Here Comes the Sun - Sun Ultra 5 & 10 Systems

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 never used it during the 90s.  I wanted to experience Sun hardware and software for 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 this Ultra 1.  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, 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 to 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...

I'm very happy with how the machine turned out and I wish to thank Peter Manina again since his gift got me restarted on this project.

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.

Another Beige Alpha Joins the Fleet - Compaq Professional Workstation XP1000

In the middle of last year an interesting workstation computer came up for sale on Facebook Marketplace here in my area.  The Compaq Professional Workstation XP1000 is an Alpha based workstation from just after Compaq purchased Digital Equipment Corporation.  The Facebook Markeplace ad stated that it was stopping on a boot screen and that it might not be working, but the price was low enough that I thought it was worth the risk of not being able to repair it.

Once I got the system home I was able to verify that the system was in the condition described and then started to read what I could find about this computer.  I soon discovered that the motherboard had a password installed on it.  In the PC world we would call this a BIOS password, but for an Alpha machine like this, it's the SRM console password.  The SRM console uses a command line but with it locked out even the help command was generating an error "Console is secure.  Please login.".  Because PCs have a jumper to reset this I was quite hopeful that it would just be a matter of time till I figured out how to reset that password but after not finding much documentation online I decided to ask for help on the Vintage Computer Federation Forums.

As usual there were several people who were a big help there, including one gentleman that uploaded some documentation to the thread that I had not been able to find online anywhere else.  Sadly, though, we did NOT discover a backdoor designed by Compaq to reset the console password.  Although I could not find an explicit statement for this motherboard I did learn that were other machines designed by Compaq that did not contain a back door, if the password is lost, the main logic board containing the firmware must be replaced.  So I decided to put the project on hold and keep the machine.  I setup a saved search on eBay since you never know what will pop up there and didn't think much about this project in the second half of last year.

At the end of last year I gave quite a bit of thought to my Vintage Computing hobby.  I purged alot of my project machines, selling, donating to Free Geek, or recycling responsibly.  I also went through my wish lists and eBay saved searches and purged items that were no longer of interest and I discovered that I had setup the wrong search, adding an extra zero.  When I fixed the saved search I was shocked to learn that there was a logic board on eBay for sale!  I watched the item for a while and eventually made an offer that was accepted.

The board shipped from Israel so it took a while to get here but once it arrived I was able to pull my machine completely apart.  I used this as an opportunity to do some much needed dusting inside the case of this machine.  It was a huge relief when the system started back up after re-assembly and an even bigger relief when I was able to use the SRM console and issue commands to boot an Operating System off an Installation Disk!

Once I could start to explore, I learned that this was one of the newer XP1000 machines.  This machine can run the VMS operating systems and Unix like systems, but not Windows NT.  The older, slower machines could boot NT, but I already have one Alpha machine setup that way.  I know at least one DEC hardware enthusiast  who will be glad to see the machine running DEC software and not Microsoft software.

I had some old media for OpenVMS which I had burned while I was a part of the Community Licensing program, but that program has ended now.  I was able to install OpenVMS 8 on the hardware, but without licenses it's not very interesting or useful.  After searching on the Internet and reading for a bit, I learned that the archived version of Tru64 Unix on WinWorld has keys with the archive, so I gave that a try, and it worked well.

Configuring networking was a bit of a challenge, but I ended up getting that working with a Static IP and now the computer can read articles on FrogFind.com and 68k.news just fine.  I'm quite happy with how the machine turned out...

I was disappointed that I couldn't load older software on here.  I have been looking for some VAX hardware since that is what we used back in College, I remember the Motif Window Manager and that was such an interesting look and feel, but I didn't know that Motif was the precursor to the Common Desktop Environment (CDE).  Because of multiple vendors working together on this more open code base this Compaq (Digital Equipment) machine will join several others CDE machines that I have including IBM AIX, Sun Solaris, and SGI Irix.

My IBM RS/6000 Power PC AIX Unix Machine

As readers of my bLog will no doubt know, I'm a big fan of the Vintage Computer Federation Forums.  The community there has helped me with several projects that I would not have been able to complete on my own. I recently saw a post from a gentleman who had listed four different Unix workstations.  I reached out, and he generously agreed to pass on an IBM RS/6000 machine, a big thanks to Peter M. for this machine.

First things first, Peter let me know that there were a couple different versions of IBM AIX which were not yet archived including the first version of AIX that can run on this box, IBM AIX 4.3.3, and also IBM AIX 5L V5.1, so those are online now for anyone else who may need them.  There are earlier and later versions of AIX already archived, and there's still quite a bit of software avaliable online including a person who is building GNU tools for the OS.

This machine is a Power3 computer.  It's a single core PowerPC based processor from about year 2000.  Specifically, this is a 44P Model 170 at 333MHz, 1MB L2 Cache and with 512MB RAM.  This machine was assembled in the USA at the IBM manufacturing facility in the Rochester, MN factory.  I've been in that facility many years ago so this machine is a part of Minnesota Computer History.

It was reported that the machine had not been used for several years and so as usual I started in with a light dusting and cleaning.  I didn't have to take the machine far apart but I had been warned that the CPU daughter card would come loose and prevent the machine from starting, so I addressed that right away.  The RAM also needed to be re-seated, the battery reinstalled, and the GPU reinstalled.  Thankfully, all the hardware manuals for this machine are still online at the fantastic IBMFiles.com website, so getting through the error codes on the front panel was pretty straightforward.  If the machine stops booting it's quite easy to look up the error codes where it got hung up, much like the POST codes on a PC.

It was interesting to install the oldest version of the OS that would run on this machine, version 4.3.3, so I did that and looked around a bit at that but eventually I decided that the last version would be more useful, so I went looking for AIX version 5.3, and was able to find disk images for that online.  I burned the 8 CD set and started the install upgrading over the top of a 5.1 install.  That worked quite well and the machine is up and running with networking...

I'm happy to have the machine cleaned up reloaded and up and running.  This completes the first phase of work on this machine, but I look forward to spending more time getting software tools loaded onto the machine, doing some more networking with it, and learning more about this era of AIX.

If you have one of these machines, or any stories to share please feel free to comment below, or drop me an email, my email address is in my profile.