Some more details about SPARCstation UPN.

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Mark J Koch ✅

Ortho view of UPN system. This photo appears to be the foam mockup model made by Palo Alto Design.

A Sun SPARCstation UPN opened to reveal the main board and inserted SBus cards along with the disk drive mounted to one half of the chassis metal. The 16-bit audio card can be seen at the bottom. Above that are memory DIMMs and above that is the DC-DC converter that converted the 24V input to 12V, 5V and 3.3V used by the fan and chips.

Description sheet for the SPARCstation UPN main board. We intended to also sell the main board as an embedded solution.

A close up view of the inside of the SPARCstation UPN with SBus cards removed. The dual PCMCIA socket can be seen with a layer covering of Kapton film.

Like 24 May at 19:48 | Open on mastodon.social

17 comments

Emelia/Emi

@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...)

24 May at 22:55 | Open on tech.lgbt

Mark J Koch ✅

@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.

24 May at 23:00 | Open on mastodon.social

Chuck

@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."

26 May at 0:32 | Open on chaos.social

Mark J Koch ✅

@ChuckMcManis @becomethewaifu I'm not sure I know what the star-7 is although it seems to ring a bell.

26 May at 2:40 | Open on mastodon.social

Chuck

@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

26 May at 2:53 | Open on chaos.social

Mark J Koch ✅

@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.

26 May at 4:22 | Open on mastodon.social

Alex

@maehem "wearable" is a stretch 🤣

24 May at 22:56 | Open on mastodon.scot

Mark J Koch ✅

@alextually But I made one. Why didn't I keep it?

24 May at 23:01 | Open on mastodon.social

Alex

@maehem I'm actually heartbroken! I would love to have seen that. It was a backpack I guess?

25 May at 9:15 | Open on mastodon.scot

Mark J Koch ✅

@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.