Gregory's ServerA gentleman named Paul Khoury approached me about getting a retro computer he'd acquired up and running. The computer is a Sun SPARCstation UPN (1997), a prototype for a super small desktop computer that preceded the Mac mini by about 6-7 years. Only about 20 were ever made. I was the designer on the project and had poured my soul into it, so I was proud to help him get it running. I dug out the schematics from storage and gave any advice I could remember and he got it powered on in a few days.
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@maehem Going off the drive for scale, that's about half the size of the lunchbox? Surprising amount of horsepower in such a tiny box. (Which also reminds me I need to get my lunchbox up and running again. And find a quieter drive for it, that thing is loud...) @becomethewaifu I worked on SS1, SS2, IPC, IPX as a tech and the whole time I'd look inside there and say to myself, "That's alot of empty wasted space." So when I got into the prototypes/ concepts group I took it to task to remove all the air. My original goal was a wearable SPARCstation but my manager and the Java team had other ideas.  @maehem @becomethewaifu Did you get a chance to play with the Star-7 ? There was a joke, "not so much a pocket SPARCStation as a portable hot plate." @ChuckMcManis @becomethewaifu I'm not sure I know what the star-7 is although it seems to ring a bell. @maehem @becomethewaifu It was the original Java "hand held" (showed off to Scott to start Project Green aka First Person aka JavaSoft). It was basically a hand held SPARCStation 10 equivalent that Oak ran on with the original interactive environment hosted by 'Fang' the mascot. I think maybe 4 were built and I know that only 2 worked reliably for the 10 to 15 minutes needed to do the demo. Sometimes referred to as *7 @ChuckMcManis @becomethewaifu I know it as Project Green. I never got to handle one. I wish I had got to hang out with that project group. Our group under Jeff Rulifson (co-inventor of the mouse) was focused on Nomadic wireless and portable computing ideas. Fox and UPN were a couple projects after a SunOS tablet project that I had joined on about the middle. @alextually Actually waist mounted. Single eye HMD. Ran JavaOS. Used it for a summer project with my intern where we used a hand held "twiddler" keyboard/mouse to enter choices in an English to Japanese translation assistance app. Got literally no attention. Not even the other researchers I worked with could wrap their heads around it.  @efi Typed in the drive model from one of the photos. Fujitsu M2954ESP 3.5” 4.35GB 7.2K Wide SCSI Hard Drive  I am told you can see the UPN along with other vintage Sun systems at the upcoming VCF (Vintage Computer Festival) in Dallas Texas in mid June: https://www.vcfsw.org @AlgoCompSynth Yes. The UPN was essentially a SS5 with all the air gaps between components sucked out. @Das_blaue_Pony does this look like a pregnancy test to you? Just kidding. I’ve asked the owner to look into it. 😄   @mos_8502 Mostly hobby now. Tried to get some design gigs over the last few years but almost every potential customer thought I was a Wendy's drive through with a dollar menu. Currently writing a Cyberpunk themed point and click adventure and a replacement for EagleCAD.  @maehem This is fascinating! I'm guessing given the date, and seeing in the boot message that it's an SBUS system, Sun decided instead to pivot towards PCI/IDE based machines like the Ultra 5 and 10 at that point instead? And here I thought that Sparc IPX and Classic were the smallest SBUS Suns ever made. :) @zorinlynx SBus lasted a while but yes, someone at Sun decided to follow the PC market at the low end instead of forging new ways to make things. I hear it didn't go well.   @maehem #1 is very AT&T Death Star. #2 is very 90s. #3 is giving off merkin vibes. I would have voted for #2.    @maehem wow, a sparc I never knew about! Thanks for posting. Did the name stand for anything? @maehem @maehem Neat!! I had never heard of this project. But I was all the way over on the software side so there were probably a lot of things that I missed.  @maehem @tubetime Fun! This is around the same time @Migueldeicaza and I and others ported Linux to those. Really loved that bootloader. Erik Troan and I figured out how it loaded from tape and did what was probably the only time anyone ever booted and installed Linux from a tape drive on any machine. By then there was no reason to keep that ability so we shelved it, but we wanted to see if we could and we did. @maehem Fantastic! I had never heard of this! Big fan of Sun hardware, big fan of small compute, so this hits a real sweet spot for me! Will there be more pictures, uploads of the schematics, etc? 🤩 @tychotithonus Might make a Wikipedia page for it. Don't know if that's considered appropriate. Otherwise might make a GIT repo for the docs. Tips from others regarding suitable places to upload these things are welcome. @maehem I think the GitHub idea is a good one. The only wrinkle on the Wikipedia side is that pages are expected to draw on primary resources, rather than being a primary resource themselves. As the likely foremost authority on this device, if you publish something definitive about it, and can list any other links to other info on the Internet about it as well, then someone else without a conflict of interest, can create the Wikipedia article and cite your reference and the references you know of. @tychotithonus Yep. That's what I was thinking. So maybe just a quiet GitHub repo with what I have. @maehem Reviewing other retro Sun stuff on Wikipedia can also give you a feel for what information is of interest: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCclassic @tychotithonus Love how the Javastation/Fox short blurb is not fully accurate. Will have to address that with some tales from the dark side. ;) @maehem this story made me oddly glad. I am not involved, I remember working on some later Sun systems, but the thought that someone can find this lost treasure AND get access to the people involved in making it, just so they can have the satisfaction of booting it, and getting the hit of both nostalgia and tech curiosity realized... Thank you for posting. =D  |
Console power up from serial port.