Whatever happened to Grex's old Sun hardware? I hack on old systems for fun and the thought hadn't crossed my mind until the other day, when a friend and I were talking about the old Sun4 VME Grex (turns our we both had accounts, but didn't know each other!).35 responses total.
That's a good question. I donated several older SPARC systems over the years; as far as I know, they disappeared into a black hole.
I seem to remember participating in a "RAM drive" when Grex was still on sun4 hardware -- 1 MB 30 pin parity SIMMs were needed to fill up another VME memory board :) I do a fair bit of work with the Vintage Computer Federation museum at InfoAge Science Center in New Jersey, they may be interested in the fate of Grex's old hardware. If not, I'd personally be interested in it, especially as we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of UNIX and I've been thinking about doing something related to that for VCF East next year.
There are probably some old confeerences where you can find out their fate. I donated an old Sun 3/260 with a bunch of odds and ends like graphic cards ram cards, CD carousel SCSI etc back in the 90's. When the boxes went from mini fridge to pizza box there was a big schism which I didn't participate. Solaris 2 was showing up as backwards compatible on Ultras but also BSD was catching up. glitch, have you been to Powells Tech bookstore in Portland, OR? It's a fun time travel.
Some of it was given away, and some of it was sold. I think some of it went home with STeve Andre. It's been a long time since I thought about that hardware.
re #4 Tube radios grab me more than the first RISC stuff. Lately I've been playing with old bakelite AM radios. The fickle world of soldering and tubes.
Vintage SPARC machines are pretty cheap on ebay but I bet a raspberry pi has more horsepower and you can run it with a phone charger. *snicker* I once had a SPARCclassic but I donated it to Salvation Army about 15 years ago. It was pretty nifty - maybe a collector item for people who have space for such things.
I would like one so I can gut it and make it into a guitar.
I recycled my SPARCstations but it has been fascinating to read about the unusual combinations of boards that made up the sun3 and SPARC hosts for Grex. I get the impression that some of them would have surprised engineers at Sun.
When I still had the Sun 3 260, I met a Sun engineer from Cary, NC at a party in Greenville (ECU). She and I killed a keg together and talked about the fun of running C on RISC. And about the pain of SCSI vs SCSI-2 with the jeweled CD drives. I used it mostly to heat my apartment in Plymouth, MI..in the Winter I could crack the window and get just the right temp in the apartment. Moisture was still and issue though. Here's a page janc drew up with is very underrated. https://www.unixpapa.com/grextech/pumpkin97/
sun3 gear has mostly disappeared from the world; it was MC68k based; a 3/260 probably had a 68020 in it. RISC is a good idea. More people should try it. The more people find strange speculative execution and other bugs in x86, the more I think we'd be better off with a different archicture overall. Note that RISC-V is not currently vulnerable to speculative execution attacks, though in fairness they don't actually have a lot of hardware.
resp:9 Nice pics from 20 years ago.
re #10 Correct, 68020. It has 12 VME slots with capacity for 32MB (using 4MB daughter boards.) The graphics board and the ethernet board were the most exciting parts, imo. I had to hunt down an RGB converter for the CRT which itself was almost $100.
32MB?! Let me put on my copy of "Flip Your Wig" and plug in a 16" black and white CRT.... Stylin'.
The CRT was as big as Florida
#9 I'd that the 1GB drive I ended up with circa 1997? It was monstrous and ran alarmingly hot.
re #15 Yes, that drive was worth alot of money to a few eastern euro countries' agencies, LOL
resp:9 I never saw these pictures or read of the pumpkin before. Awesome! A very good bit of the Grex story, right there, in one page: with pictures.
The pic of the pumpkin brings back some memories.My brother introduced me to grex back in the 90s. I remember that article being put up on the grex website an couple of years later. My brother passed last december so it brings back some good memories.
re #18 Sorry for your loss. Who was your brother?
#18 Sorry for your loss lar. :( Good to see you back posting here BTW.
My brother was on here as user "tinman" from 96 to 99. He didn't post much but was in party quite a bit. I had my first account here in 96. I got it just after I configured my first PPP connection at 14k. Win96 was out but I was still running win 3.1 on my PC. That OS didn't come with a tcp/ip stack so I had to download one called "trumpet"(I think) from my ISP and install it. MAN...I thought I was "leet" because all my friends had was AOL or Compuserv. I eventually got to the point where I could configure a PPP connection on AOL's backend and bybass their sodtware garbage. Everyone thought I was so cool...and I was until I ran into the *nix bunch on m-net and grex. To them I was a total lamer.....windows user...strickly from commerical (Frank Zappa) LOL!.
re #21 Seems like yesterday
OS/2 had it's own TCP/IP configuration built in rather than relying on a 3rd party like windows 3.11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ1AjaNjack
I disdain the day that DOS 6.22 introduced the MS TCP/IP stack driver. LAN Workplace and Wollongong 3rd party stack drivers were benign.
