When all computers were pizza boxes , i wanted a tower. Now that all computers are towers, pizza-boxes look awesome

The build quality of Sun Sparc was lightyears beyond their times, hence the price. The Sparc 10's and 20's were even more powerful and refined than the 5's of course. I used to do admin work on them back in the mid 90's. I still have an SS10, SS20, and an Ultra 5 in the basement that all still work to this day. Every once in a while I'll dust them off and fire em up for old times sake. Nothing made today has the same quality even tho they are hopelessly outdated. They still facinate me even today.

Love the pizza box form factor of these Sparcstations. Nice little overview.

Thanks for making these videos, I always wondered what those high end unix systems were like.

I used one of these for a workstation for years. Loved it.

I remember when I bought my old SS5 used some time around 2000. Even though it was pretty slow by that time compared to commodity PC hardware, you could still get on the web and do useful stuff with it, and that's what I did. Those days are long past and unfortunately so is my old SS5.

I used to work on these when I started out as a Unix consultant....a thousand years ago .....we had one as a print server.. It is amazing people collect these, we must have recycled hundreds of these back in the day.

I have an old sun ultra 5. I bought it out of nostalgia having used sin workstations in an old job. Unfortunately my misses chucked the keyboard and I took out the power supply for my dads pc and the ha was used for something g else. Watching this really makes me want to get it up and running!

So.. in the OBP, when the NVRAM battery goes fut, it flips back to default a few of the environment variables (not just MAC (which was actually there on yours..?) and checksum). run "printenv" to see them. Check the variables "mfg-switch?" and "diag-switch". Flip them and watch how much faster it boots and all the manufacturing and diagnostics it won't run thinking it's got issues. If you're unfamiliar with other OBP commands and want a listing, type "sifting words". You should also be able to change the default boot order from "net" to "disk" whilst your in there. Nice tour :) Good on you.

watching this video in one window while bootstrapping pkgsrc on our (sadly virtual) SPARCstation-5 running Solaris 9 9/05 in another. perfect

Wow the `ok` prompt drops you into manually setting bit registers in memory?!

Awesome..... always liked the keyboards on these.....

The Bt chip (the ramdac) is made by Brooktree. They also did colour lookup table chips (palette memory).

Just discovered your channel today and I fucking love it! Great job! Big up!!

Love the industrial design... It's beige but it's got that lavender accent too... both beautiful

Beautiful!

Ah, my first contact with UNIX back in 1998. Although the SparcStations we had at school had the fancy CDE stuff on them.

Nice. I worked with a bunch like this at Honeywell, 2000-2008. And a few Cray's, too. They were obsolete, and being sold off for a couple bucks, lol.

I don´t have one of these Sun workstations but I have been in the electronics a good few years and can recall NVRAM´s combined with a real time clock that look identical to the one in your machine. They are made by Dallas Semiconductor which I believe may have become Maxim. Its probably worth checking them out. They may be obsolete but worth having a look.

I bought a Sparc 5 workstation new back in the day so I could “take my work home” back in the day.

Wow, perfect case for a flat SFF PC, with an ITX motherboard and three slots GPU.

