Mark J Koch ✅'s wall

A 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.

Screen shot of the graphics card output at power on of the SPARCstation UPN with a CG6 graphics card installed.

Front view of the Sun Microsystems UPN, super small desktop system. This is a prototype and no more than about 20-30 were ever made. Measured approximately 9 inches long, 7 inches high and about 4 inches wide. Had two SBus slots and a AFX graphics card slot. Two serial ports, Sun Keyboard/Mouse connector, 16-bit audio and external SCSI. On the top were slots for up to two PCMCIA cards, which brought in nascent WiFi capability. There was an internal SCA type hard drive of approximately 200GB. Processor was the Fujitsu turboSPARC-170MHz. Memory was two standard 32MB DRAM cards. Ran Solaris 5.9 operating system.

Like 24 May at 19:31 | Open on mastodon.social

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jell

@maehem This thing is adorable and, like, I almost wish the line that crack made was part of the original design. Adds a nice flow.

26 May at 0:19 | Open on mastodon.social

knapjack

@nick @maehem Awesome! I have an IPX that I resurrected, running NetBSD and Linux intermittently for a bit. I keep thinking I'll print an SBus-shaped Raspberry Pi case and resurrect it one more time.

26 May at 5:31 | Open on bonk.cozysumo.space

ehawk

@maehem Very interesting, thanks Mark! Do you remember why the TurboSPARC/Aurora was chosen over the contemporary UltraSPARC IIi?

26 May at 14:21 | Open on mastodon.social

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