All of our chip design software ran on Solaris and we needed a new faster machine compared to the 200 and 300MHz Ultra 2 machines we had.
I remember it came on a palette and it was 3 inches off the ground. I wondered how we would get it off the palette. Then we started reading the instructions and it came with 2 wooden ramps that fit into slots on the palette and we just wheeled it down the ramps because the server was on caster wheels. We just rolled it into our server room.
I was 22 and it was just so cool.
NetBSD still supports it, and a wide variety of other SPARC systems https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sparc64/
MORSE was a big Sun reseller in Europe in the 90's. I haven't heard their name since the dot-com bubble popped !
Craigslist is a last resort.
This was also before ewaste regulations came in and some engineering school departments would just throw decommissioned hardware out on the loading dock for people to pick over. One day a pile of SPARCstations showed up and my roommates and I grabbed them all.
We put together two working SS-5s by picking and pulling parts from about eight of them. Had our own mini Sun lab in our living room so we didn't have to go out in the snow and try to stake out an open machine in the engineering computing center.
I was too lazy to do things like shell into a remote Solaris machine to double check before submitting though. I was YOLOing before it was cool.
I owned many sparcstations. Once I bought a bunch of pizza-boxes for peanuts. Not many worked, but mix and match memory + graphics cards and some did.
I had two full racks of SPARC, DEC Alpha, SGI, and other trash, in my one bedroom apartment.
Now my experiment hardware is raspberry pi and RISC-V stuff (visionfive 2 & orangepi RV2). Much more manageable with space, noise, and power bill.
It's hard to explain how advanced was Solaris at the time, specially Solaris 10 which had something named "Zones" which were actually some initial form of containers. With Zones you could run another instance of the OS completely isolated from the main Solaris (the kernel was shared, but for your apps would look like a native OS). You could even run another Solaris version! that was a cool approach to migrate a really old solaris 8 app to solaris 10 without having to change the app code.
Zones, combined with Sun Cluster or Veritas cluster would give you the ability to migrate those zones from one node of the cluster to the other (with it's own lun -external scsi disk/volume attached-) giving you some reaaaaaly interesting and new approaches to system design.
You can think about it as your dad's kubernetes.
Nothing like that could be done in linux at the time, and no one would use linux for any critical task, only for lamp servers.
Time has passed.
sokoloff•5mo ago
I'm not in a rush and you shouldn't be either, but if you can make use of them or just want them, my email is in my profile.
"My gain of shelf space is your loss..."
kps•5mo ago