The Sun Ray wasn't just a network booted system, it was really just a modern take on the dumb terminal. The entire display was streamed over UDP from the host machine. Your whole session ran on the backend machine. Each user had their own X windows session. I worked for Michigan Tech in the early 2000s. I was part of a team that wrote some shims on top of the Sun Ray server software that allowed us to set up a system where a user could insert their student ID (which had a smart chip) into a terminal, do some work, remove the card, and pick up their session from any other terminal on campus. Everything continued to run in the background. They had a program where students could rent a terminal for their dorm room with a low monthly fee. The program never took off as PC prices plummeted and students preferred having a computer which could run games and other non educational software.

That palette change thing when you enter/leave the "DOS window" is totally normal, I mean in the era when the whole desktop ran in 16 colours or 256, and such, and not true-colour like nowadays. So every window could have its own colour palette. It was the de-facto standard in Linux too for a while back to then, you have no other choice if the hardware couldn't do more colours or at least much slower (or maybe you don't have enough video RAM in that resolution you want it to do ...).

The university I went to in 2018 still had a row of these in one of the computer labs with the CRT's. These were all sitting directly across a row of circa 2016 Dells and 2013 iMacs.

I started with Linux in 1994. By 2000, the writing was on the wall for proprietary UNIX systems. The smart choice was either Linux or Free/Net/OpenBSD. The only reason why you would need to hang on to these dinosaurs was if you had some special application. At my first full time Linux job in 1999 we had to buy a Sun workstation to support a piece of software. It was a huge bummer because that software would have run fine on Linux, but the financial organization was unwilling to do the port. I used all of the proprietary UNIX variants because I worked for an engineering school through 1999, so I was familiar with all of them. Linux was refreshing and new and better than all of them with its GNU tools. Even in the mid 90's a top of the line PC running Linux for $5000 would do just fine compared to a $20,000 HP or Sun workstation. The only problem was companies being unwilling to do ports. There is a gee whiz factor I guess with these workstations but UNIX people were moving towards Linux so they just aren't very compelling.

I worked on Sun systems for (too) many years, when I first started on them the engineering was like most of the servers/workstations were excellent but went down hill as NY/Win2000 took over the lower end. Solaris however does look old (other GUIs can be added) - however compared with even Win 11/Server is very rock solid, will run for years & at the time could support WAY more CPU cores/RAM - hence the 1000's still in use today. These workstations were used for developers of the servers or for specialist requirements.

There is a video about SunPCi done by NCommander a while ago. He installed Windows 2k, NT 4, and 98, and also shows all kinds of quirks it has. Though that weird palette issue wasn't present.

The lighting, the multiple camera angles, the editing and narration bruh this is so underrated. Actually well produced videos on "funny architectures" is so scarce tysm for making stuff like this, loved the video!~

In 1999 to 2000 my group had Sun Ultra 1s and Ultra 5s just to run a Green Hills cross compiler and remote debugger for an in development consumer electronics device. The development experience was like a 5 to 10 year in the past time warp. A few of the engineers did more with their Solaris machines but I just used it for the necessary toolchain and didn't do much customizing besides tweaking the terminal and changing the desktop wallpaper. I stuck to my Windows machine for day to day email, docs and even code editing where I could.

At uni, late 90s, we had an account on a Solaris machine (a room full of NCD XTerminals) and 20MB of quota. So one thing I did was to download and compile WindowMaker and use that as my window manager rather than CDE. Gimp was also small enough back then that I could compile it within my quota. I really should have spent less time geeking with Unix and Linux, and more time on my studies, though I did graduate.

That was a fun video! That stirs up memories...I had gotten out of working with Sun/HP-UX/Power by the early 2000s. At that point I built a custom Linux distro for a company that made medical office management systems running on an RS/6000 AIX server with DB2, and Windows workstations. My custom distro, along with a release of DB2 for Linux enabled them to transition to commodity X86 servers running Linux, and defenestrate the workstations. About 30 RS/6000 servers all across the US were replaced with IBM x86 servers, and about 5,000 Window seats were replaced by Linux. fun times!

