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Newbie looking to get into vintage unix workstations, requesting advice.

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- The Ultra 5 and 10 also have swappable CPU cards. As far as I know, they are basically the same machine, except the 5 is a pizzabox and the 10 is a midtower. I think the fastest CPU available for the 5/10 is what, 400MHz? Even though the 5 takes the same RAM as the 10, the 5 can only accept 512m without mods because the floppy drive gets in the way of installing the taller 1024m simms. Even though it looks like regular PC ram, it isn't; it's some kind of parity ram.
Couple or three corrections to this otherwise excellent post:

1.) Fastest UltraSPARC IIi for 5/10 as far as I know was 440MHz.

2.) There was a special double-stacker 512MB DIMM that fit an Ultra 5; I have a set. I can post a pic when I find them again.... :)

3.) There is an ATX-compatible motherboard that takes the same UltraSPARC IIi modules, called a SPARCengine IIi, 501-4559, aka Panther. These are quite expensive on eBay; maybe it's time I sold some of the nine or ten that I have here.

There are other more modern UltraSPARC III based units, like Sunblade 1000 or even the lower end Sunblade 150.
 
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I've learned a lot from this thread. I'm in the camp that is in favor of exploring the original hardware even though it can now be emulated, or at least simulated on other more modern equipment.

I was considering adding some SUN or SGI equipment to my collection. But I am not sure I want to spend the money to acquire it or learn a whole new platform.
Speaking from the experience of running several different Unix workstations, going all the way back to the TRS-80 Models 16, 16B, and 6000 running Xenix through running an AT&T 3B1 ( a small incremental improvement, mostly in being Sys V instead of Sys III and having more RAM; it wasn't really any faster) through running a small two node Apollo DomainOS system (two DN3500's, one server with tape, 690MB drive and 24MB RAM and one workstation with the 19 inch monitor, networked with Apollo Token Ring; these are 25MHz (IIRC) 68030-based systems), the simple fact of the matter is that, at a Unix shell prompt, there really just isn't that much difference between those systems and a modern Linux or *BSD box. Sure, some things have been modernized, but vi is still vi, and I use vim on my Debian 11 system almost exactly like I used vi on the old Xenix Tandy 6000.

All those machines are long gone; replaced by Linux boxen of various speeds over the years. My main boxen right now are a pair of Dell Poweredge R515 rack mount servers and a Dell Precision 7740 laptop, all running Debian 11 at the moment.

But I do understand the "thrill" of getting an old box loaded and running. The Tandy 6000 was fickle enough when it was new; the DN3500's were even more fickle. And while I used my T6K for quite a while, once I got the more compact 3B1.... The 3B1 was my main box for a long time post-t6k, both before and after the DN3500 experiment. (They just took way too much power and were just way too weird, even though they were supposed to be SVR4; the 3B1 had a great software archive and was bog standard SVR2, good enough to run CNews, pine, and trn. ). If you can find a working 3B1 they are fun and old boxen, 68010 based, for a great vintage feel; I never had any major issues with mine. For TCP/IP you can run the KA9Q SLIP/PPP stack, or if you can find one of the relatively rare Ethernet boards you can go that route.

I would pick something that can run NetBSD, personally, and that is relatively common and inexpensive. For text mode only a Sun 4m is plenty, but they do have their issues due to simple age. And parts are harder to get now than when I was last fiddling around with Aurora SPARC Linux (based on Red Hat Linux and later on Fedora). I would probably not go any older than Ultra 5/10 vintage these days if I were just getting started.

EDIT: Almost forgot SGI. While SGI machines of the Indigo2, Indy, Octane, or O2 generations or newer are quite capable, they need IRIX. This used to be a very difficult and expensive piece; I remember paying several hundred $ for my set of 6.5.19 discs. But purple Indigo2 IMPACT workstations or the O2 R10K/R12K workstations are quite usable. Just NEVER ship an O2 assembled; they are so brittle these days. Indigo2 is much more rugged. And unless you know exactly what you're doing stay away from Onyx/Origin or Altix. Especially avoid Altix these days, since they use the orphaned Itanium ia64 architecture (I have three Altix systems at $dayjob; one is 20 CPU, one is 4 CPU, and one is 32 CPU, and all of them use a lot of power and generate vast quantities of heat; they haven't been run in several years due to these reasons).

One further EDIT and I'm done: I've run Ultra 5/10 machines as personal workstations, and the ide disk performance stinks. Get a SCSI disk and bootable adapter...or get a Sunblade with better disk.
 
