravity.

Oh my. Yeap, definitely check polarity and voltages on used stuff.

At least it wasn't as bad as someone at my high school (c. 1995) who plugged a Centronics printer into a Mac SE external SCSI connector and released the magic smoke™ of both.

Oh my that brought some real memories back. My first real programing job was in 1989 on a Sun Sparc 1+ Identical to that. Writing imaging C code for an industrial app before photoshop.... Loved that box.

"Bad magic number" brings back some PTSD of trying to get a Sun Server working in like 2001. My friend and I futzed with that thing for hundreds of hours.

Combing usenet for answers and reading useless, bulky manuals.

Good memories from uni working with those (and other Sun) machines. I still have many of them and last I checked (during covid) they all still work.

The title had me thinking it was first plasma at the SPARC reactor. Unfortunately, not yet.

Thank goodness I gave up physical retrocomputing as a hobby ages back. Oh, I've held on to my display piece IIe, and framed the motherboard of my high-school 486, the first machine I ever built myself. Past that, though, these days everything is emulated or virtualized. Leaded solder fans and museumists are welcome to the rest!

Those SPARCstations were noisy, slow, and power hungry. I wouldn't be running them either which is why I got rid of mine which were in the attic for a decade.

Yeah, nostalgia or historical learning is one thing, but these things can’t even browse the modern web (processors can’t handle modern TLS ciphers and our phones have higher resolutions that these can drive). You will be hard pressed to even run modern-ish server-side code that doesn’t use encryption. Even OpenBSD, which tries to cross-compile on as many architectures as possible to expose potential bugs, had to give up on sparc32.

They will eventually just take up space.

A Sparcstation5/10 will run NetBSD 10.1; but modern web browsers are just too fat for that hardware.

You see a Duesenberg in a museum sometimes, too. We even still say "doozy."

The Sparc 1 and 1+ was already landfill by around 1995 or so. The 5s and 10s ran circles around them.