SAVING a 30-year old Sun workstation!

SAVING a 30-year old Sun workstation! - ISP Series Episode 2

Рет қаралды 90,906

Күн бұрын

While we may have left on a cliffhanger in our first ISP episode, this might be our most extensive video to date. We get up close with the SPARCclassic, and delve into the hardware and software that will power our early-90s ISP.
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#90s #internet #technology
00:00 - Loading complete
00:24 - Preserving the history
01:05 - The SPARCclassic
03:24 - Starting the repair
04:52 - Power supply
15:45 - NVRAM
16:42 - Floppy drive
19:14 - Case
22:15 - Reassembly
25:56 - NVRAM programming
28:05 - Installation server
30:09 - Solaris 2.6 install
33:53 - First boot
35:48 - Connecting a modem
38:05 - User #1
38:59 - Outro
Huge thanks to:
Foudroie for the wonderful music from their album "The Journey"
Watch: • Foudroie - The Journey...
Listen: open.spotify.com/album/4K8Lc2...
Allem Iversom for the smooth sounds of "Chapter Two"
Watch: • Allem Iversom x Dontcr...
Listen: open.spotify.com/intl-fr/albu...
...and Downtown Binary for the mega "Astral"
Watch: • Downtown Binary - Astr...
Listen: open.spotify.com/album/1uGa6r...
Above music provided by Lofi Girl.
References:
Ashdown, Pete. Video Interview. Conducted by Serial Port, July 2023.
Jordiferrer (2012). CC BY-SA 3.0. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
cmnit (2007). CC BY-SA 2.0. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Thomas Schanz (2014). CC BY-SA 3.0. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Stephen Edmonds (2011). CC BY-SA 2.5 AU. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
Erkaha (2015). CC BY-SA 4.0. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
The Internet. Computer Chronicles, 1993.
Processor Performance (MIPS). 2023. www.thekurzweillibrary.com/si...

Пікірлер: 289

@jond1536 10 ай бұрын

I dated a woman that worked for SUN, she was an engineer working out of Portland, Somewhere in China and the middle east. bit wacky, but had a great sense of humor. She had a sparc at her apartment and would sit down and "go like the wind" She was a senior engineer and very smart. That sparc workstation brought those memory's back. Great video

@Timi7007 10 ай бұрын

The effort and skill demonstrated in this video 🤯 The power supply restoration alone is where most people would have written this off as e-waste. Thank you for doing this, preserving history and showing the process!

@theserialport 10 ай бұрын

Waiting is hard! We bumped up the Premiere time

@ihartmacz 10 ай бұрын

Thank you. Would have been the wait though because this video was excellent. 🔥

@ILikeMetricMusic 10 ай бұрын

Now the question is, did you post that comment using a 300 baud modem? 😅

@mxg75 10 ай бұрын

3D printing a tiny piece of plastic to repair a dent in the case is going above and beyond with your restoration. I salute your dedication.

@FintanMoloney 10 ай бұрын

This is fascinating stuff. Your content has made this very quickly one of my favourite KZfaq channels. The SPARCclassic looks like a very well organised and built machine in such a small form factor.

@tenalafel 10 ай бұрын

It was great at that time, if you could afford it. I worked in a company where it was the classic desktop and we could do so much with it. ( sadly the PC took over, and after we went to U5, we moved on to desktop PCs and then laptops ). And the screen, the 21" screens weighted a ton but were so sharp.

@alexlefevre3555 8 ай бұрын

Restoring older hardware is a passion of mine... I am enamored with the fact that you completely serviced the floppy drive because the action felt "dull". The attention to detail is exquisite!

@maartendeen8404 10 ай бұрын

Wow, trip down memory lane. I first fell in love with Sun when we used a 3/160 for internet access at college. Later at an internship we used Sparc Classics heavily for CAD (missile guidance systems) and at my first job we used them as print controller. I still have a bunch at home, IPC, IPX, Classic, ELC (love that one), SparcStation 5, 20 and a SparcServer 1000 with a SparcStorageArray. All so obsolete now but I can't make me throw them away,

@joeyd7072 10 ай бұрын

Love seeing videos on early sun systems as I am a technician that works on these everyday. It turns out that, refineries still rely on these for their everyday processes!

@NuculearFallout1 10 ай бұрын

I am absolutely glued to this serious , great stuff so far! For being such a small KZfaqr your videos are fantastically put together ! Can’t wait to see the rest of this series

@JimLeonard 10 ай бұрын

You guys are just hitting it out of the park with your content. Great history, great repair, great background, and accurate (I used and serviced these systems early in my career). You are banging on all cylinders!