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But I do understand the "thrill" of getting an old box loaded and running

It’s stupid, but probably the most thrilling “Old Unix” moment I had in a long, long time was successfully installing PDP 2.11BSD in SIMH and getting the virtual network adapter plumbed in so you could telnet into it. (I did this on a racked machine in a dev lab at work and it stayed up for about a month so we could all get a laugh out of it.) So honestly you don’t *have* to have the real hardware if it’s UNIX history you’re interested in.

(Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to play with a real PDP11/70 with the hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of add-on hardware it would take to match the virtual configuration I was using, but that’s just never going to happen unless I stumble into just the right museum docent gig after I retire.)
 
So while I didn't find the pair of 256MB (512MB kit) DIMMs yet that I had installed in an Ultra 5 I used as a personal workstation a number of years ago, I did find an example of the double-stacked chip technique (these DIMMs should actually work ok in an Ultra 5, even though they are 60ns instead of 50ns; they are the requisite 3.3V EDO buffered ECC, and came out of a Cisco 12008 router's GRP-B route processor card). Four of these give 1GB, the max for the Ultra5/10 series. The Sun 256MB modules don't double-stack and are quite a bit too tall to fit, but the double-stacked modules work well, although they are NOT 'supported' by Sun, since Sun never released a 256MB DIMM for the U5 as far as I know. There is even a current eBay auction (as of Jun 23, 2022) for an Ultra 5 with 1GB of 50ns RAM installed (it doesn't really have a Creator 3D, though!). Here are a couple of pics:
double-stacking-chips-in-DIMM.jpgdouble-stack-end-view-DIMM.jpg
 
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Also, just an FYI on Suns. You really HAVE to run these with a GUI desktop. The stock "text/console mode", while a beautiful font, is just the slowest thing imaginable. I don't even think it's as fast as 9600 baud.
 
I've run Suns with text console, GUI console, and serial port, as the message Red Hat and deriviative Linux at least says:
Code:
Red Hat install init version 7.0 using a serial console
remember, cereal is an important part of a nutritionally balanced breakfast.

The large majority of the Sun boxen I've run have been for $dayjob and were serial console. Even did a small Beowulf of Ultra 30s.... Here's a coupe of photos from 2005 of that attempt:
sr-u30-cluster-front-wide.jpg
u3-cluster-back-from-2005.jpg

The largest Sun systems I've run under Linux are Ex500-series; $dayjob has an E5500 and an E6500 here; the E6500 has 20 400MHz CPUs and somewhere around 28GB of RAM or so. It doesn't get run very often, but it's still ready to boot if needed, although it HAS been ten years since last boot....boot takes fifteen minutes to come up to OBP. Would have loved trying a Sun Fire 15K at least once, though.

You're very correct; text console (as opposed to serial console) is quite slow.

The oldest Sun box here is a Sun4/360 with 32MB of RAM. I haven't really done anything with it yet. It is old enough to run SunOS.
 
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Looks like it'll keep you warm on those cold winter nights...
Indeed. The one Altix 350 system got its name 'winterstar' for that reason..... although the heat load of the EMC Clariion next to it dwarfs even a 30-processor (15 node plus 1 router) Altix 350.... :)

That's one reason the Ultra 5/10 series are a good intro; they are old enough to be a bit of trouble but not so power-hungry they get left powered-down most of the time.... Same is true one with the SPARC Classic, IPX, and IPC of the Sun4m generation; small, low-power, and fun.
 
Same is true one with the SPARC Classic, IPX, and IPC of the Sun4m generation; small, low-power, and fun.

The Sparcstation 5 is also a nice unobtrusive box and even with the slower CPU configs it'll run rings around most of the lunchbox-shaped models, but the performance spread between them is so relative at this point that it hardly matters; they basically run the gamut from "low-end 486-ish" to "Decent Pentium-ish". IE, fine for the years they were introduced, almost all equally "slow" now.

Speaking of performance, back when I was still playing with an Ultra 10 (which I still have in the garage, and as long as I don't actually try to power it up I can claim it works) I went on a spree of running the old flops.c benchmark on everything I could compile it on and it's my vague memory that the Ultrasparc IIi in those boxes scored about the same as a similarly clocked Macintosh G4. (Which despite all the misleading advertising from Apple also means effectively about the same ballpark as a similarly clocked Pentium II or III.) Which was, again, decently respectable for the years they were made (although definitely long in the tooth by late 2002, when they were finally discontinued). This certainly puts them significantly closer to some definition of "still usable" than the 4m machines, but... I guess the reason I still feel like the 4m machines are "better" in some ways is because they can in theory at least run more interesting/unique antique software. (Like SunOS or the Sun version of NextSTEP.) With the Ultras it's Solaris, Linux, or one of the BSDs, and that's pretty much it.
 