Great video, thanks KZfaq algorithm! Regarding VGA capture, there is thankfully now a cheap way to get pretty decent VGA capture super cheap - just get one of those super cheap HDMI capture devices ($5~10 from eBay/Amazon) and a VGA to HDMI adapter to plug into that. It's a little unwieldy, but you'll get 60fps capture, or you can do 640x480 at 30fps uncompressed too. A lot of VGA to HDMI dongles only do standard resolutions and balk at things like 720x400, so if you do need any non-VESA resolutions, you can get a used Extron RGB-HDMI 300A for around 50 bucks. But all definitely try one of the cheapo dongles first - it's surprising what you can get now! I have an Epiphan VGA2USB and it has been superseded by the aforementioned setup. What's more, no proprietary drivers required either - standard USB UVC support!

Great video! I love that purple shade of beige. I can't believe I only JUST now found your channel. I look forward to watching your variety of videos on various retro goodness.

Regarding the color palette changes - your on-board Blade 100 graphics chip PGX64 (ATI Rage XL) has its own 8 MB of memory. Thus, you can switch from the 256 color palette mode to 24-bit true color (check the "m64config" command) and remove the issue.

17:00 Correction, AMD64 in the Athlon64 was launched in 2003, and torpedoed Intel's Itanium maneuver to jettison x86 with the move to 64 bit.

Even when they were working the sunPCI cards were slow and buggy, and not great to use. Sun did release a 2nd version of the pci card which had updated hardware, and would have been what a blade 100 would most likely be equipped with. The first generation pci card would be commonly used with the ultra 5 workstation. Which is another cost reduced sun workstation(vga and ide as well), the predecessor to the blade 100.

My second job out of college I had a brand new Sparcstation 20. On my first day I accidentally emptied a piping hot cup of coffee into the keyboard which proceeded to make the workstation go nuts. We had a service agreement with Sun and they came out and replaced the keyboard same day. Ah, the memories. No one ever found out it was the new guys cup of coffee that disrupted the morning.

I love that HP printer in the background, back in my IT days (ahem 2000's) we used those in the office, they were a real workhorse. Really fast printer.

I have one of these machines, a tenant left it behind when they moved out (it had been from whatever major failed investment firm he had worked for). It was missing the keyboard and mouse, so getting into OpenFirmware is a major pain (you essentially have to force it to fail out to the prompt). I put in a couple larger (compared to what was in it) IDE drives, and swapped in an IDE DVD drive, and managed to load whatever the latest Solaris was. Tried to offer it out to any open-source project needed an UltraSparcIII machine for development, but never got any takers. Last time I booted it up there was some dead battery-backed PROM, so I can't make use of it at all now (yes, replacement chips are available, I just don't have anything I could use it for). I was accustomed to CDE from working on AIX. But I think the later Solaris version I ran on it had GNOME2 or something similar, so no trouble with the desktop color switching (that was such a pain when I was in the test lab on an AIX Control Workstation and I'd bring up a GUI application from the Linux box back in my office).

Interestingly in the UK RISC machines were not uncommon and were what a lot of kids would have first experienced, the Acorn Archimedes range and later Risc PC's. Used a lot in schools as a follow on from the BBC micro and some were even had extra BBC badging, weren't necessarily the cheapest but not the most expensive either, available in keyboard wedge, desktop and one laptop variant, had their own expansion system, network and used their own OS that resided in ROM (Unix was an option at one point I believe). Excellent machines and a somewhat decent amount of software made for them. The later RISC PC and A7000 had standard PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports and the BBC used loads of systems for TV graphics and playback control. Ended up with the PC/OS side of the business being sold to Pace who made STB's and the real cash cow being the processor side that became ARM Ltd. Interestingly it also had hardware and software options for running MS-DOS/windows from the first model, originally it was just a software program as the speed of the ARM processor could emulate an 8086. Amazing what was created by a small money starved company from Cambridge, whole OS/GUI/PC architecture including their own 32 bit CPU that's had some success!

