# Did you use SUN workstation ?



## Spartrekus (Jan 18, 2019)

Hi,

Remembering SUN workstation for fun and off topic. Did you ever use those? Like,  for  given use or applications, stories,....

More reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUN_workstation

Bye


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## SirDice (Jan 18, 2019)

Only Sun Sparc servers running Solaris 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10. Never a workstation.


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## Beastie7 (Jan 18, 2019)

The Sun Ultra workstations look nice. Not sure if FreeBSD supports them though.


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## Datapanic (Jan 18, 2019)

I used Ultra and Sunblade work stations as well as Sparc servers and storage systems for a long time.  Still have a working Sunblade 100 and a pair of Nextra's.


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## Sevendogsbsd (Jan 18, 2019)

I briefly used a Sun workstation (couldn't tell you the model or OS version) when I was in software development school for the military. Time frame was late 90's (97-98). Can't even remember what we used it for, lol.

I do remember it had a HUGE CRT monitor, can't remember the size, 21" maybe?


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## Spartrekus (Jan 18, 2019)

Sevendogsbsd said:


> I briefly used a Sun workstation (couldn't tell you the model or OS version) when I was in software development school for the military. Time frame was late 90's (97-98). Can't even remember what we used it for, lol.



(e)-mails and web browsing, maybe


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## Sevendogsbsd (Jan 18, 2019)

No, not at all, they were not Internet connected - it was something like Rational Rose (software design modeling software) but I can't be sure.


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## ShelLuser (Jan 18, 2019)

I still have a Sun sparcstation in my basement somewhere. The old square box with a 21" (or close enough) CRT monitor (my back already starts hurting thinking about it  ) and it ran Solaris 7.

The only workstation I own is a SunBlade 100. Came with a 3,5" diskdrive, cd player and a card reader.


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## forquare (Jan 18, 2019)

I never owned a Sun Workstation, but my year out halfway through university was spent as a lab engineer in the Sun’s UK office. It was the (academic) year that it was announced Oracle was buying Sun. 
I used a few workstation, and worked on the for engineers. Mostly people had Sun Rays, but certain engineers got workstations for compiling software. 

I did own a couple of Sun Rays, and got an internal Sun Ray Server build to that ran on my home OpenSolaris server. Alas, I didn’t use it in anger, but it was a fun project.


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## BSD User (Jan 18, 2019)

I used Ultra as a software RIP server connected to an Agfa Imagesetter centuries ago. Tried using it as a desktop, but didn't have much fun even after upgrading from Solaris 8 to Solaris 10


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## ralphbsz (Jan 18, 2019)

Used a few desktop Sun 3 machines (I think they were 3/60) in the late 80s.  Not the GUI, but just remote login, using them as CPU servers for computational simulation.  That's because the CS department had a few dozen of them, and they were not using any CPU time, so science groups on campus were allowed to run CPU-intensive jobs on them, to help justify spending all the money.  In reality, the CS department had bought them as status symbols: they had a GUI, while everyone else on campus was still using VTxxx or 327x terminals.  They were dog slow, in particular their floating point.  Made me really appreciate the VAXen and the DECstation.  But at least their Fortran compiler was functional, unlike the NeXT machines (which were also dog slow, and their compiler was laughably broken, I gave up on those).

Then helped a fellow graduate student set up a server class machine (3/2xx of some sort) which was a workgroup server.  The hardest part was getting the AppleTalk networking to work (to serve existing Macs, of which that group had quite a few).  The OS back then was very borken as far as networking was concerned.  Or maybe it just wasn't designed to be used in anything other than trivial configurations.

Never used Sun 4 (SPARC) machines; by that time, I had access to much faster hardware (RS/6000, PA-RISC and then Alpha), and the 32-bit SPARC machine were slow by comparison.  The funny thing is that later in life, the chief architect of the SPARC ended up being my manager for many years, and is still a friend.


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## DrTed (Jan 28, 2019)

I've owned a SparcStation 2. It was slow as molasses in January, but it was my very own SparcStation. 

I bought it off eBay for $80 and had to provide my own 50 pin SCSI drive (I had plenty of spares). No video card, so I had to use my VT-220 serial terminal and an external CD-ROM to get OpenBSD on it. 

Getting it was neat... I had a day off and found it was cheaper for me to drive 1200km round trip (in one day) in my diesel VW Golf III, than it would have been to ship it. So I did the drive. Would do again.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 28, 2019)

Somewhere around 1990, the company I worked for finally realized that we engineers were getting bogged down with the old PDP-8 or PDP-11, don't recall. It would take hours to assemble my Motorola 68K code and there were about 10 of us using that thing. We got competing bids from Sun and their direct competitor. Was it  Century something? At the time "Century" was running neck-and-neck in the workstation race. I picked Century cause I thought they had a better system overall but the company chose Sun. Century soon went out of business so I guess better minds prevailed.


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## oed (Feb 23, 2019)

I briefly used Sun workstations at work in the late nineties, and when they dropped in price I bought some for home use. I've owned a Sparcstation 10, a Ultra 5 and a Ultra 60 with ultrastore 711, scsi tape drive and a SunPCI II card. Ran Solaris, OpenBSD and FreeBSD on them. Later I got a powermeter, and have run Intel based servers ever since


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## kpedersen (Feb 23, 2019)

Can't remember the servers behind them but used the SunRay thin clients a lot at the University. We had about 30 of the things. They worked very nicely. Running Solaris 10 Update 7.




I even still have the Sun Microsystems ID card in my wallet . Quite cool, just stick it in and your exact session is restored; including all running processes.

We unfortunately no longer have them up and running. I am told that they are all stored in one of the supply closets ready to be sent to land fill :/


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## recluce (Feb 23, 2019)

Well, I used or abused a Sun Sparc Classic. While this was a workstation, we used it mostly as a server to get our new (1994) ISP off the ground. That machine initially was Webserver, DNS Server, FTP Server and even news server (Usenet without binaries) and even served as a workstation. The uplink at that time was a whopping 128 kBit/s. 

Today, the business is still around, even though more as managed security service provider. That old Sparc Classic lasted for a long while. It just shed more and more functions to other machines, FreeBSD servers that is (the shop remains 90% FreeBSD). At the end, it only ran NTP (I believe) and was retired with a little ceremony on its 20th anniversary in 2014. It is now sitting in a display cabinet in the reception area.


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## olli@ (Feb 25, 2019)

I once had a SparcStation 10 (SS10). It had Solaris installed on it when I got it; I replaced it with OpenBSD (FreeBSD doesn't support it), then got annoyed with it and finally replaced it with NetBSD which was better. Stopped using it about 15 years ago because the performance was rather abysmal … A cheap intel PC was much faster and consumed less power. Also, the SS10 had only a simple graphics card (what was it called … CG4 or CG6) that supported only 8 bit color.


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## aragats (Feb 25, 2019)

I have enjoyed using Ultra SparcStation with SunOS 4.x and OpenWindows back in the 90s.


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## olli@ (Feb 26, 2019)

By the way, I'm still using Sun's old OpenLook-based window manager olvwm with FreeBSD today. It was the default back in the old SunOS 4.x days, before Solaris 2 and CDE existed. It was removed from FreeBSD's ports collection because it's not 64bit-clean and there's no maintainer, but I'm keeping an i386 package around (along with its dependencies, which isn't a lot) that still works well with FreeBSD/amd64.


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