The truth is, our desktop computers today would have been classed as supercomputers only a few decades ago. There was a time when people who needed real desktop power looked down their noses at anyone with a Mac or a PC with any operating system on it. The workstation crowd used Sun computers. Sun used the Sparc processor, and the machine had specs that are laughable now but were enviable in their day. [RetroBytes] shows off Sun’s final entry in the category, the Ultra 45 from 2007.
Confusingly, the model numbers don’t necessarily increase. The Ultra 80, for example, is an older computer than the 45. Then there were machines like the Ultra 20, 24, 27, and 40 that all used x86 CPUs. A ’45 had one or two UltraSPARC III 64-bit CPUs running at 1.6 GHz and up to a whopping 16 GB of RAM (the one in the video has 8GB). Sure, we see less powerful computers today, but they are usually Chromebooks or very cheap PCs.
The Ultra line started back in 1995 but went underground for a few years with a re-branding. Sun brought the name back in 2005, and the Ultra 45 hit the streets in 2006, only to discontinue the machine in late 2008. According to [RetroBytes], the Sun team knew the Workstation days were numbered and wanted to produce a final awesome workstation. Partially, the reason for sparing few expenses was that anyone who was buying a SPARC workstation in 2006 probably had a reason not to move to cheaper hardware, so you have them over a proverbial barrel.
We liked the CPU cooler, which looked hefty. Honestly, except for the type of CPUs in it, the box could pass itself off as a mid-range desktop tower today with PCI express sockets. The operating system was Sun’s brand of Unix, Solaris, now owned by Oracle.
Sun’s big competitor for a while was Apollo. We’d point out that if all you want is to run Solaris, you don’t need to buy new old hardware.
I think I might have an old Ultra 5 in the garage somewhere.
I had fond memories of the Ultra 5. It was already a dog back on early noughties, even running Linux 😁
I started using Sun workstations back in 89. Sun sparctation 1. I was a draughtsman and our drawing office switched from a primos mainframe to the suns. The increase in performance was phenomenal
Me too 😉
Perhaps SPARC lives on, produced as microcontrollers by MCST in Russia.
Fujitsu as well, last I checked. They keep cranking out newer and faster processors.
However none of those are in workstations
SPARC lives on in the space world. The LEON line of processors by Gaisler is SPARC-based, fully space grade, and is used in a lot of space missions especially European ones. They’re not powerhouses though. Their latest processor somehow is able to execute both SPARC and RISCV instructions (but not at the same time) but I don’t know the details about it.
I’d love to have a working Sparcstation!
(Nostalgia)
The last interesting Sun hardware I setup was a SPARC Enterprise T5140 with 16 cores and 128 threads in total. Setting it up using a 9600 baud serial console, I made the mistake of listing the CPU’s (psrinfo -pv), and then thinking: “oops, I probably will have time for a coffee now”.
The Oracle T-class CPUs were a branch off of the SPARC Thumper, cool-threads CPU line. Fujitsu held the IP for the heavy hitting SPARC64 CPUs, and the T-class underperformed during the T2, T3, T4, T5 getting close, but not until the SPARC M-class processors did Oracle regain the ability to compete against the SPARC64-VIIIs and above. I ran all these processors in a data center environment, in Sun SPARC M5000s, T2000, T3-2, T4-1, T4-4, T5-4, and T8-1s.
Solaris lives on. Illumos is Solaris, as forked from the OpenSolaris sources shortly before the Oracle buyout. The illumos crew have been maintaining it all this time, and it’s actually shipping now as the hypervisor OS on some of the most advanced servers ever made: Oxide’s rack-scale systems.
If anyone ever ported it over to RISC-V (might happen after ITX boards start to ship with the hypervisor extension), I might expand it’s uderbase again.