I was like "oh cool somebody else is still rockin a Laserjet 4" then I realised it was part of a retro themed set xD

When running the SunPCI UI, your graphics doesn't get corrupted. That very much looks like the X server runs in 256 color palette mode where in-focus windows could grab and modify the palette colors while they had the focus. So normally, CDE has focus and owns the palette, but the SunPCI UI, when it has focus, grabs and modifies the palette (presumably to fit VGA colors). The PGX64 graphics in the Blade 1000 does support 24bit @ 1600x1200, but I suspect the SunPCI UI might need palette mode? Never had a SunPCI to play with when I had a Sun Blade at a previous employer to play with (many, many years ago).

What a find! Really well produced and great content. I subscribed immediately. Thanks so much

Fraser Health (BC, Canada) used lots of these Sun Ray 1's throughout the province probably 20 years ago or so... saw lots of them in various clinics.

15:55 - Looked like a Quantum Fireball to me :) As of at least 2018 one of my EE professors was still using a Sun Blade 100 in his office. He checked and wrote email using a text-based program in the terminal, and he did some web browsing on it, and used it to update university web pages that he was the admin of. I forget what web browser he used - I think it was Firefox. He had it, a modern PC, and a modern Mac all on a KVM, but he used the Sun the most.

It was very rare for the Sun Blade 100 to ship from the factory with the Sun PCi card fitted, they were usually sold as a separate X-option and as far as I can recall not that many were shipped compared to the amount of Sun Blade 100 shipped, at least that was the case in the UK. At the time it was cheaper and better to buy a cheap PC and run it along side the Sun machine. The Sun Blade 100 was also assembled in California. I know a Firewire webcam was used during the production process to test the functionality of the Firewire ports. Ncommander did a good KZfaq video about the Sun PCi card, you might want to check that out. Edit. The Sun PCi card works far better with its own dedicated monitor.

So happy to see this recommended to me by KZfaq. Great video and explanation, I love old UNIX workstations!

Great video! Can’t wait for your next one!

very good and informative vintage computer video, subscribed

incredibly well made video. I like the way you talk and explain. you look so relaxed in front of the camera 👍

Fantastic video. I loved the history as well as the live showcase. You're a great presenter!

I have one of these Sun Blade 100's with kb/mouse, 20" Sun CRT, in working order. Original Solaris 8 discs. 500Mhz SPARC with two 30GB HDD's. It was fun when the delivery arrived at my home with a pallet of boxes and of course no loading dock. They were not shipping UPS/FedEx it was full freight. It is quite heavy. It was capable of booting Linux which not ironically, outperformed Solaris.

I have a memory from the introduction of the Sun Blade 100: it basically swept the floor with the older low-cost SPARCs and it was possible to use cheap PC components (RAM/disks though the nr 1 thing to do was get a fast SCSI HBA and a SCSI disk-that ATA design wasnt fast.) Sun had a beneficial upgrade program for customers so at the time ZTH went and replaced their older machines with blade 100/1000 the students and staff was also allowed to buy blade 100 at a discount - so many went with that so the manager for the upgrade program saw all of her budget for this DISAPPEAR (her budget payed for the difference between normal price and the customer price.) Higher ups at Sun had to do something - they probably refilled her account and told her to be more restrictive the next time....

Damn dude it's awesome to see this, my buddy had one of these back in 1996 if I remember correctly, used it as his home PC.

I remember using Sun/HP/SGI workstations in the late 1990's at the University of Michigan as well as NT machines. I was writing C++ computational fluid dynamics code on both Unix and Windows. CDE looked just like what you showed. What drove me absolutely nuts was non-standardized filesystems/headers/libraries between compilers and operating systems. On Sun I recall also running SDRC Ideas and Unigraphics, both uber expensive 3D parametric CAD applications. I also recall lugging around a zip, then Jaz drive and connecting them to the SCSI controllers on both Unix & NT machines to share files with my own PC. Those were the days!

I bought my own SunBlade 100 for home use, I had one at work as well. I miss a workstation.

Hello, nice content. Waiting for more.

I worked with these as a student in university. The CS lab had these, while the general study areas had Dell.