I love talking about this stuff. Check out Adam Curry (from early MTV) talking about his journey from building his own modem for his zx80 sinclair to using Mosiac for the first time (I remember doing that from a floppy disk LOL) and so on. His story is interesting because he had connections and knew people. But he talks about Gopher and Archie etc. Fun stuff. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFKOhvUva2Y
re #25 If I could go back to the days of Archie and Veronica pulling down binaries with Z modem perhaps I wouldn't be surrounded by "innovators" and "disruptors" whose claim to fame might be their last potluck.
Venture to a new world: https://www.webcrawler.com/ Do the Jughead: http://archie.icm.edu.pl/archie_eng.html I haven't met anyone in real life that thinks of GeoCities fondly but my first domain name was attached to one in 1997. #biginjapan Useless knowledge: PHP almost destroys the ability to search the web with a Commodore 64 using Contiki and a NIC+ Ethernet adapter. It worked for a very long time though. It is still very possible to visit a very active BBS scene using a Commodore WiModem or NIC+ and terminal software that is still being updated today like CCGMS Elite. Long live telnet on 8-bit. There are even some nice 80-column C128 terminals.
*I* think of GeoCities with at least a little fondness. I even neglect a page hosted on its clone, NeoCities: https://papa.neocities.org/
re# 25 and 26 The WWW was out when I first got on the internet but all of the old stuff was still popular. I used archie and veronica for gopher,chatted using IRC, posted on usenet ( and got all my porn from there) used ftp clients to download programs. I used netscape and even ran an old legacy version of Mosiac. of course we all telnetted(ssh)into m-net or grex. To this day I still talk about this to the technicians I train "wellll sonny, when I first used the internet..."
re #27 Archie takes patience. I almost forgot what patience is. Thank you for putting me back on the Internet hayride
Heh, didn't expect to see so much activity on this one :) Since posting this, I have acquired a Sun SPARCserver 670MP, a friend of mine in California picked it up and shipped it for me. Quite the beast! The Sun-provided casters of course detonated instantly :D At the Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, in Chicago, I got talking with a guy about Sun and AT&T 3B2 stuff, and it turned out he wanted 3B2 Ethernet boards, which I happened to have, and had a very complete Sun 3/160 to trade. So now I've got a 68K Sun box. Ended up with the huge grayscale ECL monitor for it, too, from another conferece-goer. Picked up a bunch of Sun4 suff from a print shop (like, typemetal and book making) in Jackson, MI last summer. I actually still support Sun4 for $day_job, so some of it went toward that effort. The SPARCserver 670MP has a dead power supply (bad caps) so for now I think I'm going to use one of the Sun 4/330 boxes with the 670MP CPU board (which is very nearly a single-board-computer). I like keeping this old stuff alive, it's fun to hack on stuff from a simpler time. Tonight, I'm SSHed in from an Altos III dumb terminal (Wyse WY-30 with different ROMs) hung off my main Linux workstation :)
That's cool. A lot of vintage stuff needs re-capping and similar parts replacement done to get back to working. 40 year old power supplies & motherboards sitting in a closet or warehouse or back-corner of a server room, etc. I'm glad you are keeping these these servers working. Good luck.
re 32: Yeah a lot of stuff needs caps nowadays, if you get old enough into linear supplies you can sometimes reform them, but most switchers seem to either be fine or the caps are totally gone (usually leaking). There's a fair bit of this stuff still doing useful work in industry -- in January I did a SCSI SSD conversion on a SPARCstation 5 that runs a stepper, which is the machine that patterns silicon wafers for making computer chips. The customer had looked at several replacements from various manufacturers and decided they really didn't like any of them and didn't want to rework their process around a new machine -- plus they cost several million dollars. Hard disks had been the only real reliability issue with the machine, can't fault 90s SCA drives for giving up after living in the kinda poorly vented environment of a SPARC pizzabox :)
Not actually Grex's, but a SPARCstation 370 (Sun 4/370): https://imgur.com/a/vqF9786 A friend traded it to me as I still haven't gotten around to recapping the 670MP's power supply. After getting the 4/370 up and going, I swapped in the 4/670MP CPU board. It shows definite signs of life but is failing some self-tests. Hopefully nothing major!
re #34 Beautiful! The original R2D2 with some o dat RISC architecture
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