I’ve recently been playing with the last HP Precision Architecture RISC workstation, an HP Workstation C8000, made from 2004-2007. These have one or two PA-8800 or PA-8900 64-bit dual-core CPUs at 900 MHz, 1.0, or 1.1 GHz, with up to 32GiB of ECC DDR memory. They run HP-UX 11i v1 (not v2 or v3), MTOE or TCOE (Minimum Technical Operating Environment or Technical Computing Operating Environment), or Linux.
After the C8000, they switched to Itanium workstations, but they only made two models of Itanium workstation before switching to only x86 for their workstations.
I think it was upgradeable to v2. My b2000 and b2600 certainly were.
Got dozens of SPARK 2 running Solaris 2.5.1 running at work. Tough little machines but the batteries dying on the CMOS are a pain in the keister.
SPARC
SPARC 10 with two Ross/Hypers and 16 Megs ram running SunOs 4.1.4 sits on my desk. 6 or 7 years ago I replaced the 2 gig scsi drives which made the thing overheat with one of those scsi adapters which lets me use a a 10 gig micro-sd contain 4 2gig file systems. Heat problem is gone.
It shares an HP monitor (either/or) with a tower PC and lives most of the time in 1993 which is where the applications expect to be. OS patched up to last one I could find (maybe around 2000). It does live in today when I’m running apps which are not calendar linked. Only real problem
running in the past is files have to be carefully named because last-save date has no meaning.
I did replace the hostid cmos with a new one a few years back. except for 10 years while we were away, it’s been running 24/7 since I bought it in 1992.
I remember thinking Solaris was a travesty at the time. There was a big foofara in the Unix commumity as to whether UNIX standard would be Dec or Sun based (may have flavors misnamed). Dec won and then was gone IIRC.
I love it.
SPARK
Scalar Processor ARChitecture (SPARC)
Also a play on Palo Alto Parc
“The truth is, our desktop computers today would have been classed as supercomputers only a few decades ago.” No, they wouldn’t. A supercomputer is defined by its size. Something that fits on a desktop could never be a super computer.
If you traveled back in time 40+ years with a raspberry pi 5, number one you would be burned at the stake for being a witch/warlock and number two you would probably have one of the most powerful computers on the planet until someone killed your ssd with tiny files and then you remember you forgot to bring a USB keyboard, mouse, HDMI monitor and USB-C power supply.
Sorry, Karl, you’re completely off-base here. Not only were there relatively small supercomputers – I’m thinking the Cray-III design here which was quite compact – there were also huge numbers of mainframes which were physically large but never described as supercomputers.
The definition relates purely to performance. If you think about it, a small size is actually beneficial: that’s why the Cray-1 and Cray-XMP was designed in the C-curve shape. This minimizes the signal propagation delay, with all of the wiring around that small inside space in the center.
There was also a category of “mini-supercomputers”, such as the Cray Y-MP/EL, which didn’t have high performance, but which had source-level and sometimes binary-level compatibility with the big boys. There were generally sold as development systems, and – blunt honesty here as an ex-SGI/Cray employee – boast potential. Universities in particular would boast they have a Cray, then quietly “but it’s only an EL….”
They were referred to as deskside crays. I unpacked one once. It was mini fridge size
We still run a Sun Blade at work, for circuit simulation and fault analysis software LASAR… Made a sparc QEMU virtual machine on a raspberry pi just incase the hardware fails. :)
This! I have emulated an Ultra10 image in QEMU just in case our old E1000 dies.
We use LASAR too and on a Ultra 45 like in the video. Tried to setup a QEMU VM as a backup but couldn’t really get it working acceptable. So now I’m setting up a new Oracle SPARC S7 server to be our primary…
My first e-commerce site was hosted on such a machine, running Solaris. It worked very well indeed.
Then the owner switched to Windows, and that’s when the problems began. I was finally forced to move to a different company with Linux hosting, and life was much better. :-)
Back when I was working on CAD software for VLSI design, I had a Sun 1 workstation running a Motorola 68000 processor. It was serial number 35. It felt very fast at the time.