The alpha 64 bit micros were well established before 2000. XP1000s were able to run VMS, Tru64-Unix or Windows NT at that time. Even the floor standing Alphaservers had all these options available. All you needed for the Alphaservers was an Orchid graphics card

If you want to prevent Operator Flapping Error when things beep at you. Type STOP-A, then power-off. If you wish to divine other commands of the OBP type "sifting words"

really nice case design

Far cry from the Sparc 10 and 20s which were built like tanks

I managed so many SunBlades (some with PCI cards) - this brings back memories/nightmares.

Great video! Hope this is the algorithm break-through for you, love this type of content :)

I'm glad people are talking about the absolutely bizarre options for budget machines of non-x86 systems back in the day.

Didn't know you had a KZfaq channel until now! This is the kind of system that would get me really excited on paper, but your demonstration has definitely warned me off, thanks. I'll stick with my SPARCstation 5. Thanks for the video!

Greetings from Brazil. I’ve worked with different Sun stations from the IPX, SPARC10, SPARC20, then ULTRA5 and BLADE150. The first one I saw with IDE HD was the Ultra 5. I was amazed to see their remote installation process from ARP capability. You also didn’t showed the ROM environment. That is comparable to the BIOS, but with much more capabilities that you can only see today into the Dell idrac or comparable HP solution. Also, you haven’t said about how robust this hardware is. No PC is capable to endure so much. Also, the Operating System is rock solid, if you compared to DOS, Windows 3.11/NT, or later on Windows 95 (this one crashed after some operating days all by it self).

I've always been intrigued by these and wondered if they were worth a punt on eBay... maybe now after watching this I will only be interested if VERY cheap :)

I have learned to love the design. It is maybe the cheapest Sparc you can try nowadays. Memory is standard, but needs to be unbuffered ECC. If not for the x86 card it is a nice authentic machine.

The eject floppy icon was for dismounting/closing the floppy file system, then you ma y pushed button to eject. You always have to dismount removable media before removing it.

I'm always so hype about new videos from you, granted this is the second time ive watched..but still lol

Is the connector on the PC card by any chance a "PC/104" connector or even a "PCI-104"?

The Amiga 2000 had a card like that, called a Bridgeboard. They went from a 4.77mhz 8086 card up to a 486sx25. It could display on an Amiga screen, or in a window on the Workbench, or to its own monitor with a VGA card plugged into one of the Amigas ISA slots.

Omg that laserjet 4 on the back I wish I could have one. I have a sunblade 150 and a sunblade 2000 and love them

I wish I could see a SPARC computer network in it's full power... Both server, client and just terminal parts.

Being completely foreign to this world of computing (I didn't start using computers until the mid-2000s and those were typical Wintel PCs) I have to say, for an operating system from 2002 Solaris 9 looks _positively ancient_ by standards of the era. As you mention with the other problems of software on a machine like this, it's really no wonder they eventually lost so much market share.

I never realized how close to the DEC alpha Personal Workstation "Miata" the engineering was. Like the Miata, you probably could swap the motherboard in a pinch for a x86 board (don't know if Sun released a full PC in that box, DEC did). But overall, the Miata was fabulously engineered for its price point compared to this. Much faster too.

My first job in the uk had a fleet of sun ultra 5's (and a bunch of older and slower pizza box models) as their production platform for electronics testing. Everything was SPARC based. As far as I'm aware they're still using a SPARC based circuit simulation software on a server but all of the desktops have long since been replaced by generic Dells.

Keep in mind, that SunPCi card wasn’t really anything new. It was preceded by the SBus-based SunPC card. That was a huge, huge improvement over WABI. And if you want to have some software fun, find MAE. Emulate a full Mac. Say what you want about the software, Solaris evolved into something pretty bulletproof. Even today, Solaris 11.4 will run for years on end. The early Solaris 2.1-2.4 days were a little rough though. :)

14:06 That'st the PRAM/NVRAM battery. It is need to store OpenFirmware configuration data, which unlike BIOS firmware equipped PCs, is too big to be stored in the tiny CMOS clock memory area. Apple and NeXT did EXACTLY the same, but instead supplying their boards with 2 standard, almost harmless coincell batteries, they decided to supply a BIG, EXPLOSIVE and CORROSIVE lithium barrel battery from where they derived the two voltages to keep the CMOS clock and NVRAM working. It looks clunky, but actually kudos to Sun for no taking Apple single explosive battery barrel path.

