Chuck(G)
25k Member
It's the peripheral equipment to some of these old horses that can give you fits. Why not just run Unix/Xenix/BSD under emulation? You get the experience without the frustration.
It's the peripheral equipment to some of these old horses that can give you fits. Why not just run Unix/Xenix/BSD under emulation? You get the experience without the frustration.
It's the peripheral equipment to some of these old horses that can give you fits. Why not just run Unix/Xenix/BSD under emulation? You get the experience without the frustration.
I am not sure if the Ultra 5/10 will still run SunOS or not.
I'm in this camp. It's not really interesting to me to put in some work just to successfully get a $ prompt, the same $ prompt I can get by opening a new terminal window on my Mac.And, frankly… it pretty thoroughly put me off bothering with these things. I mean, there’s only so many times you can fire up ‘fsn’ and deadpan “It’s a UNIX system!” before the novelty wears off.
USB mouse and keyboard (which is not a keyswitch anyone finds desireable so they are cheap)
Unix wasn't just a great playing field leveler in terms of software, it was similar with hardware. Some machine had interesting graphics solutions, but after a while, seen one "3M" machine, you've seen them all. Only NeXTStep really stands out here, and maybe SGI.
Those work well until you need to do STOP-A - the keystrokes for that are either not documented or don't work.For non-USB Suns, there were converters to use PS/2 peripherals with them; you can still find them on eBay, though they've gone up a bit since I got mine :/
This is called a 13W3 connector.I actually think that I have a mouse, keyboard and display for some sun workstation that I got in a large lot at the recycling center years ago. I never used them as they were all proprietary and n system to go along with it. I know the crt monitor had some weird connection with some large pins in them and bunch of regular ones in it, Size wise id say the connector was a little larger than a dvi connection. I'll dig them out of storage and see what maybe they would go to and maybe go that route if the system can be had for a decent price. the "Sparcstation IPX, IPC, 4, 5, 10, and 20" might be the systems that would work with those peripherals?
This is called a 13W3 connector.
If you've ever tried to build a cable using 13W3 connectors, the disadvantages should be obvious.
I don't know exactly what goes on under the hood, but Suns of at least back to SPARCStation 2 vintage are kinda middle-tier in terms of how picky monitors get with them. It's not like, say, the VAXstations where you'll need a monitor that can handle full-on sync-on-green output, nor does it have problems with green tinting on monitors that don't know how to separate out the sync like some SGIs do. On the other hand, my SS2 does still have issues with the cheapest and commonest of my LCD displays - but I think it's more a matter of the onboard controller not knowing what to do with an uncommon resolution like 1152x900; a slightly less cheap monitor of comparable vintage handles it just fine.My vague recollection is that some older Sun framebuffers only output composite sync, which can be a compatibility gotchya with generic monitors. A lot of older monitors work fine with composite sync but newer and/or cheaper monitors tend to have more rigid ideas of what qualifies as a valid VGA signal.