you can get an 8-pack of Sun X7022A/501-2653 RAM sticks, clip the middle notch wider, and stick it in the RAM slots just fine to allow it to get 256MB. These are for the 3500/4500/5500 and 6500 systems and I believe the StarFire also used these DIMMs. Internal pic of my SS5 running with all 8 sticks populated: pbs.twimg.com/media/CZ07eAeWEAAX2VS.jpg:large ...with extra cooling on the 110MHz MicroSPARC II, a fan from a dead 8800GTS GPU schlepped on top to promote wider air circulation to the drive bay, because yes, I have a 10k drive in there. 18GB, with a hard drive fan screwed to the bottom taking up the second drive bay slot to keep it decently cool. and, extra heatsinking on the HappyMeal card in the middle Sbus slot, which has recently died and needs to be replaced due to my own error when doing some internal cleaning. one of the address pins _might_ _have_ touched 12v and I don't think the main chip on there was very happy about that. :/ and a screenshot of it running Debian Etch with the stock kernel before I moved back to a custom compiled 2.4.37.11 kernel: pbs.twimg.com/media/ChRKu-4WUAQ_Cl4.jpg:orig I recently had my NVRAM battery die after 22 years of life (the reason I opened it up and cleaned it, and killed the HappyMeal card.) I've done a couple of battery replacements just using sealed replacements for Thinkpads because they're pretty much the cheapest ones you can get where the batteries already have leads on them, and it's a bunch less work to solder the ends on than hotsnotting a battery socket and some wires in, in my opinion. others will say the opposite, but I'm just saying what's worked for me the best. it's good to note that the numbers on your NVRAM on the yellow label are actually the last digits of your MAC Address and Host ID. those will come in handy when you finally do the NVRAM battery hack, else you can find information on actually acquiring a new compatible chip for VERY cheap on the internets. Debian works fine on these if you don't mind compiling newer versions of some things, but in all actuality, NetBSD booted via the network for an install or OpenBSD from a CD-ROM drive install are the easiest to set up, just don't expect anything from them graphically. in fact, my suggestion is to never use these graphically with anything unless it's SunOS or Slow-aris, or you magically acquire an expensive ZX framebuffer to stick in two of the Sbus slots. the AFX slot apparently had a card, but no one on the internet at least has ever seen one out in the wild. to install Debian, one has to install Debian Woody first, then go through a painful upgrade to Sarge (since Sarge and Etch won't CDROM boot on Sun4m machines because of an ESP SCSI driver bug), and then finally Etch, but you can only use the 2.4 kernel from Sarge to boot the thing. the 2.6 kernel makes the machine 'oops' a kernel panic after enumerating the SCSI bus, also because of the aforementioned ESP driver bug. There was one gentleman in the #gentoo-sparc channel on Freenode that was making Gentoo installation media for Sparc32 machines, but I don't think it's gotten anywhere in a while. There have been successful installs of Gentoo with very stripped 3.x kernels on the machine, somethign that will hopefully change later on as kernel 4.x matures and one can chainload a bigger kernel into memory from a smaller one-- the kernel size has to be below 2.something megs or else the system will NOT boot it, due to the older OpenPROM version. you can network-boot Etch, however, and do a clean install that way, but it all depends on if you're able to set up the network properly to make that happen, and don't mind the 10Mbit speeds of the inbuilt AMD Lance ethernet chipset to do so. on a much lighter note, I wasn't aware the F1703 was sync-on-green capable. I'll have to remember that when I swap out mine for something else on my desk sometime soon.

Whats the model number of that battery chip? I have to source all sorts of oddball battery and rtc nvram chips for arcade games let me know as that boot sequence is definitely for us uber geeks. I don't know very much about Sun Sparc systems - very interested in their history though.

Nostalgia...: I used to work at Sun Microsystems and support those ;-)

Those "mkp" commands you used for booting the machine - it this FORTH of some sort? Do you have more explanatory sources on this?

Shutdown process seems kinda complicated, although modern linux is not much different(but we have "sudo", which makes process simpler). But it seems weired that you have to type shutdown commands twice...(One from shell, and one from ok prompt)

I am green with envy that you have ANYTHING from Sun Microsystems...

I had a L5 server with full cpu cards. It was pretty cool. Only odd thing is it's drives were in RAID 3 array. I assume it was for rendering large files. As thats the only thing RAID 3 is useful for.

how i can see the netcard. i wrote ifconfig and only appers "lo".

not that i don't enjoy the network stuff, but i really miss videos like this.

God i *HATE* those nv chips with batteries in them. Have 2 Suns that won't work because of the nvram. Guess i need to find some keys and solder some batteries?

I found a free ultra 10 with 486mhz and 756MB of ram and built in ati rage pro, its a cool little thing but im trying to figure out a way to make it show google ... :D but cant even find a solaris 8 iso ... it does boot up tho, i installed ubuntu 7 but cant find a gui for it.

So what is the name of the environment where you were inputting the MAC address?

what could you use this for now apart from heating a room? Just curious.

Thats super easy to shut down just 10 commands and one password. Very user friendly.

Is that actually Open Firmware on startup?

instead of loginroot you could have issued su - then halt :-) or simply used a role and su halt (wich was common this era) define default shell to be /sbin/halt to the user halt , then login as halt :-)

Hi Cameron, I have spare new/unused SS5 internal CD-ROM if you still need one. In the UK and can post it.

POWER-ON @ 9:28 ;)

How to I join

Cameron, just FYI I think this machine looks like it uses the same NVRAM as an Atari Falcon. If you go to www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/storenew/ You could purchase a replacement Falcon NVRAM which uses a coin-cell battery. This might work.

Who's watching 2019? I used to work with these, forgot about Stop-A :D Employee #23244

I was kinda depressing when I first got to use a workstation how limited they were compared to IBM PC's!

WARNING: Don't look directly at the sun!

Dust that video card, it's full of vintage fluff!

That was a heck of an opening. “This video, umgahtelukma Sun SPARCstation 5.”

3:36 Have you tried the superglue-and-baking-soda method? kzfaq.info/get/bejne/pJedmNKLxq69iqM.html

holy f* i can hardly understand that accent - try english please

yuck!!! openlook! the ugliest UI ever made ;) you can see it was designed by programmers only... In the early 2000's when everyone was using CDE on solaris 2.6-7-8-9 at my office there was one asian supergeek who always chose openwindows when logging in. It was his "thing".

He's touching an awful lot of internal components and isn't wearing an earthing strip. Talk about asking for trouble.