We opted not to add Sun blade 100s because, even with live failover backup servers, we felt that there was too much risk to not have workstation standalone capability.

Ok but did you go through the Solaris 9 software repository? It is indeed a pretty minimal system but just like the network it should be highly customizable to exactly suit your employees needs. Not really sure what the licensing was back then on all the other stuff they wrote for Solaris. And as far as the x86 PCI card was there supposed to be drivers loaded into it? I would imagine you could run Windows 2000 on it but it would need to know how to talk to essentially what is the hypervisor running on Solaris to talk to any of that lower level hardware. They definitely had to have some kind of drivers to get that "client virtual machine" to talk to the network if it didn't have a NIC on the card or so you would think coming from a company that said "the network is the computer".

Pretty interesting.

I still rock 2 Sunfire V210's. Haven't found anything better at cross compiling with the Intel C compiler.

cool video. My brother had a sunray

At what I was told back then, when I bought 2 (with different LCD screen)... they told me it's a PC also, perhaps that just replacing the CPU it was possible to put an Intel chip and have a normal PC ? I was told it's a PC at the end... Thank you, it was nice to see it running again (and I still have all, the 2 with screens and keyboard+mouse). I also signed to get the source code of Solaris a little later.

Sun was one of those companies that made beautiful machines that were utterly useless for the average user. They were likely great for the applications they were made for, but they were pretty worthless if you wanted to do anything that required software that most people use. The fact that they were doing IPV6 instead of just IPV4 back in like 2002, is pretty interesting. Most people are still on IPV4.

19:48 Why pictures loading so slowly? I did think it's bug)))

One could use NetBSD on the blade, I do in my home lab, if you want to run more modern software like Firefox. Solaris 10 runs a little better on the hardware especially if you max out the RAM. Compare against a 20 year old PC for reference and it isn’t as bad. Most blades in day to day use were in environments that weren’t about pc/windows but custom software used internally and as a development environment for the SPARCservers that ran the universe at that time.

The software isn’t horrible as such. Admittedly, Solaris is not my favourite unix, but on a unix eorkstation of the time, you got a unix, great for development, a shell, even an X11 server to support geaphical applications. Certainly somw graphical programs were included since marketrouds had the idea that all users wanted to point and deool, but they were never really intended to be used, just included as an alibi. It’s an entirely different way of working, and as for using integrated development tools where the underlying OS was interchangeable with ant other, you still have a much better shell to work with if you need to than you have on pre-NT windows. Today, I generally disregard ant icons and run everything from the prompt in linux. Tve screen show s shell, iIDEs and…toys. But I’ve used unix since system 3…old dogs, etc :)

I have the Sun Blade 150 with a SunPCI card, and SunRay, which reminds me I need to setup the SunRay again. I pretty much use the Blade to manage my Sun Enterprise and other Unix/Linux-based servers and systems. I tossed Netscape to the side and just find or compile one of the Chromium-based browsers. I always wanted to see how far a could modify the SunPCi card with CPU upgrade kits I use to do with PC compatibles Oracle, boo boo

The floppy should have worked - was it formatted for PC, and with a FAT filesystem?

I have Ultra 5 with PGX64 (which is pretty much what is onboard of Sunblade 100) + SUN PCI II running Solaris 9 and have no issues you pointed. No color pallete changes. SunPCI was actually designed to use external monitor, when you use it everything is snappy and even direct3d works just like it was a normal PC. You don't seem to have good understanding of what Unix and Sparc architecture was all about. They were actually comparable with PC's at the time as speed goes, they were not slower in any way. And they were way more flexible, stable and multitasking was much better. At the time, late 90's and early 2000 they were used by air traffic control, design studios, for simulations, by financial institutions and for scientific applications. SPARC is still used today, SPARC provides better security, scalability and encryption than many other architectures, you can run up to 100 VM's from one CPU etc. For certain applications like massive databases, enterprise solutions and storage it's hard to beat SPARC if you consider it's footprint in data center. That's what SPARC and Unix is all about.

