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Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

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Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#51

Post by 0des »

ianai wrote: post #36
0des wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A subset of us still use plan9, usually in the form of 9front. Every time I think of Plan9, I get a little misty eyed and wistful. I'm just old enough to remembering time sharing systems and mainframes. These days looking at whats called cloud, I'm seeing a lot of the old architecture coming back, loosely speaking. Mobile devices are like the new dumb terminals, the browser is the shell, and the cloud is our mainfram…

I completely agree! What are the features from the front end of P9 that you miss most?

Simplicity (im a TWM guy) also the way that acme is like a emacs from the future in that like the plan9 ui the mouse gets a lot of traffic. You can highlight words and instantiate them as commands, also one of my favorite features is preemptively drawing the space where my window is about to spawn.

Also, the color scheme is truly based, as the kids say.

Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#52

Post by mdehling »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #3

https://github.com/mdehling/sun-fb-logos/blob/main/HOWTO.ado... describes how to dump firmware images; I assume after that getting these is as easy as pointing binwalk or something at it?

Unfortunately, no, at least not in all cases. For some of these the logo was in Sun RasterFile format or in a simple (width, height, colormap, data) format. In other cases it took a serious amount of reverse engineering to extract the logo: For the RasterFlex-HR logo I had to read the colormap from the hardware directly because the firmware never initializes it.

Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#55

Post by mdehling »

classichasclass wrote: post #24
kazinator wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Still got that Quake executable? The 712 here says hi (in a SAIC Galaxy 1100). I have a BriteLite IPX, an UltraBook IIi and a Tadpole Viper badged as the Sun Ultra-3. However, I'm rather fond of Solbournes, the other white SPARC meat. The S3000's flaring orange gas plasma is distinctive. I should finish restoring the Series 5 chassis and all those Kbus cards I have in storage.

Nice collection! I’ve never seen the S3000 in person, but from the photos I’ve seen it looks amazing. Love the orange plasma on my IBM PS/2 P70/P75!

Any chance you might be willing to help out by sending me some firmware or logo data? For the little B&W logos it could be as simple as typing “sun-logo 200 dump” at the ok prompt.

Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#56

Post by classichasclass »

mdehling wrote: post #55
classichasclass wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still got that Quake executable? The 712 here says hi (in a SAIC Galaxy 1100). I have a BriteLite IPX, an UltraBook IIi and a Tadpole Viper badged as the Sun Ultra-3. However, I'm rather fond of Solbournes, the other white SPARC meat. The S3000's flaring orange gas plasma is distinctive. I should finish restoring the Series 5 chassis and all those Kbus cards I have in storage.

Nice collection! I’ve never seen the S3000 in person, but from the photos I’ve seen it looks amazing. Love the orange plasma on my IBM PS/2 P70/P75! Any chance you might be willing to help out by sending me some firmware or logo data? For the little B&W logos it could be as simple as typing “sun-logo 200 dump” at the ok prompt.

Let me see what I can do this weekend. The Sol PROM is more limited but I may be able to make it cough up something.

Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#57

Post by pjmlp »

0des wrote: post #23
gonzo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A subset of us still use plan9, usually in the form of 9front. Every time I think of Plan9, I get a little misty eyed and wistful. I'm just old enough to remembering time sharing systems and mainframes. These days looking at whats called cloud, I'm seeing a lot of the old architecture coming back, loosely speaking. Mobile devices are like the new dumb terminals, the browser is the shell, and the cloud is our mainfram…

Ideal only if one doesn't care about high performance graphics or audio, which Plain 9 didn't had anyway.

Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#58

Post by NexRebular »

lokedhs wrote: post #15
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 o…

Would that demo be on one the Ultra Pack collections? Archive seems to have the first volume but it seems there were several released. Sadly they are super hard to find even on eBay.

Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#59

Post by lizknope »

the_only_law wrote: post #47
neilv wrote: post #21

In the Sun-3 (Motorola 68K) and early Sun-4 (SPARC) workstations, you got just the monochrome logo. It was nice and tasteful, fitting well alongside a large black-on-white serif console font. Then the first time you saw an early Sun-4 with CG6 graphics boot, with the full-color 3D image, on that black-on-white console display, it seemed a little out of place, but cool. The Linux boot logo of the Tux penguin might've…

I’ve heard some of these had Forth in ROM, which would be fun to play with, but the only type of Sun machines I see in the market are later Sun Stations and I have 0 clue if those have forth as well.

The Sun SPARC machines I used in the 1990's used Open Firmware for booting. It contained a Forth interpreter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

Re: Collection of Sun Workstation boot logos

#60

Post by zeruch »

otachack wrote: post #10
zeruch wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My last Sun box was a Sparc 20 IIRC, and I had that until 2007ish or thereabouts, before I gave it up. Sun is still one of the best companies I ever worked at, and I was there when the E10K and Java was released, really exciting times without a hint of the circus/surreality show the industry has become.

I'm envious! I was in college when the acquisition happened. I wonder how different the world of computing would be if that buyout didn't occur.

Not sure if the computing world would be that different, but maybe Oracle would have taken a humbling tumble (I loathed them years before they even attempted the buyout, as their corporate culture is too much like Lord of the Flies except "anyone not named Larry Ellison is Piggy" and I've rebuffed every attempt to be recruited by, purchase new or renew existing Oracle contracts. Rip and replace any chance I've had.
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