Gday everyone
Today we're going to be taking a look at one of my favourite computers here, the SparcStation
20.
It's one of the first computers I actually bought for my collection.
I bought it about 12 years ago for less than 100 Australian dollars.
And I bought it mostly because it's one of the kinds of computers I used to use back
when I was at university.
Although I used to use these through something called an X-terminal.
Today we're going to take a quick look at the history of the machine, although there's
not very much of that, we'll take a look inside, and we'll play with some software.
Sun originated from Stanford University in the early 1980's founded by graduate students.
The name Sun seems to come from a pun on the univeristies computer network which was known
as SUNET.
The first Sun computer actually came before the company, and was a personal CAD workstation
designed using the Motorola 68000 and spare parts from the computer science deparment
and Silicon Valley supply houses.
This design would be the basis for the Sun-1 workstation, the first official workstation
to carry an early version of the sun logo.
Through these early Motorola 68k workstations Sun would become well known for making Unix
computers with high quality graphics.
They would replace the Motorola processors with one of their own design in 1987, the
SPARC architecture was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system and
would outperform most of the competition.
This lead to virtually every Unix vendor hurrying to make a RISC design of their own.
Digital would come out with the Alpha, HP would make the PA-RISC and SGI bought MIPS
computer systems.
These SPARC based machines would come in a variety of form factors, from smaller workstations
in these cute little lunchbox cases, to the larger pizzabox workstations with greater
capacity, to the larger sized enterprise servers which had large amounts of memory and processing
power.
As I mentioned before, my machine is a Sparcstation 20.
It was released in 1994 and is one of the more capable of the 32 bit Sparc machines.
It could take up to 512MB of system memory and could support up to 4 processors.
Because of it's capability these machines were often deployed as servers due to their
cost per performance.
Often being used as web servers.
One notable use of this model was it's involvement in making the movie Toy story.
The Animators were using high end SGI workstations that were extremely expensive, but also extremely
good at 3d graphics.
It would have been too expensive to build a render farm out of such machines, so after
benchmarking and testing they settled on using the Sparcstation 20 as it combined multiple
CPUs in a small enough package with lower cost and decent performance.
They ended up using 117 machines 87 with two 100Mhz Ross Hypersparcs and 30 with four 100Mhz
Ross Hypersparcs.
These were co-ordinated by a single larger 8 CPU Sparcserver to provide data and manage
the cluster.
Over the life of this model there were a number of different CPU modules you could install
starting as low as 50Mhz but reaching as high as 200Mhz.
There were two slightly different core designs that were the most used, SuperSparc and HyperSparc.
The Supersparc was made by Texas Instruments for Sun, and these modules generally feature
a large cache.
The Hypersparc was made by Ross Technology and generally achieved higher clock rates,
but with a smaller cache and worse memory latency.
In general it very much depends on the work load to determine which implementation performs
faster.
I wrote a comparison on my blog some time ago which I'll link in the description bellow.
Inside in my machine I have 3 CPU's, two 50Mhz SuperSparcs on a dual card, and a 60Mhz SuperSparc
on a separate module.
I have a 90Mhz Ross hypersparc as a spare module, which by itself isn't faster than
the three I have installed.
I have 272 Megabyte of RAM installed and 18 Gigabytes of hard disk space on a single SCA
hard disk.
I can not use the onboard CG14 frame buffer because I don't have a VSIMM, but I have an
SBUS TGX+ 2MB framebuffer card to allow me to run the machine as a workstation.
If you ever get a similar age Sun machine you'll find it helpful to have a straight-through
serial cable.
I have two adapters and some cat5 cable, this is useful for some of the more modern Sun
machines I have.
The reason you want a serial cable is to interact with the machines console where you'll see
diagnostic messages during the boot up process which can take some time depending on the
PROM settings.
It's feasible to install an operating system and use the machine via the serial terminal
if you don't have enough hardware for an interactive display.
For such a display you'll need a keyboard, mouse, and framebuffer and a means to connect
it to a display.
My framebuffer has a 13w3 connector, so I bought an adapter to connect to VGA screens.
Not all screens will work with the output from typical framebuffers, but I've had no
problems with the displays I've tried.
The machines ROM will not turn on the display unless there is a keyboard connected, it needs
a special Sun keyboard and mouse which can be difficult to acquire.
I was lucky enough to be gifted some by a work colleage.
Once you're powered on you will probably need to use the openboot ROM to configure and boot
the system.
There is some basic online help in the ROM and some commands to boot the system or power
it off, but something you might not expect is that it also contains a forth interpreter.
My machine is already configured and has an operating system installed, so I just boot
the local hard disk.
I chose NetBSD to install on this machine as it is one of the few modern Operating systems
to still support 32 bit SPARC.
Back in the day you'd usually find either SunOS or Solaris installed, but there were
a few other options such as NextStep.
I'm using FVWM as my window manager, partly as it's what I used on the X terms back in
the day and is a nostalgic favourite for me now.
I've compiled some X windows games, Here's some of them being played using my computer
as the X server.
I'm considering making a video series to show some of these in more detail, let me know
in the comments if that would interest you.
I was also able to compile two web browsers, Links and Dillo.
They can both view modern websites, although without javascript.
The performance is a bit slow, but it is surprisingly usable given the system.
Although stuff like twitter doesn't work because of javascript.
Dosbox of all things compiles and works, the display doesn't update particularly fast,
partly due to the limited 10 Megabit networking.
I also imagine that the machines relatively low performance would be a factor.
Not sure if these bench mark values are correct.
I apologise for the flicker, but I couldn't run these games on an X server I could capture.
These games don't work on 24bit colour displays, Xdoom for instance requires an 8 bit display.
Here it is running at double the normal 320x200 size.
It runs quite well all things considered.
Here it is running at the standard 320x200.
It's too small for playability, but it does render reasonably fast.
I believe this version of Doom and the X server can't change the frame buffers resolution,
so we're kinda stuck with the small window.
The X11 version of Maelstrom is similar in that it requires an 8 bit display, but it's
quite playable as the window is large enough, although the text is a little small.
Unfortunately at this point the power supply in my machine appeared to die.
I've ordered a replacement, and I might have a go at refurbishing this one.
The board looks a bit greasy and dirty suggesting to me that the capacitors have let go.
There might be more wrong with it, but I can't exactly make it more broken.
This is kinda sad for me as this is one of my favourite computers.
It taught me much of what I know about Sun hardware and the basics of getting one of
these going.
I used it for a time as a server, providing a basic website and subversion repositories
for some of my projects.
Even the name I use for my channel and other media came from it, being a play of the name
SPARC.
I eventually retired it from it's role as a server when I got hardware to allow for
a display.
Since then I use it as a vintage work station, mostly for fun.
Given I can't show any more of my machine running, I'm going to have to leave it here
for today.
Thanks for Watching and I'll catch you next time.