I think that's an NLX format system. kinda neat

50 years of progress and we end up with Unix and Java.

The end was a pisser! What an odd piece of computer hardware, I loved to know how modern Linux performs on it.

Sun Ultra 5 user here, i envy the built in USB ports.. But DHCP problems? Never had any issues. I have cheated abit IDE to SATA adapter on my machine

That was the disaster. CDE was a ghost from the 3.11-Hell in WindowsXP era. Patch management was way too difficult for novices who had gotten accustomed to things like apt or urpmi.

Oracle Blade is really impractical compared to other desktop pc solutions

The quality of that keyboard sounds similar to that of HP and Dell. If you ever saw their computers in a store even the mouse feels like there were a zillion corners cut in production. The keyboards are small and look like the worst things you could ever be doomed to typing on all day and the mice are so light they feel like they have no internal structure at all. Now what is so bad about the mice you may be wondering. Any mouse that did not come with those computers (bought separately with a good keyboard too) feel a hundred times better. The mouse that HP and Dell ship with their desktop is so light it feels like a good sneeze may budge it.

i must be a blade 100. i lose my mind when i wake up too.

No Killer App seems to be a common theme with failed hardware platforms.

"some reason" the graphics corrupt = the window is using a different colorspace than the desktop. This was a standard xwindows thing in the long long ago.

So… Sun had their own version of the OrangePC card. Interesting.

Even if just this system is kind of crap, I miss the period where there where several hardware and operating systems manufacturers around. Now every system is a PC and it's 50 shades of kind of boring

Perhaps a bit to late to comment here. I still work with Solaris after 2+ decades so I know a thing or two. You are mostly missing the point here with these late Ultra Sparc machines, particularly the low end which includes the Sunfire Netra v100 and X1 (almost the same architecture). Most enterprises which had a data center filled with Sun hardware needed replacement for aging small Sparc Servers (5, 10, 20 32bit SuperSparc pizzabox workstations and servers) that were completely end of life and support, so Sun Microsystems offered these cheap x86 alternatives in an effort to stop companies the migration to linux for simple solutions suchs as firewalls, small webservers or middleware services and X clients

That font though... ^^

Smart people living in USA!

Near the end, it sounds like it is sending out Morse Code, then flatlines.

One Major innaccuracy, that is actually relevent to this. The Core2 was NOT the first "x86" based 64bit CPU. That would be the AMD Opteron 64 (servers) followed very quickly by the AMD Athlon 64 (desktop/mobile). This is why the x64 arch is still to this day often refered to as AMD64. Why relevent to this conversation? Sun themselves started using the Opteron on their systems, and moved solaris to AMD64.

Maybe someone know where can I get software fo HP-PA PA-RISC? I mean not the OS. It not a problem.

WHEE!!

Annoying that it's such a pain in the butt to fix the NVRAM in these compared to the older versions of OBP. EDIT: I always loved the Sun hardware, never was a fan of Solaris.

Capacitor bloat alert! there's one behind the CPU heatsink.

I haven’t seen the video capture yet, but it doesn’t look that great. :P

More like Sun Jankrosystems

lol @29:50

Don't install/run SUNpci as root. Then add the user you want to run it as to the appropriate user groups to allow floppy/cd access. Might need to mod device permissions as well.

AMD became 64bit in 2003

Sounded like flatline at the end... :/

The type 6 was made to be cheap. An IBM Type M it is not, but it's far less trashy than you paint it. If you hit the keys hard enough for them to shatter, you're typing with a hammer. (Yes, they may be brittle today *because they're decades old* Mine looks about as good as it did new 20+ years ago; a bit yellowed, but not as bad as many others from that era.) The SunPC card was just total stupid. Why would I buy a SPARC and put a PC inside it? That's a full f'ing PC running a full f'ing PC OS. And it isn't remotely integrated into the system. I don't know anyone that bought one of those stupid cards. (hint: just buy a desktop PC)