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Re:End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video] by Sidneys1 on Wednesday October 02, 2024 @09:36AM (#41720517)
A couple years ago I got a reply to a Craigslist ad I had posted looking for 90's and 00's era computers people were looking to get rid of. This guy said he used to run a small website starting around 1995, and had a couple "SUN servers" taking up space in his storage unit that he'd love to get rid of.

He was a bit of a curmudgeon, going on about how his business partner screwed him out of a "seven-digit payout" when his domain eventually got bought by some Japanese company. But a minivan rental and some elbow grease later I had a whole pile of hardware that he was all to happy to be done with: A Sun SPARCstation 20, a Sun ULTRA 1 Creator, an Axil Ultima 1 (a third-party Sun clone), an gorgeous amber Wyse CRT terminal, and a few other odds and ends.

I wrote a more detailed list on my blog [1], but so far all I've managed to do with them is get the drives out and cloned and the ULTRA 1 running (an involved process as the internal BIOS memory lost power long ago, wiping such transient properties as "what is my MAC address".

[1]: https://sidneys1.com/retrocomputing/2022/06/03/retro-roundup...

Re:End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video] by mikeruiz on Wednesday October 02, 2024 @11:32AM (#41721677)
Love those terminals, was just thinking about looking for one!

I remember that the programmable MAC address feature occasionally came in handy when dealing with recalcitrant / braindead software ‘entitlement’ schemes vendors would occasionally require.

Re:End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video] by Sidneys1 on Wednesday October 02, 2024 @04:26PM (#41724678)
I absolutely adore the terminal. It appears to have several VT-compatible modes, so should be very usable with modern Linux. Except I don't have the accompanying Wyse keyboard with the appropriate setup keys required to switch compatibility modes. Gotta trawl ebay for one one of these days...
Re:End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video] by porphyra on Wednesday October 02, 2024 @01:22PM (#41722918)
I was excited to read about cool hardware including a gorgeous amber Wyse CRT terminal, and disappointed that there were no pictures whatsoever on the blog post.
Re:End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video] by Sidneys1 on Wednesday October 02, 2024 @04:18PM (#41724619)
Yes, I got ahold of these just weeks before moving to a new state. Things have been a bit chaotic since then. Here's a video of it booting, though!

https://youtu.be/lGCLvFzGYX8

Re:End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video] by Sidneys1 on Friday October 04, 2024 @03:09PM (#41744621)
Re:End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video] by shrubble on Wednesday October 02, 2024 @03:33PM (#41724255)
The Sun Rescue email mailing list has people who can help (I’m on the list also); much lower volume than in previous years but still helpful.

http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org