@Time4Technology 10 ай бұрын

35:27 The usage output shows a "-m" option (even with the normal skel system for the initial directory contents) similar to modern useradd implementations, I don't think you would have needed to create it manually if you used it.

@kalon9999 10 ай бұрын

Amazing. I was about 5 years too young for all of this but these were very much my early computer experiences. This episode had amazing core memory refreshers, like "use telnet because ssh hadn't been INVENTED YET"...

@MLX1401 10 ай бұрын

Satisfying board & mechanical design. The latching lever is just 🤯 Related tip for fellow tinkerers: if you need to repair broken plastic but can't access a 3D-printer, there's always the classic "superglue & baking soda" -method. You just need these two ingredients and a file and/or sandpaper. If the part is visible, finish with some paint (model paint is really good). I have succesfully repaired a broken record player hinge, battery compartment covers and one printer tray. The fix is very durable!

@I4get42 10 ай бұрын

Yes! I learned that trick from an Adam Savage video not long ago and I was a bit surprised they didn't use it to fill around the 3d-printed part. As an aside, it works really well to patch a cracked fingernail until it grows out enough too!

@livefreeprintguns 10 ай бұрын

I had a SPARC IPX and it was the greatest little monitor stand/OpenBSD cable modem router I ever had.

@Resaebiunne 10 ай бұрын

WOW! That was fantastic. This episode could easily have gotten a lot more technical, but the way you conveyed the information was fantastic. As an electrical engineer with a strong linux/UNIX/BSD background I'm hooked!

@TylerFurrison 10 ай бұрын

Never thought I'd see a smaller retro channel like this.

@kjetilv 10 ай бұрын

Really nice to see these deep dives into old tech

@ppokorny99 10 ай бұрын

Brings back so many memories. I used Adtran ISDN “modems” to provide access to the Sun systems at work. And wrote a whole provisioning system to install and upgrade our fleet of sparc and ultrasparc machines. Became so familiar with that Solaris install process

@JapanPop 10 ай бұрын

I adored your care and attention to getting this iconic machine running and serving. Great to see this.There is a dearth of good Sun content on YT, so thank you!!

@nalle475 10 ай бұрын

Wow I remeber those days 😂. The sound of the modem and the at commands - wow. We used to run a lot of Sun stuff. The weight of the poxes compared to the PCs of the day was a indication of serious stuff. The “pizzabox” versions especially was hard to move around due to the odd shape and weight distribution. Seeing you booting up the machine brought back tons of happy memories and funny moments, like sleeping in turns under tables while setting up large database systems spanning into other countries.

@probablysomeonesomewhere 10 ай бұрын

you are very underrated, you did an amazing job restoring this machine and this video was amazing

@JayJay-88 10 ай бұрын

Nice to see an old Sun machine getting the love it deserves. 😍I bought my first SPARC in 1995 when I was 15 years old - a SLC (20 Mhz SPARC built in to a 17" B/W monitor). Good times.

@lgroschiensalle 7 ай бұрын

I've never seen a computer receive so much love... :P If people loved the Lord just half as much as this man loves his computer, the world would be a very different place.

@PiddeBas 4 ай бұрын

The production quality on this is so good!

@larryroyovitz7829 8 ай бұрын

I like this series. I'm a subscriber! Glad to be here in the early-ish days.

@funjon 7 ай бұрын

This makes me nostalgic for my old SPARC IPX. I miss that little lunchbox.

@christopherbartleson8918 10 ай бұрын

This is absolutely awesome. I'd love to do this as part of my home lab to hook up some old computers to the internet.

@dawnmitchell8213 10 ай бұрын

Videos like this remind me of just how much information I’ve forgotten from those days.

@w9gb 10 ай бұрын

This brings back many memories …. and my solutions at that time. Had a SPARC IPX on my desk for network management, while installed early fiber-optic (multi-mode) backbone (Ethernet, FDDI capable). Fortunately, I was electronics (hardware) geek first - high school electronics teacher was from Motorola.

@dhardison 10 ай бұрын

I was there in the 90s local dialup ISP. We didn't use Sun, but it's still nostalgiac for me 👍

@tcpnetworks 10 ай бұрын

I had about 10 of these machines in the end. We ran RADIUS out of them to get user accounts working. Other ISPs I worked for - we transitioned to freeBSD.

@dhardison 10 ай бұрын

@@tcpnetworks We began as a Windows shop, but switched to Linux for basically everything but the customer representative's desktops.

@MarkyShaw 10 ай бұрын

Bravo my friend. Very well put together video! Love these series that you do. Always wanted to learn more about Sun machines as well. Great work!!!