If you're really a vintage person, there are the Sun/2 Multibus boxes, as well as the Sun/3 VME ones.
Always wanted a working Sun 2 system, simply for the Multibus.
 
Always wanted a working Sun 2 system, simply for the Multibus

I’ve kind of wanted one just because there’s a long running thread/argument on the NetBSD mailing list over what the slowest platform NetBSD ever ran on is, and the Sun/2 is an extremely strong competitor. (There are apparently some MicroVAX machines that give it a run for its money.) It’s also amazing that the maintainer of the Sun/2 port hasn’t thrown in the towel yet, it’s still in current:


20 years ago it was pretty common to trip over Sun/3s in the back room at Weirdstuff in Santa Clara, but I never bit. Mostly 3/50s in that huge flat pancake case with the dent on top for the (ECL?) monitor, that was always missing.
 
If you're really a vintage person, there are the Sun/2 Multibus boxes, as well as the Sun/3 VME ones.
Always wanted a working Sun 2 system, simply for the Multibus.
You get essentially the same system with the 3B1; 68010-based, up to 3.5MB of RAM. 3B1 is quite a bit smaller, and no need for an extra terminal on the desk.

As far as multibus goes, I have a three Proteon routers here that are multibus and 68020 processors; would love a NetBSD on those....
 
This here is what you need. :D It came with a dual-height LSI 11-02, but I am (slowly) working towards putting an 11-73, SCSI, and ethernet in it. 2.11BSD here I come!!!

If only the VT-100 worked. :( I dunno if it's fixable or not; haven't gotten that far.

I'm gonna use it to run my gopherhole and the simple part of the web services.

20211105_203309.jpg

Tetering precariously above my head:
20220623_180509.jpg

Beautiful Tektronix PDP-11/23 with 8" floppy and 8" winchester drive that supposedly runs some ultra-proprietary variant of sysV called TNIX. I can't get it working though. As far as I can tell, every bus transceiver on every card is burned out, and I am not sure why as the PSU appears to be fine. o_O
20220623_180537.jpg
 
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I love how the docs for running BSD on a PDP-11 are riddled with statements like this:

Only sheer insanity could prompt the use of 2.11BSD machines as gateways. If you really want to do this then the best recourse is to prowl the sources and see what has to be done. The code is all there, and the "ipforwarding" variable is present.

Sounds like a dare to me.
 
Isn't netBSD based on 4.2 BSD? I can't recall.
Via Net/2 and the various 4.3 flavors as I recall. There's a family tree at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unix_history-simple.svg
Funny that this was the first mention of the AT&T Unix PC in this thread!
Hmm, I know I previously mentioned the 3B1 in post #42.... These days I would probably prefer a mightyframe or a 3B2 of some sort. If I had power and space a 3B15 would make a nice space heater.....
 
Via Net/2 and the various 4.3 flavors as I recall.

Via “386BSD”, yeah. Basically they took the Net/2 code, which wasn’t *quite* a full OS release (it omitted a few bits that were thought maybe actually belonged to AT&T, although the settlement of USL vs. BSDi case a few years later made it pretty clear that was mostly bogus), and filled in the pieces. All of Net, Open, and FreeBSD are forks of this code base.
 
I’ve kind of wanted one just because there’s a long running thread/argument on the NetBSD mailing list over what the slowest platform NetBSD ever ran on is, and the Sun/2 is an extremely strong competitor.
The Sun 2/50 would certainly be in the running for slowest...anything. It's a, what, 16MHz?

All that said, at the time, it was a usable workstation. We had one at the office. A friend of mine bought one for home use. Plugged in to a 750MB MIcropolis (I think). Loudest beast of a drive I'd ever seen. I think the lights dimmed when that sucker spun up.
 
The Sparcstation 5 is also a nice unobtrusive box and even with the slower CPU configs it'll run rings around most of the lunchbox-shaped models, but the performance spread between them is so relative at this point that it hardly matters; they basically run the gamut from "low-end 486-ish" to "Decent Pentium-ish". IE, fine for the years they were introduced, almost all equally "slow" now.
I have an SS4, an 85 MHz SS5, a pair of Axil SS5 clones, an SS10, an SS20, a pair of SPARC Classics, and a pair of IPX (or maybe they're IPCs....). I ran Aurora Linux 0.32 (and later) on both the SS4 and SS5 long about 20 years ago.

Too many Unix boxen, so little time_t.... and there's an Alpha server 2100 (4 CPU, 1GB RAM) too..... And both 164SX and 164LX boards....
 
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