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Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

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Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#11

Post by lizknope »

kazinator wrote: post #4
zeruch wrote: post #2

Oh, the nostalgia...(disclosure: worked at Sun in the mid 90s)

I had a Sun SparcStation 20 in the mid 90's at work. I was some discarded equipment that nobody was using, that was just laying in a corner somewhere. I put Red Hat Linux 2.0 on it from a CD-ROM. I put a TFTP server on it, and used it as the server for booting an NCD X/Window terminal. Also something nobody gave a shit about. I had GIMP running on it; at some point, people gathered around the cube to see that. Being…

I had a SPARCstation 5 on my desk in 1997. I took an SBus graphics card out of another machine. It would boot just fine without it. Then I put it in my SS5 and connected a second monitor. People around me thought it was amazing that I could have 2 monitors on the same machine.

We got a few Ultra 2 machines and then an Enterprise 450. I still remember being so excited when it arrived on a palette and when we unboxed it it came with 2 wooden ramps that attached to the palette so you could roll it down to the floor.

One engineer got an Ultra 60 as his desktop but by 1998 we started replacing most desktop machines with Linux / x86 and running everything remote and displaying to our local machines via X11 with the Suns in the closet. We also had a Sun Enterprise 4500 with around 16 CPUs at the main office.

By 2003 we started replacing our Suns with AMD 64-bit machines and Linux. All of our semiconductor design software was already Unix / X11 so it was easy to port to Linux. Around 2004 the switch was complete and we never used Suns anymore. They just fell behind the price / performance curve and couldn't compete with Linux / x86-64 anymore.

Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#12

Post by ianai »

jdswain wrote: post #6

I do miss the diversity of computing from back then. Today everything has converged on looking and acting almost the same, but back then there was so much more choice. Amiga, Atari St, Mac, SGI, Sun, NeXT, and a whole lot more.

Yep. Nowadays a new release is likely to take features or design away or backwards for seemingly the need to be different. Like the many times Microsoft has tried to take away the Start menu. Gnome 2 to 3. Etc.

Meanwhile Planet 9 tried to pull off a logical extension of unix only to be abandoned. Some of those ideas live on, but probably not as extensively as P9 would have allowed.

Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#13

Post by drewg123 »

zeruch wrote: post #2

Oh, the nostalgia...(disclosure: worked at Sun in the mid 90s)

The first computer I owned was a Sparcstation 1, bought used in 1993 or so. I was a sysadmin in DEC oriented place (running Ultrix & OSF/1), and missed SunOS from my university days. I used it mainly as a terminal. I replaced it with a Pentium Pro running FreeBSD after a few years.

Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#14

Post by DonHopkins »

drmpeg wrote: post #5

Here's some Solaris wallpaper. 1920x1080 https://www.w6rz.net/solaris.png 750x1334 https://www.w6rz.net/solarisios.png

Here is an old surrealistic brochure I scanned and posted to archive.org about the Sun-4/200 Series Supercomputing Workstation with 10-MIPS Processing Power.

https://archive.org/details/sun4200seriesbrochure/mode/2up

They had racks full of those brochures and others just as weird for the taking, in the lobby of Sun Building 1 in Mountain View (2550 Garcia Avenue, now the Intuit building), around 1987 or so, when I was a summer intern.

Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#15

Post by lokedhs »

zeruch wrote: post #2

Oh, the nostalgia...(disclosure: worked at Sun in the mid 90s)

Same. I left early 2000's. At one point I wrote a an OpenGL game which ended up on the demo CD that came with the Ultra workstations. It contained a big 3D Sun logo that I created by manually writing the appropriate code in C. It was easy once I figured out that the dimensions of the logo are all very nice even values.

The game itself should still be available on one of those discs. Perhaps someone created an image of it.

Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#19

Post by gonzo »

ianai wrote: post #12
jdswain wrote: post #6

I do miss the diversity of computing from back then. Today everything has converged on looking and acting almost the same, but back then there was so much more choice. Amiga, Atari St, Mac, SGI, Sun, NeXT, and a whole lot more.

Yep. Nowadays a new release is likely to take features or design away or backwards for seemingly the need to be different. Like the many times Microsoft has tried to take away the Start menu. Gnome 2 to 3. Etc. Meanwhile Planet 9 tried to pull off a logical extension of unix only to be abandoned. Some of those ideas live on, but probably not as extensively as P9 would have allowed.

I think you mean “Plan 9”; in case anyone wants to search for it.

Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#20

Post by ianai »

gonzo wrote: post #19
ianai wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Nowadays a new release is likely to take features or design away or backwards for seemingly the need to be different. Like the many times Microsoft has tried to take away the Start menu. Gnome 2 to 3. Etc. Meanwhile Planet 9 tried to pull off a logical extension of unix only to be abandoned. Some of those ideas live on, but probably not as extensively as P9 would have allowed.

I think you mean “Plan 9”; in case anyone wants to search for it.

Yes sorry, long day.
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