@BertPdeboy 10 ай бұрын

Man! Super cool stuff! I really liked to see the restoration progress, and am genuinely excited to see follow-ups!

@wingasm1468 7 ай бұрын

Need more of that lo-fi reassembly in my life

@laneium 10 ай бұрын

jort storm at the end really sold me on this

@ScottDuensing 10 ай бұрын

Ah, the memories. Except we built our ISPs on very early Linux boxes. Now I want a SPACclassic to play with!

@dshack4689 10 ай бұрын

subscribed the moment the modem started squawking it answering protocal at 38:10, gosh that sound takes me back! your video is an inspiration - i have 2 sunsparc server10's (and drives and keyboard and mouse and monitor, plus another spac station) from my job in 1995 that one day i need to refurbish and boot up. if you were in Brisbane Australia I'd actually donate them to you as I can see the care you take!

@domxgun 10 ай бұрын

Love the dedication and calmness you bring. I'm thankful the KZfaq algorithm made me discover your channel.

@GuildOfCalamity 10 ай бұрын

One of the cleanest old floppy drives I've ever seen. Great series, keep up the good work!

@Leftylove22 10 ай бұрын

You guys are sharing some great history. It really takes me back to so many memories! Love this channel. Subbed.

@paulkhoury3160 Ай бұрын

Nice choice on that Hakko desoldering gun. Used the same Hakko when I replaced caps in a Sun IPX PSU. Bought two SPARCclassics on ebay and they're my next project.

@ohasis8331 10 ай бұрын

Very good job on the rebuild. I was going to say "that brings back some memories" but I didn't remember anything till I actually watched this and then I remembered.

@PhilippeMarseille 10 ай бұрын

Wow.. that odd nostalgia "yay" I got when the dialup connection worked with the AT commands... Blast from the past!!! Amazing video production!

@ChadDoebelin 10 ай бұрын

thoroughly impressed, i'll keep watching! you earned a new subscriber.

@awksedgreep 10 ай бұрын

This really takes me back. Thank you for putting this together. I had a hand in building 3 ISPs. The first was just customer service web apps for a cable ISP. The second was all the services for a cable ISP. The third was rebuilding a nationwide cable ISP complete with a DWDM dark fiber backbone. Only thing I would change in your series is installing 2.5.1, not 2.6. We never took the time to upgrade because 2.5.1 was considered "dial tone" Solaris.

@srobak 10 ай бұрын

Sojourn Systems - started in a janitor's closet at the Michigan State University Computer Science building selling shell accounts to non-CS students. Moved out of there within a year and into an office and added a modem pool. Quickly became one of Lansing & central Michigan's most popular ISP's. It was eventually acquired for ~8 million USD by Blue Marble ISP of Michigan which made them the 2nd largest ISP After Merit/MichNET.

@ricardog2165 5 ай бұрын

I had that exact model that I got from work when they were about to throw it out. I got it working with Redhat, but it was slow. Loved the keyboard. Shortly after moving to an apartment, I threw it out and I've been kicking myself over it ever since :( I remember accessing my university's Sun system remotely over PPP in the '90s. I discovered a library that tunneled all TCP/IP requests over PPP and let my local X-Windows Server display GUI apps running remotely on the Sun system. There was a method to apply this library to any app. It was awesome, I was probably one of very few people in the university using this system like that.

@tombarber8929 10 ай бұрын

loving this series so far, can't wait for the next one!

@JoeHamelin 10 ай бұрын

Takes me back to my days at Wolfenet in Seattle.

@drgti16v 10 ай бұрын

beeeep boooppppppp schreeeechhhhhhh I miss those sounds

@cbw56 10 ай бұрын

Just discovered this spectacular channel. So interesting!! Thanks for the quality content.

@Graham_Rule 10 ай бұрын

That takes me back. At work I had a Sun 4/330 in 1989 which cost a little more than the flat I'd just bought.

@its.bonart 10 ай бұрын

God, I am so happy I found this channel! In love with this series!

@tammymakesthings 8 ай бұрын

Wow, that brings back a lot of memories. I lived in Silicon Valley during the first dot-com boom, and thanks to some friends I was able to score a SPARCstation IPC (or maybe IPX; I forget which) for my home computer for a reasonable amount of money. As I recall, the Sun 13W3-to-SVGA video cable cost me more than the workstation. Great machine for the time, though. I also remember setting up a “Custom Jumpstart Install” server for work, which was great. You could net boot a new Sun workstation, and based on the CPU type/RAM/HD size/subnet the server would automatically install and configure Solaris and a bunch of application software. The company I worked for was a hardware manufacturer and all our engineers had Sun workstations on their desks, plus we had a BUNCH in our labs, so that was a huge time saver.

