[HN Gopher] Build your own SPARC workstation ___________________________________________________________________ Build your own SPARC workstation Author : marcodiego Score : 55 points Date : 2021-08-05 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (learn.adafruit.com) (TXT) w3m dump (learn.adafruit.com) | neilv wrote: | One of my greatest bits of luck was getting access to these and | other Unix workstations&servers as a teen. | | If you run old SPARCstation OSes, a few points of interest... | | If you get the OpenWindows era with Open Look look&feel, one of | the things that were newish around then is the pinnable menus and | dialogs. You could sometimes tear off a menu and turn it into a | persistent window that's more like a toolbar (which was also | emerging then). | | Open Look (or Sun) was also introducing small rectangular | drag&drop target widget on windows, when drag&drop was new. Which | I don't recall seeing later, so maybe it was a mix of less | drag&drop than we thought we might have, and more an expectation | of the user to learn what things could be dragged and where they | could be dropped. | | Behind Open Look also a number of different toolkits and window | system backends that might be behind a given Open Look | application and desktop. My favorite toolkit was XView, and it | was very easy to work with in C, and used varargs sorta like GTK | later did. Desktop-wise, besides X, there was the XNeWS server, | which supported a kind of display PostScript on steroids, and you | could write entire applications in PostScript (though their | OpenLook widgets looked poor early on, compared to the pixel- | perfect XView result). | | Maybe the key thing to notice about OpenLook... At the time, the | other main X GUI look&feel that workstations were moving to was | Motif, which was mostly just rectangles. Someone once posted | screenshots of a dialog in Open Look and then another in Motif, | with all the text removed, and, in Open Look, you could pretty | much tell what all the familiar widgets were, and you immediately | knew how to interact with all of them. That was considered | valuable at the time. (Though HCI in general has moved more | towards brochure-like and magazine-like motivations in the | interests of the creator, and away from motivations we had | before, for new-user and power-user usability in the interests of | the user.) | | If you go back a little further with your workstation, to SunOS | 4.1.x or 4.0.x, you can forget about X and NeWS, and see | something a bit different: SunView. This was a monochrome GUI, | maybe sorta like an old Mac, but without all the things the Mac | had, and backed by much more sophisticated workstation/server OS. | People did powerful things with it, on a workstation with a | megapixel display and 8MB of RAM. The GUI toolkit was the | predecessor to XView, and similar. | | For workstation application programs (like my employer | developed), it wasn't unusual to implement your own portable GUI | layer, including an entire window systems. So, our stuff and | Interleaf's, for example, would create a native window for | whatever workstation desktop was in use, and implement our own | desktop within that. And they were all different, and often | innovative, sometimes in ways that have been lost. | | I didn't see how all the different CAD, EDA, etc. packages | worked, but sometimes the workstation was pretty much an | appliance for running a single program, and on occasion would | even be branded with a physical badge for the application | software on it. | | You can rediscover some of the same flavor _still alive_ by | looking at UI innovations by, for example, Blender, where (last I | used it) they built UI from scratch, and they seemed to innovate | in the interests of the users, including power users. Maybe more | accessible to us on HN, some IDEs are places that get creative | innovations often in the interests of power users.) | | You'll also see innovations less-familiar in some other | workstations, like Apollo Domain. (A lot of Sun stuff might be a | little too familiar, because they sorta won, albeit in the form | of Linux and the BSDs today. SunOS was also arguably the easiest | out-of-box platform for building GNU-ish software on the | Internet, before Linux was sufficiently ready, so that's another | regard in which they both influenced and were influenced.) | | Also, if you end up trying a real-metal vintage workstation | experience, don't forget to hit the degauss button on your 21" | CRT, be startled by the sounds and the ray behavior, and each | time wonder in the back of your mind whether there's any health | risk to be standing near it each time that happens. :) | abeyer wrote: | > For added fun, a Sun Type 5 keyboard converted to USB | | We must have _very_ different definitions of fun. The pile of | mush that was the Type 5 is up pretty high on my list of "never | again" keyboards. I was a full on Sun fanboy, but even I was the | first to admit that