Restoring a Sun SPARCstation IPX Part 3: SCSI2SD, Solaris Install and Expansion

And like so many things with Sun in the 90's, it was way too late and aimed at the wrong market. X terminals became popular at the very end of the spinning rust era, when maintaining storage was a big part of the IT budget. Drives would die suddenly, they were hard to replace due to all the OS muckery required post-install, they remained very expensive relative to the rest of the system, they were much slower than network in general, and in practice half their capacity was dedicated to storing the same bytes of software anyway. Putting all that complexity into a single system with redundancy and central maintenance was a win.

But it was ephemeral. By the mid 90's, innovation in the PC world had pushed storage prices way down and reliability WAY up. No one wanted an X terminal by 1996, they'd just grab a 486 and put Linux on it. This was the market Sun should have been worried about, and they were oblivious.

I know this, because my very first job in 1996 handed me an X terminal, and I grabbed a 486 out of a closet and put Linux on it instead. The terminal did have a bigger display, though.

I'd love having one of these so much... At one time I bought one off eBay, only for me and the seller to discover that shipping it to Brazil, where I was living, was ludicrously expensive.

The seller promised to keep it for me, but that was 16 years ago and we lost contact. I hope it found a nice place.

At one site, the "tech doc" people got the SLC. I felt bad for them because they were running Interleaf and FrameMaker (two nice solid publishing tools with page layout aspects), plus our CAD-ish products... on a smaller screen than all the Software Engineers and EEs had on their adult-sized SPARCstations.

We did experimentally get an IPC or IPX for one engineer. Most all Sun workstations up to that point were pizza boxes, but I recall the first IPC/IPX had arrived one afternoon. And the weird non-pizzabox form factor, and general curiosity about whatever Sun was doing next, was why three of us went back inside from a company social event, to watch while one person set it up (installed more SIMMs, etc.).

Based on my recollection of who got the IPC/IPX, he was a great engineer, who then left software development, and now owns cool pubs in Portland, so maybe he really wanted a SPARCstation 2 instead. (Just a joke; I like the IPX, and when I wanted to personally buy a SPARC for home, I chose an IPX.)

Industrial-design-wise, Sun liked pizza boxes for workstations (they fit exactly under the bases of the huge CRTs, and fairly easy to open and get access to all the components), plus putting peripherals in a few form factors of what we called "shoeboxes" (but no longer shoebox-sized). (The 386i models had shoeboxes that attached atop the PC-ish minitowers.) The various peripherals you see stacked atop the IPX in that post are of the incarnation of shoeboxes that went with with latest pizzabox workstation chassis industrial design (3/80, 4/60, 4/65, 4/75, and maybe others, until the SPARCstation 10 (?) evolved the design a little). So the IPC and IPX looked like Sun was maybe thinking "Hey, we could also put the workstation in this peripheral form factor, and it could open in half". And so it seemed the lunchbox workstation was born.

I wonder whether the IPC and IPX moving the floppy drive (which I think was hardly ever used, when we had networks, CD-ROM, and QIC/Exabyte/DDS) to a more prominent position-- was an accident of fitting things into the internals, or because the peripherals all had their openings on front, or to signal something about the market positioning/differentiation of these workstations.

Probably because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_Design_Inc.

I had an Indy at home for some time back then. Now that is a cool looking computerinabox.

They are absolutely beautiful, and the Open Windows environment is still gorgeous. Sadly not very useful today but for remote terminal sessions --and you would need a local web browser.

"I particularly remember the keyboards"

I particularly remember "Stop A"

IIRC, OpenBoot was not called OpenBoot, nor was it open, until long after Sun started using it. The same was the case for the SPARC processors; the GPL relase was the classic last-ditch efforts of a failing business. Sun, had they succeeded, would almost certainly have stayed as closed as possible.

Sun used open standards when they suited their purpose, but they also tried for proprietary lock-in. Their alternatives to X Windows, for instance, had licenses that weren't open in any real sense.

And sometimes they tried to have it both ways -- licensing Java, for example, in ways that seemed to allow for third party adaptations and implementations, and then playing games with access to the Java TCK (the test suite) to try to prevent the Apache group from actually shipping the alternate implementation they'd developed (Apache Harmony) -- see, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony#Difficulties_to...

Sun was better than some of the other vendors at generating "open" buzz for themselves, but it wasn't really clear to me at the time, nor is it now, that they were better at actually being open than, say, DEC.

That was my main development machine (Sun had a generous developer discount) until customers stopped asking for Solaris builds.

I'm in Ireland and would be happy to adopt one of them. You can reach me at my nickname here at gmail.

I've got an IPX like the linked article. 64MB RAM, 3 external SCSI drive enclosures. I have some SBUS cards around here for it.

It also has the dead NVRAM battery, but I just take the opportunity to set my MAC to de:ad:c0:ff:ee at every cold boot (which isn't often these days).

I have an older version of OpenBSD on it.

There is a chapter in "Expert C Programming" by Peter van der Linden called "Bus Error, Take the Train", which made me laugh out-loud.

Mitch Bradley (author of Open Firmware) also developed a version of it for the OLPC:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OFW_FAQ

IIRC the voltages can all be produced by a PC's ATX power supply, but the connectors are different. If you can't find an IPC or IPX on ebay, that's probably your best bet.

You may just need to replace the capacitors: http://www.glitchwrks.com/2017/07/24/ipc-recap

The Sun part number is SUN 300-1055, and the model number is APS-02 if you end up trying to find a replacement. It's a 65W power supply that provides +5V/9A, +12V/1.5A, and -12V/0.1A if you want to frankenstein a cheaper PC power supply in as another comment suggested.

I would say if you can, replace it with a SFF PSU. The work is a bit "messy" (rewiring the ATX with the Sun connector) but no more cap leaking...