Sun SPARCstation 1

The 1989 "Campus" that started the pizza box era, restored to a genuine SS1 board after arriving with a Purdue clone upgrade installed

Sun SPARCstation 2

The early-90s Unix workhorse, here with an 80 MHz Weitek PowerUp and a rare fully-populated 64 MB DataRAM SBus card

Sun SPARCstation 5

Sun's 1994 entry-level "Aurora," topped out with a 170 MHz TurboSPARC — SPARC for the masses

Sun SPARCstation 10

The first Sun desktop to fit two CPUs, with the modular MBus that made compute upgrades a slot-in affair

Sun SPARCstation 20

The pinnacle "Kodiak" pizza box, built to take four CPUs — this one runs a 125 MHz ROSS hyperSPARC

Sun Ultra 1

Sun's first 64-bit desktop — the 1995 "Electron" with hardware-accelerated UPA Creator graphics

Sun Ultra 5

Sun's budget UltraSPARC IIi desktop, whose cost-cutting IDE drives needed a ZuluSCSI workaround to behave

Between two Sun workstations: decoding the X11 wire protocol

What an xterm actually does on the wire during startup, captured between two Sun workstations and decoded byte-by-byte the morning of the capture, by Swift code that didn't exist the night before. The first piece of a Mac-native X server.

Trust Me, You Want SunOS 4.1.4 on Your Older Sun Boxes

How SVR4 STREAMS imposes per-packet overhead the IPX's BSD-based SunOS 4 stack doesn't pay - and why it shows up as interactive feel

Interactive Sun IDPROM Reset Tool — M48T02 / M48T08 / M48T59

Interactive web tool that automatically generates the OpenBoot mkp commands to reprogram the IDPROM after replacing or battery-modding any Sun timekeeper NVRAM chip — M48T02, M48T08, M48T18, M48T35, M48T59 — on a SPARCstation.

The Chip That Proved Sun Couldn't Kill the SPARCstation 2

Why a third-party CPU upgrade in 1993 tells you more about the SS2 than any spec sheet

Bi-Color LED Daughter Card for ZuluSCSI

A small daughter card that repurposes the front-panel power LED on Sun workstations to also indicate drive access, using an RGB LED and an XOR gate driven by the ZuluSCSI accessory output

Solaris 2.6 Disk Image Notes

README for the Solaris 2.6 prototype disk images hosted on oldsilicon.com — security, networking setup, CDE, preinstalled compilers and GNU tools, and the full /usr/local/bin listing

SunOS 4.1.4 (Solaris 1.1.2) Disk Image Notes

README for the SunOS 4.1.4 / Solaris 1.1.2 prototype disk images hosted on oldsilicon.com — sun4c machines, DNS-without-NIS patched libc, Motif 1.2 + mwm, X11R5/R6/OpenWindows, preinstalled GNU tools and gcc 2.8.1

cmacs: A Cross-Platform Terminal Editor for Vintage Unix

A portable terminal editor built from scratch in C++ that compiles and runs on SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, NetBSD, Linux, and macOS

Locked Out: Clearing the Firmware Password on Vintage Sun Workstations

How to bypass and clear a firmware password on Sun SPARCstations and Ultras when the timekeeper chip has lost its memory

Burning a New SPARCstation 1 PROM

How to upgrade the OpenBoot PROM on a SPARCstation 1 using a MiniPRO TL866II Plus programmer

Sun Boot ROM and Firmware Image Archive

Downloadable OpenBoot PROM and firmware images for Sun workstations and servers

Last OpenBoot PROM Versions for Sun Workstations

Reference table of the final OBP firmware versions available for each Sun workstation model

Fixing a Corrupted TOD Clock on SunOS 4.1.4

How to recover a SunOS 4.1.4 system that won't boot after setting a modern date corrupted the time-of-day chip

CDE Keyboard Repeat Rate on Solaris 2.6

How to increase the keyboard repeat rate in CDE on Solaris 2.6 by configuring Xsun server options

Compile Time Comparisons Across Vintage and Modern Hardware

Benchmarking C++ compile times across Sun workstations, SGI machines, Raspberry Pis, and modern desktops

Getting SunOS 4.1.4 Working

Notes on installing and configuring SunOS 4.1.4 on real hardware, including networking, DNS, X11, and GCC

Replacing a Sun IPX Power Supply with a Mini ATX

How to replace a failed Sun SPARCstation IPX power supply with an inexpensive TF400 Mini ATX supply

M48T02 Timekeeper External Battery Mod

How to add an external coin cell battery to M48T02 timekeeper chips

The Rise and Fall of SPARCstation Clones

When Sun had competition from its own architecture

Resetting IDPROM on Sun Workstations

How to reprogram the IDPROM on sun4c, sun4m, sun4d, and sun4u workstations

Sun Hardware Reference Guide

Technical reference for Sun workstation hardware

SunOS 4.1 Using DNS without NIS

How to modify the shared C library on SunOS 4.1.x to use DNS resolution without NIS