their input devices could be pretty awful. | jeffrallen wrote: | Sun optical mice were a pain in the ass too. | adrianmonk wrote: | Hey, I'm moving the mouse but the pointer isn't going much of | anywhere! What's wrong?! | | Oh yeah, _the mouse isn 't CORRECTLY ALIGNED with the mouse | pad_! I'd better check if the mouse pad has moved out of its | proper position on the desk. And pay a bit more attention to | how I'm holding the mouse so that I don't introduce too much | rotation about the vertical axis. | | That alignment was something I never had to worry about with | any type of mouse I used before or after. On the other hand, | it worked pretty well when it was lined up right. It really | seemed to track motion more smoothly and accurately than | mechanical mice. | | For those who don't understand why it had to be aligned, | Wikipedia has an article | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Systems) with two good | photos. | | Mouse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Systems#/media/Fil | e:Sun_... | | Close-up of grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_Systems | #/media/File:Mous... | wyldfire wrote: | The ones w the reflective metallic mousepad? | abeyer wrote: | yup, and the marks were painted on, so started wearing off | (and thus losing mouse resolution) the second you started | using it. | hughrr wrote: | This thread brings me pleasant memories of drunken post | student union bar C hacking sessions in the 90s. Apart | from the mice. And openwindows. Fuck both of them! | cmrdporcupine wrote: | What's wrong with openwindows? Always like it. | neilv wrote: | I don't know whether to blame the Type 4, something about our | desks, or something in the water... but our entire development | team were getting RSI problems, like I haven't heard of before | or since. | | (Fortunately, there was chatter on the Internet about this | problem at the time, and I learned the very simple workstation | adjustments that worked for me. Ever since, I've been able to | type like crazy, with no discomfort. To this day, I give | everyone The Talk about typing RSI injuries, the set of usual | culprits I know about, so you can adjust and see what works for | you, and the absolute necessity of not working through typing | pain. And if someone is noticing typing-related pain, they need | to get a referral to a specialist(s), they need to keep on the | specialist so they don't fall through the cracks, and they need | to do what the specialist says.) | crawdog wrote: | Now all you need is a license for ATG Dynamo and you can setup | your own circa 1998 ecommerce website. | tyingq wrote: | You can get 6 LEON/Sparc boards for $36: | https://navspark.mybigcommerce.com/navspark-mini-6pcs-pack/ | | Though I suppose 200k of RAM might be a barrier :) | mrlonglong wrote: | Cluster them for more ram ! | mrlonglong wrote: | I've used most of the SPARC stations during the late 90s. 4, 5 | and 20. They were a lot better than the Pentiums in use. Moved up | to the UltraSPARCs, my last one was a Blade 2000. Linux was a | champ on those architectures. But I don't miss the blasted bus | errors not one bit. AMD is where it's at nowadays, ARM will be | next within the next few years. | ttul wrote: | As a teenager, I scored a sweet job installing new SPARC 5 | workstations at an electronics company for a few weeks during an | otherwise quiet summer. Man, those were some amazing computers. | The cases opened with a thumbscrew and were so easy to work with. | Elegant design. Super robust. For a kid who had only ever worked | with cheap PCs, Sun hardware was an absolute dream. | icedchai wrote: | I had a Sparc 5 at home when I was in my early 20's, probably | 1996 or 97. That was my main desktop for about 4 or 5 years. | Great machines. | mrlonglong wrote: | Oh and I thought OpenWindows was cool | johndoe0815 wrote: | You can also implement a Sparcstation 5 on an FPGA (and not only | in qemu) thanks to temlib: http://temlib.org/site/ | chrisBob wrote: | > Operating range : (altitude < 18km) or (speed < 515m/sec), | both not exceeded simultaneously | | Is that a limitation so that you don't use it for missile | guidance? | packetslave wrote: | Yep. Same reason your phone's GPS won't work above a certain | speed and/or altitude. | bifftastic wrote: | Tempted to try this with SunOS 4.1.3 for the sake of nostalgia - | the first Unix I ever used. | usr1106 wrote: | Read the article but it did not mention anything about the | software licences. Have these old versions been released for free | in the meantime? | | Copyright expires 7O years after the death of the author. Not | really suitable for software lifecycles. Nothing from the 1990s | has any commercial value any more. | NexRebular wrote: | Sadly there are no free releases of these old versions | available. Not even sure it's legal to install from authentic | media if the hardware is not real SUN hardware... ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-08-05 23:00 UTC)