So around 1990 or 91 a buddy of mine got a job at a place that sold used sun equipment.
They had a pretty liberal “put that in the garbage” policy. They would get stuff in by the semi truck load. Machine doesn’t boot? Spend a few minutes trying to figure it out, toss the whole thing. So he would pull out things from the machines that had nothing to do with the reason that it was not functional. And he ended up with quite a room full of sun stuff. At the time, I was into PCs, and doing remodeling for a living. He wanted his garage divided into three rooms. So he gave me a complete sun 3-160 in exchange for remodeling it.
I had no idea what it was good for at the time. It made some pretty cool looking mandlebrot images. I remember that the video card, which was bigger than the motherboard in a PC, had one z80 CPU for each color, with its own ram. He set me up with I think a 24-in CRT monitor, which was just insanely large at the time. And it had a video cable thicker than a garden hose with four BNC connectors on each end. Later, he hooked me up with a sun i-386. And one day I got a call from him, they were cleaning out their warehouse of racks, just sending them to the scrap yard because they had too many. So I went up there and picked up a 6 ft Sun rack with the full enclosure sides and door, and a whole bunch of drawers and slide outs and power conditioning stuff, and I had that set up in my house for a while with a PC in it. Crazy times.
“Forth
May 2, 2005 — The OpenBoot PROM (OBP) is firmware used on Sun SPARC and Apple computers to handle boot and devices (instead of a BIOS). It is very powerful, and contains a …”
As someone who both used and managed Suns from the late 80’s to mid 90’s, then actually worked at Sun from 1999-2004, I do not understand the veneration of the brand or it’s products. Early Suns – SunOS 4.x days – were pretty good. The Solaris move can only be described as a c******f*** of massive proportions, and then you had Sun selling a 64 CPU server which another company had designed and deciding to save $50M by not having ECC cache. Billions of dollars lost. It’s a company which succeeded despite itself, and at best it’s products could be described as “they’re okay”. In comparison say to DEC or SGI, I struggle to name a single really good Sun product, and the only reason we don’t say the word “Java” with absolute contempt is that Microsoft looked at that security fiasco and said “hold my beer, let me show you this cool thing called ActiveX”.
Sorry, don’t get it.
I love retrocomputing, but I think Sun gets such a positive pass it really doesn’t deserve.
IBM went out of workstation business even earlier, also Sun (unlike HP) had massive success in educational and scientific institutions that affected some general positive bias..
Mind you, there’s a world of difference between a life lived and cause of death. Whatever one might disdain (even through the loathsome Solaris2.x era) one has to be totally blind to not see Sun’s legacy everywhere.
Sun created RPC, NFS, ZFS. They contributed significantly to open source in parts of X11, Gnome.
I remember installing & using lots of Xterminals by other vendors because Sun didn’t sell them. Auspex and Netapp were purpose built NFS servers that Sun didn’t compete directly with until the Thumper & ZFS.
If you were a sysadmin, you had to compile all sorts of free software. 90% of it just worked on SunOS. Everything else was a port, including Solaris. It wasn’t until Linux became a force after the dotcom era that Sun stopped being the primary development platform.
Solaris 2.5.1 and later were solid. Solaris 10 was fantastic and Zones were better IMO than Linux containers. If Open Solaris had happened earlier, maybe it would be the Unix of choice instead of Linux today.
I remember picking up Unix with Solaris JumpStart in SD. Learned a whole lot about CLI and scripting that led to my career and where I am today. Those machines were awesome. I remember having access to an E10K in 2000 and knowing that server was king.
One time in my tender years as a junior programmer they let me use an Intergraph Interpro workstation to do some flowchart stuff I needed for documenting a project and I felt like The Shit even though I didn’t know a iota of CAD or graphic design at all then or now, with the rest of people looking at me as I sat in front of it like it was an old hat for me.
I was like a kid back then, wanting to play with every thing there was.