Oh look, a random relic from aeons ago: Original #SunMicrosystems sign from the 1980s featuring the 1984 logo.
It was outdoors for soooo long that the labeling faded away nearly completely so I had to re-apply it and accidentally upgraded to the 1996 logo. Oops...
Did I mention that I collect weird random old stuff?
OTD 1989: #SunMicrosystems announces the SPARCstation 1. Datasheet: https://www.1000bit.it/js/web/viewer.html?file=%2Fad%2Fbro%2Fsun%2Fsparc%2Fsparcstation1%2Epdf#zoom=page-fit
Purple feet!
Someone near Frankfurt is giving away two Sun StorEDGE units. I wish I had a house so I could adopt these.
https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/sun-microsystems-storedge-l700e-l180/3041337943-225-4501
**Sun Microsystems’s Storage History – The Early Years**
https://ethw.org/First-Hand:Sun_Microsystems%E2%80%99s_Storage_History_%E2%80%93_The_Early_Years
#SunMicrosystems
Oh. I'm feeling so very old.
.
I remember setting up a 750 MB mirrored set of drives on a Sun 4/260 to run a "large" Oracle DB. That was more storage than the entire set of Wang VS systems we were replacing.
We were told we would NEVER need that much storage.
ordered a new run of #usb3sun boards. should be back in stock later this month!
OTD 1982: #SunMicrosystems is incorporated.
Preliminary business plan (as VLSI Systems, Inc.): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AISiLW3rBJQhArztoQ5p5K12Z4Bj2hru/view?usp=sharing
Serial number 1 of the JavaStation 1 is up on EBay: https://www.ebay.com/itm/195650243344
You can run NetBSD on it: https://fatsquirrel.org/oldfartsalmanac/netbsd-on-a-javastation/
-8 outside and +18 indoor
Is there any shared computing like #boinc for Sparc or MacPPC (Apple PowerPC)?
That you have had any experience with?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_computing
My #sunmicrosystems #sunfire and #powermacs generate a lot of heat. so lets give them something todo
Got the Ultra 5 to boot again after manually twiddling from the serial monitor (instead of doing blind Stop-A bullshit).
A joyous moment, but also the nvram is, unsurprisingly, shot -- but at least that I can work with vs "it doesn't boot and doesn't do diagnostic led blinkies on the keyboard"
I'll call that enough of a success to motivate me again
Thinking about selling my Sun TAAC-1 VLIW board. Introduced in 1987, it was a coprocessor for VME Sun-3 systems, and the world's first "Board Level General-Purpose Graphics Processing Unit", according to some.
Approximately 400 were made.
Photogenic little beastie, among other things.
If you're interested, please email: dave@cca.org
OTD 1994, #SunMicrosystems announces the #SunATM 155Mbps ATM SBus card. The kind of ATM you only put money into. My baby, Mea culpa. 1/2
Randomly thinking about this the other day, still think it's crazy that #Java was this huge important #ProgrammingLanguage when I was first learning to program back in the 2000s, then #SunMicrosystems was bought by #Oracle in the 2010s when I was teaching for the certifications, and now in the 2020s it's become this depreciated legacy language. The success of the less-portable and less-learned copycat .Net and staying power of the older #Python shows there was clearly a market for Java to continue, but the large #corporation was so much more interested in filing lawsuits against people who were doing things with the language than actually developing it further with modern features, they actually managed to push it into obscurity.
And we can't forget that this was a MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR LOSS. BILLIONS OF DOLLARS had been spent to build up infrastructure to support the widespread use of this language across the industry, so when they dropped all support, and all of that became obsolete for no other reason.
Found these while cleaning up the lab. I saved them from a pile of electronics waste at my old job years ago. Both work fine, even on a Windows system. Interestingly, the left one is a three-button ball mouse with a USB connector. No fancy scroll wheels or optical sensors. #SunMicrosystems
I might just boot up this sucker, too. Just because. For some reason it's missing its faceplate. I think it's just in another box.
@mwl I also have #SunMicrosystems ZFS On Disk Specification, and I’m not sure they both agree. I expect I just need to read more carefully.
First tradeshow swag from #SunMicrosystems? Note the original logo.
I had completely forgotten that in the early aughts Sun actively encouraged employees to blog. I was reminded by Bryan Cantrill's reflections on his two decades of technical blogging started at Sun.
https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2024/11/16/blogging-through-the-decades/
Supercomputing from 1993: #SunMicrosystems SS10 cluster. (Exhibited at SC18)
If only Sun Microsystems had purchased Apple when it had the chance, we could have had this magnificent device
https://alecmuffett.com/article/110670
#SunMicrosystems #apple
