If you have learned much about the history of computing it's hard to avoid hearing about Sun Microsystems. They dominated the personal workstation market for pretty much the entire time it existed. They came out of Stanford and invented or popularized many technologies that ended up being widely adopted around networking and the Internet. I've had Sun equipment on my wish list for quite a while as I'd never used during the 90s it and wanted to experience it myself.
The first Sun that I acquired was an Ultra 5 desktop. I had been warned that it was not working and incomplete, a parts machine, but I was happy to have it anyway. I purchased parts on eBay and tried to get it working spending many hours reading and learning and testing, but the main board on this machine ended up having a bad MMU, so I made a note on my Wish List to get another machine of this type and I moved on.
Shortly after that I acquired a working Sun Ultra 1 machine from my friend Steve Hatle. He worked on these machines during his career so he's had professional experience with them and he did a nice job restoring the machine that I have now. It works great, and it's always nice to be able to start out learning about a new type of computer with one known good working machine as a baseline.
But the Sun Ultra 5 project sat for quite a while until last fall. A generous donor, Peter Manina, gave me another working good Sun Ultra 5 during VCF Midwest 2024 this year, thank you Peter! He had donated another machine previously, an IBM RS/6000 Machine which I covered here.
This second Ultra 5 machine was also a bit of a project because this lot included a SunPCI card (a PC on a card made by Sun for these machines). Peter had suggested that the PC Card runs hot, and that it would be better to run it in an Ultra 10 tower which has better cooling. The Ultra 5 and 10 are sister machines with the same motherboard so the CPUs and peripherals are interchangeable. I waited for a while and when an Ultra 10 parts machine came up on eBay for a reasonable price I purchased it. At that point I had three machines. I was hoping for two working machines a 5 and a 10.
The next hurdle for these machines is getting a working NVRAM / Clock Battery. I tried the battery replacement hack where you use a dremel tool to cut through the side and solder on a CR2032 coin cell holder, but these are not Dallas brand batteries and are much harder to modify in this way. I tried ordering clock batteries from China, but these parts came with a dead battery, too. I ordered another pair from an eBay seller. The project sat for quite a while but eventually I found this video and decided that I should be able to dremel out the epoxy far enough to get too the terminals inside and solder on a battery. The results were not pretty but I modified three chips and added an easily replaced CR2032.
The Sun Ultra 5 machine came together easily after the clock battery situation was resolved, Peter had already put a modern SSD in it with a StarTech SATA to IDE adapter that is well known in the retro community for providing good compatibility. I was able to re-install Solaris 9 on that machine and had it back up and running in a short period of time. It looks a bit yellowed on the front, but overall I'm quite happy with this machine...
The Ultra 10 was more of a challenge. Peter had warned me that some of the Solaris Install Media, even though it came directly from Sun, might not work. I had been planning to use Solaris 8 because it is compatible with the PC Compatibility card but neither of the two versions of 8 I had were working for a clean install, but then watching this video from the Phintage Collector he showed that the PC Compatibility Card could be made to work with Solaris 9. I decided to follow the path of least resistance and go with Solaris 9 on the Ultra 10 system, too. I setup this machine with another Star Tech IDE to SATA bridge card and a low cost SSD. I also replaced the non-functional CD-ROM drive in the eBay machine with a working drive. After I got the machine running with Solaris 9 I started on the SunPCI card configuration. This article was also extremely helpful for getting the SunPCI Card to work, and here it is running Windows 98...
Do you have any memories of the Sun SPARC or Ultra series workstations? Let me know in the comments or reach out to my email address shown in my profile.
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