happy
#suntember everyone!
...yeah, i didn't realize this tag was actually a thing until just this morning, which happens to be the last day of september. i'm writing this on the night of september 30th, so in some places it's probably already
#oracletober... doesn't get much spookier than that
...but, if you know me very well, you probably know how much i love sun microsystems, and especially how much i love my sun ultra 10 workstation, which i got a couple months ago and immediately fell in love with!
this computer is equipped with a 64 bit sparcv9 CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and a 128 GB modern SSD i swapped with the old 32 GB hard drive it had when i got it. i believe it was released in around 1997-1998 and originally cost around $2.5k when it was new (although that number seems a bit fuzzy). it runs solaris 8, and it's become my favorite hobby computer to just mess around with. it's a lot of fun trying to compile random old unix software on it and (hopefully) seeing it work in the end!
my setup is an original sun keyboard and mouse and a dell CRT monitor from around 2003. the mouse is a pretty standard three button mouse with no scroll wheel and a ball. the keyboard is honestly quite crappy, i'm guessing it's a cheap membrane/rubber dome keyboard of some sort. the mouse actually plugs into the keyboard, then the keyboard plugs into the computer.
upon booting, openboot complains that it can't find a network. usually i have this connected to my wireless gateway via ethernet, but it's currently not available so the computer is offline for now. even if it is connected to the network, it keeps complaining that it can't connect to or find something which i can't quite remember, i think it's just an old network discovery protocol it's trying to use to communicate with the router or something. to boot you have to press stop + A and run "boot disk" every time it starts up. there's probably some setting to disable this, but unfortunately sun workstations of the time stored its BIOS settings using battery backed NVRAM like modern systems, however the battery was actually a proprietary chip rather than a coin cell battery which isn't produced anymore. it's possible to mod these chips to take regular batteries, but i lack the expertise to figure that out.
solaris then boots, which usually takes 2-3 minutes (which is pretty normal by solaris standards). afterwards, you can log into CDE and do all the unix stuff you'd like, such as playing doom, browsing the web with internet explorer 4.0 or netscape navigator, or just messing with the system. i wrote a little fetch style script to show some of the system's resources and info.
anyways, that's pretty much all i have to say about this amazing computer! i'm so happy i'm lucky enough to have this, for a long time i considered a sun workstation an unobtainium level holy grail, so being able to play with one is quite mind boggling. i've been meaning to make some articles on my website about this but i've been busy with many other stuff (i literally just fixed an NES before posting this lmao) so i've been putting it off. there's still a lot of stuff i want to try like hosting a web server (probably only locally, my ISP sucks and won't let me port forward) and trying some more software (like quake?). i also have a sunPCI card which currently doesn't work but i've been meaning to try cleaning its contacts to see if that could help at all. anyways, fuck oracle and have a lovely rest of the month!
