|
|
| Author |
Message |
| 14 new of 27 responses total. |
keesan
|
|
response 14 of 27:
| 
Apr 17 03:05 UTC 2000 |
Jim has a SUN SLC. (He will not tell me if it is a computer. 'Keyboard and
mouse'. And it works. It says it has 16 megabytes. He asked ROss to tell
him what sort of hard drive it is and Ross decided to use it for a Mac and
erased the operating system. Grex is welcome to the computer if it can find
the operating system to use with it.
|
jp2
|
|
response 15 of 27:
|
Apr 17 03:58 UTC 2000 |
This response has been erased.
|
mdw
|
|
response 16 of 27:
|
Apr 17 04:19 UTC 2000 |
Maybe, but why? I don't know what hardware architecture the SLC has -
sun4 bad, sun4c possibly good, sun4m good, sun4u best. I know sun has
dropped support for the sun4, but they may should still support sun4c.
|
kaplan
|
|
response 17 of 27:
|
Apr 17 23:30 UTC 2000 |
In resp:0 there is a topic "Pico License". I don't think there's a
question about our license to use the PIne COmposer, a text editor that is part
of the pine package. Picospan the conferencing software is a different thing.
Regarding resp:12, if you want threaded discussions, there are plenty of
places you can go. Most people in the grex conferences prefer the item and
response scheme as is. And you can use a twit filter to ignore posts from
user x without any modification to Picospan.
|
keesan
|
|
response 18 of 27:
|
Apr 18 19:00 UTC 2000 |
Marcus, do you want to come look at the Sun computer? Jim says it is not a
computer because he does not have the operating system on it. We have some
strange arguments about meanings. My first computer came without a hard drive
- was it a computer?
|
remmers
|
|
response 19 of 27:
|
Apr 18 20:23 UTC 2000 |
A computer without OS is still a computer.
|
darkskyz
|
|
response 20 of 27:
|
Apr 18 23:21 UTC 2000 |
my definition of computer is electronic circuitry which can respond to user
input in a programmmable way.
|
mdw
|
|
response 21 of 27:
|
Apr 18 23:50 UTC 2000 |
Sure I could come in & look at it sometime. All suns came with rom boot
code; this is a very crude OS but an OS nonetheless. On the newer suns
the boot code even understands forth so you get a "higher level"
language for free, just by having the hardware. Even on the older suns
the boot code was smart enough that you could enter & run machine
language programs.
The very simplest computer system I've ever heard of is the RCA Cosmac
(CDP1802) microprocessor, some LEDs, wiring, & a battery. The Cosmac
was not a really brainy microprocessor - even a Z80 makes a Cosmac look
pretty dumb. The Cosmac did however have several interesting features.
One was that it didn't need much external logic to run. Another was
that there was only 1 "halt" opcode; the other 255 possible bytes values
all corresponded to legal instructions. The external wiring merely
connected the address lines to the data lines, in such a way that the
one invalid opcode could never happen. The result is that the cosmac
would "see" a rom containing 64k of "random" but legal instructions,
which it would execute. The LEDs were hooked up to the address lines,
and so would flicker in a pseudo-random sequence which was long enough
to look "random" to people. Since the COSMAC had about 16 bytes (128
bits) it was pretty likely it was going to be looping for a very long
time before the pattern started to repeat. So, basically, this whole
deal was a microprocessor driven "random" light flasher.
Input: 1 (the power switch)
Outputs: up to 9 or 16 LEDs
RAM: 16 bytes (the register bank in the MPU)
ROM: 64K of "wire" programmed data.
Chip count: 1
|
scg
|
|
response 22 of 27:
|
Apr 19 02:34 UTC 2000 |
Solaris (the Sun operating system) is available for free for non-commercial
use. http://www.sun.com
|
keesan
|
|
response 23 of 27:
|
Apr 19 02:58 UTC 2000 |
So does grex want this machine? Or does a grexer want it? Free to grex.
How would this compare to a PC computer in speed?
|
mdw
|
|
response 24 of 27:
|
Apr 20 00:07 UTC 2000 |
Compared to a modern pentium? Probably pretty slow. I'd guess it to be
about the speed of a 386. A lot will depend on how much memory it has,
and what OS is installed - solaris 8 (if it will even run) is pretty
big, so it's quite likely to spend a lot of time paging & be a lot
slower than sunos (which is much smaller). It may also be possible to
run linux and netbsd/openbsd.
|
gull
|
|
response 25 of 27:
|
Apr 26 03:46 UTC 2000 |
I have a SPARCstation SLC, so I can give you a little info. It's a Sun 4/20
architecture, meaning it's a SPARC processor running at 20 MHz. It has no
built in disk of any kind; they were meant to either be connected to an
external SCSI disk or (more commonly) network booted off a central server.
Video is a black-and-white framebuffer driving the internal 17" monitor. It
also has 12-bit uLaw sound, two serial ports (on one DB-25 connector), and
an AUI network port. 16 megabytes, in the form of 4 4-meg parity SIMMs, is
the maximum amount of RAM. The serial port pins are configured so a normal
cable plugged into the DB-25 port will connect to the proper pins for port
A. Port B requires a special splitter cable.
IIRC this was Sun's first computer that sold for under $6,000. It features
completely silent operation. (No built-in disk, and no fan.)
It will run Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or SunOS 4.1.4, all of them slowly.
No, I don't want another one. ;>
|
keesan
|
|
response 26 of 27:
|
Apr 28 16:31 UTC 2000 |
Does anyone know anyone who might want this computer? Should we simply
recycle it? We need the space.
|
gull
|
|
response 27 of 27:
|
Apr 29 03:26 UTC 2000 |
I don't know of anyone. They're pretty common, as Suns go, since they were
popular with colleges. I once bought a lot of 10 for $15 at a surplus
auction. (Some wag asked me if I planned to set up my own computer lab.)
|