@TheStefanskoglund1 Ай бұрын

You could run a fairly large Sun installation on two system administrators. More than a 1000 machines was completely ok.

@damouze 10 ай бұрын

This was amazing to watch. It does reminds me though that I have a Sun Blade 100 workstation with a defective ID-PROM... I have had the replacement part for ages, so it should be possible to fix it.

@johnclement5903 10 ай бұрын

The EE-Prom in Sparcstations do not fail per se; it's only the internal battery for the DSxxxx clock/calendar. But, since the battery, clock/cal, and eeprom are all potted into the DIP plug, ya gotta replace the whole !@#$# thing

@timkent 10 ай бұрын

I'm pretty sure they no longer included a C compiler after SunOS 4.1.4 as it was sold as a separate product called Workshop, but you can use GCC.

@forbiddenera 10 ай бұрын

38:29 mmm sweet modem sounds.. and man.. dialup into bbs to use telnet takes me back! That's how i started on the net!

@joeturner7959 10 ай бұрын

TLG started earlier, with dialup, but had machine crash, and the install disks were left on top of a tv. So... They were down for more then a week, but since they were such nice guys, we stuck around. That was in 1988. I was in Concord, and they were in Daily city. Long distance rates applied as well as the 11:00pm price cut.

@Ubermeisteryyy 10 ай бұрын

Very well made video! And your skills are impressive. Happy subscriber.

@youtube.commentator 10 ай бұрын

This is very interesting, thank you for sharing, subbed

@AlexanderWeurding 10 ай бұрын

Great work! Thanks for the content.

@ratmdex 10 ай бұрын

This channel is exactly the niche market I needed.

@peptoyo 10 ай бұрын

Ugh... I hate being early to see this after you mentioned what's next and saw 10 hours after looking for that.

@RealEngineer 9 ай бұрын

Great video!

@cidadaoPPT 10 ай бұрын

This channel is pure perfection!

@geesharp6637 10 ай бұрын

Wow does that bring back memories. I haven't done a Solaris install in years. Totally forgot about the CDE desktop. The best day was when I got my UltraSparc. Great job.

@alzeNL 10 ай бұрын

ah, hearing that modem - the nostaliga is strong with this one, subscribed !! - was a sun/solaris engineer for 10 years, bounced around the world building from the ground up to fully remote net boot installs, what a lovely OS solaris was - remember the forth interpreter in the boot prompt :D my own pet peeve with sun, why oh why on the keyboard have the power switch on the top right, how many times that got knocked. Seeing this lovely machine restored reminded me of my first sparc machine, with CD, DAT Drive and Sun Monitor. I worked for an ISP in Central London, the onwer dontated it to me. I live in a nearby seaside town, my commute was on coach. I had to carry the lot and the monitor from near Oxford Street to Embankment, but it sure was the envy of alot of people back in my hometown when I got it up and running - that huge sun monitor !!!

@yipperduigs 10 ай бұрын

US Robotic modem pictures at the of the video with Hayes compatible modems noises playing in the background.. Cant believe it! 😁😁 Loved this trip down memory lane 🤗

@mercster 10 ай бұрын

In the 90s I used ISPs that used SPARC... I also used one in college, and in the early 2000s I worked at a place that had a disused SPARC Ultra 1 that was going to the rubbish... I got to take it home :) Fun little system, I put RedHat Linux on it.

@CollinBaillie 10 ай бұрын

The information super highway! Awww yisss!

@deepsleep7822 9 ай бұрын

So cool to see that BBS stuff again.

@elektronischdev 9 ай бұрын

The sticker on the bottom of the machine saying “BZT” suggests that this machine was used by the German “Bundesamt für Zulassungen in der Telekommunikation” meaning “Federal Office for Licensing in Telecommunications” - interesting journey for that little buddy!

@goatjuggler 10 ай бұрын

Awesome content. I'm sitting on a SPARCstation IPX that I bought off an AT&T programmer that I've been meaning to restore so this helps a ton!

@nibrobb 9 ай бұрын

I am eagerly awaiting the next episode 😁

@darknewt9959 10 ай бұрын

We had hundreds of these at the newspaper publisher I worked at in the late 90s. Also SPARCstation 5, 10, UltraSPARCs, and all the servers up to the E10k. Come the millennium we literally could not give away our old classics, 5s and 10s.

@nicksmith4507 10 ай бұрын

Good work. Nice machines at University and looked great in a tower with the matching CD and external HDD

@minombredepila1580 10 ай бұрын

Amazing content and very professional. I immediately subscribed :-)

@Silanael 10 ай бұрын

Oh, this brings back memories..

