I have this hobby (some in my life might call it a problem) of collecting old computers and keeping them running. I have computers from as long ago as 1981 (a Commodore VIC-20 if you’re curious, upgraded from its factory 5 kilobyte allocation to a whopping 40 KB of RAM!), and with a couple of exceptions, all of them are in running condition.
About a year ago my friend Tillman gave me a couple of Sun workstations because he was moving to a downtown apartment. A few years previously he had given me a SPARCstation 20 and this time, he gave me its twin plus a very similar SPARCstation 10. Until recently I hadn’t had time to get the new machines running, or even connect them to power.
Although I’ve been busy lately my brain likes a certain amount of diversion so I spent a little time getting my SS20 named mooloolaba up and running. (All of the machines on my local area network are named after communities in Australia.) I had long ago upgraded it to its maximum allocation of 512 MB of RAM (I think it had about 96 when I got it), installed a floppy drive (see previous post), added the uncommon low-profile 4x SCSI CD-ROM drive (for convenience more than anything; an internal drive doesn’t require a separate power source), and upgraded the dual 50 MHz SuperSPARC CPUs to a pair of 180 MHz Ross HyperSPARCs. It’s always been a reliable machine although the original hard disk was sensitive to corruption if the power were interrupted. The new, bigger hard disk seems much better. It’s running NetBSD 4.0.2 (5.0.x doesn’t support multiple CPUs on SPARC, alas).
Pleased with my progress from that project, I ordered some null-modem cables and USB to serial adapters so that I could connect the two “new” machines and give them some attention. Since it was a little different from mooloolaba, I dug out the SS10 that is now named cairns and connected a funky old external, caddy-driven CD-ROM drive to it (a NEC MultiSpin 6 that is so cool it has an LCD display and an external SPDIF jack; apparently music hobbyists love these devices for CD audio playback). Once I realized that my $5 USB-to-serial adapters didn’t support BRK (necessary to get some machines into boot PROM mode), I got NetBSD installed and I was off to the races. This machine has 288 MB of RAM. Because I thought that 4.3 gigabytes of disk space might not be enough, I poked through my pile of SCSI hard disks and found two that didn’t work and one that did. The working one only has a gig of space on it but it’s good enough to make a useful /home partition and take some of the pressure off the / drive.
This SS10 has dual Ross HyperSPARCs too, but only at 90 MHz. It’s noticeably slower than mooloolaba, but for most applications it’s still pretty zippy.
I got some of the obscure 13W3-VGA video adapters but I wasn’t able to get a video signal from the ss10. I’m not sure if my monitor doesn’t support Sun’s funky video resolution default (I can override that and see), or if the video on this machine isn’t working. Still, they are interesting even when run headless.
The serial ports are reverse-gendered (sort of like the original Amiga 1000′s was). Unlike the Amiga, the 25-pin connector supports two serial ports. The cables are uncommon but can be found, and of course, if you’re handy with a soldering iron, you can build your own cable.
Although I have no idea what I’ll do with it, I’m pleased to have gotten cairns running. These machines are early 1990s vintage, and compared to what other machines of their era can do, they are amazingly powerful. (The very fact that they can take half a gigabyte of RAM speaks volumes; my retired Pentium 133 from that era, devonport, could only take 128 MB and my still-running 486sx, canberra, only has room for 32 MB).
Next, I’ll see if the other SS20 is running. It has a VSIMM so it might be fun to try to get X running on it…