@ProjektSUN 10 ай бұрын

You should load that bad boy up with 128MB's of ram! ALSO, why not just use an ISO image on the ZuluSCSI to install on the virtual hdd?

@theserialport 10 ай бұрын

That might have been easier, but we wanted to see the Solaris "boot net" install process and learn how it worked since it was widely used

@accelerat0r747 2 ай бұрын

This one was pretty good !

@tylerljohnson 10 ай бұрын

I spent a few years as a sun systems engineer & later a programmer using both the pizza box sparcs and the lunch box machines. great to see one again. Also, I've got that same BK multimeter!

@mokosoft2004 10 ай бұрын

wow... es sorprendente... de verdad... es maravilloso ver este tipo de videos.. felicidades...

@JamiesHackShack 10 ай бұрын

Enjoyed it! Keep it up!

@sjanssen 10 ай бұрын

As a noob in repairing pcb's and parts, this is really educative and very well explained

@richardlincoln886 10 ай бұрын

Back in the day the firmware/boot into Forth fascinated me and I tinkered on the one machine at work. The 'OK' prompt. Used to write compiler/interpreters for Forth on any system I touched back then - micro 6510, 68k, IBM Mainframe LoL. Obsessed. Forth being the ultimate terse/syntax-less language.

@Guitarhero1000 10 ай бұрын

Damn. One of my new favorite KZfaq channels.

@hermand 10 ай бұрын

I love this, my dad was a super early internet adopter, meaning i was online from the early 90s. Im now 20 years into my own tech infra career, but the 90s stuff fascinates me.

@hermand 10 ай бұрын

Also, my dad loves to retell the story of when I got us temporarily banned from our ISP because I created an open mail relay....whoops

@hannescampidell 10 ай бұрын

the 5v rail like this is perfect

@JamesHalfHorse 10 ай бұрын

Fascinating. I was set to follow this plan in the mid 90s but the funding backed out. Worked for a dialup isp later in life as it was winding down more that people switched to high speed from the phone company we couldn't compete with.

@Lion_McLionhead 10 ай бұрын

A board from 1993 as clean as the day it was made takes us back to 1993. UNIX workstation videos remane extremely rare because they haven't fallen in price.

@galnetdor 9 ай бұрын

I ran an early 90's ISP (Castle Network inNJ) and I used 3 Sun workstations as the main servers. Fun times. One of the services we offered was UUCP e-mail. This brings back some old memories.

@tibbydudeza 10 ай бұрын

I visited one of our first to home ISP's here in South Africa since my mate worked there - this was during the days of Mosiac WWW and Windows 3.1s and Trumpet Winsock. They used Livingston Port masters and a bunch of USR Robotic 14.4K modems in the closet lying on top of each other - the heat generated was substantial - a few used to die on a monthly basis.

@princesswalt4010 10 ай бұрын

Very cool video! This made me go check my stash and cuddle with my Sparc IPX in that same form factor. After I bought it used in the early 2000’s, I had the same fun of net booting SUSE Linux, and used it as a dev system to write code using Xemacs. I’ve wondered for a while now if it would even power up… it’s been sitting in a pile withs it’s Spark Station 2 sister for about 20 years completely unused. I still have one of those awesome soft touch sun keyboards with the giant “Help” key!

@Fifury161 10 ай бұрын

I managed to bag a suite of these along with the longer thinner unitsm back in the early 1990s. I still have them, but now with only 1 set of peripherals and 1 huge CRT. I also salvaged a lot of the memory modules out of those longer thinner Sparc stations - the modules use UDE like connectors and look like someone welded DIMMs together (back to back and side to side - they are thick!) They did all work and I did have the CD drive and still have a few hard drives, but alas no software or time/inclination to do anything with them!

@apricotcomputers3943 10 ай бұрын

Friggin' genius maaaan!❤🎉

@jn_gutierrez 10 ай бұрын

Excellent.

@samshort365 10 ай бұрын

Nice video and great job. I probably mentioned already that I used a Sun Sparc 20 with Solaris 8 as my main system sometime between Beos 5 and Linux and used it to stream international radio with Real Player. I also had Basilisk II emulating Mac Os 8 on a 21in CRT monitor. These were very reliable machines.

@josephk6373 8 ай бұрын

What an excellent content

@webmilio 9 ай бұрын

16:25 talk about the pros and cons man!

@movax20h 7 ай бұрын

Thanks for showing the full installation. Pretty simple actually, and pretty modern (I was expecting way more esoteric and hard things) and standard, and not too far from early Linux installers. Cool.