Your assessment is probably right - it will be a neat item that takes up room, unless you invest in the right peripherals. From memory, the keyboard and mouse are proprietary, and necessary. If you can turn up the right gear for cheap then it's a better value proposition, but even so the use case might be limited.

Personally, I first used the newer Sparcstation 5s back in 1995 for learning general purpose Unix tools and commands, and programming (C/C++/assembly); even though the S5 was only a year old back then (released in '94) they were slooooooow in X-Windows. Maybe (probably/definitely) my university skimped on the configuration, but attempting to use it for CAD or ray-tracing would have been impractical. I'm really keen to hear what others think though, especially those who can see a practical use for the S2!! 😀

JidaiGeki wrote:

Your assessment is probably right - it will be a neat item that takes up room, unless you invest in the right peripherals. From memory, the keyboard and mouse are proprietary, and necessary. If you can turn up the right gear for cheap then it's a better value proposition, but even so the use case might be limited.

Personally, I first used the newer Sparcstation 5s back in 1995 for learning general purpose Unix tools and commands, and programming (C/C++/assembly); even though the S5 was only a year old back then (released in '94) they were slooooooow in X-Windows. Maybe (probably/definitely) my university skimped on the configuration, but attempting to use it for CAD or ray-tracing would have been impractical. I'm really keen to hear what others think though, especially those who can see a practical use for the S2!! 😀

They're more of a novelty item, or at least mine was. I owned a Sparc Station 10 (single processor) that sat under my bed for about 5 years before I, sadly, recycled it. Keyboard and mouse are proprietary, and possibly the video output (mine was a headless system) so there wasn't much I could do with it except for collecting dust.

Video will be 13w3 connector and possibly require sync on green compatible display

There are adapter cables available online for the video. As for keyboards an mice IM me. I have a single machine and peripherals for about 10 of the dang things.

I used some Sun workstations at my university. Really just another *nix window manager experience. I remember web pages being ugly on Netscape (Solaris fonts probably) and using Star Office.... Engineers used various software in them. I remember following Matrox forums and G200/G400 gossip on these things daily. 🤣

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I own a few Suns (SS 10, 20, and IPX). They're nice systems but as others have mentioned they're not fun or useful. SGI systems are way more fun and can actually be used for some limited graphics work.

That said, $15 is a good price and the pizza box chassis doesn't take much space, so you might as well take it.

I wouldn't bother. I've a Sparcstation 20 sitting upstairs in my loft, unused. Why? It's noisy (fans, narrow SCSI hard drives), hot, and slow. The neatest part of it is the BIOS. Additionally support for sparc32 is being dropped from various Unixes (OpenBSD has just binned it). I used it as a firewall for a while, before its 10Mb network card became an issue (quad port 100Mb is expensive, as Sparc32 doesn't take PCI).

Sparc64 isn't much better, but has the advantage of being a tad more modern, supported by various OS (check the graphics card support though) and useful sometimes for checking endian issues.

Again though, Sparc64 is usually hot, slow, uses fibre channel disks in some Ultrasparcs, and has gone through the cheap phase (at least on ebay UK) as is climbing back up again. I regularly ponder getting one, each time the reluctant conclusion is no. If you see a particularly cheap Sun Blade 150 it may be worth it - it's very slow, but quiet, and supports IDE disks.

The only non Intel systems worth getting these days are various ARM devices, or a late model PowerMac (still slow, but not unusably so, depending on what you're doing). There are also development POWER systems if you have comparatively deep pockets.

The other option is SGI as mentioned. If you can get either a cheap O2 with a reasonable amount of memory, or a cheap Fuel, it's probably worth a play. Octanes are very noisy indeed, and have a lot of different options, most of them quite limiting in terms of the software they'll run. Disks are SCSI again.. I got a rather good bargain : two O2s for a tenner each(!), both with the full AV cards, and about 640MB memory across both systems. The disks are horribly noisy, as is the power supply fan until you mod it.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Hey guys, I have the opportunity to get a SUN Sparcstation 2 for basically 15$ but it does not come with a monitor or a keyboard or mouse and is missing the HDD. Will this thing be a nightmare or should I go ahead and get it, what can you even do with them when they are in working condition? As far as I know they were just graphics workstations so it seems like it's going to be one of those things that look cool but ultimately just take up space in a corner. 😒

at 15$ I would buy it, even if you don't use it I'm sure you could get that if not more out of it of you sold it on an online or partied it out. You know, pass it along to someone else who would use it and make a few bucks wile you are at it.

I use an UltraSparc5 as an CD player… That's probably the most useful thing to do with on old non-x86 system like these. They have a cool BIOS and a proprietary keyboard and mouse which you will need to get. I think they are quite cool but also quite useless now a days, your first assessment is probably right. I would still go for it 😁

I love the sparcstation pizzaboxes. I've had 5's and 20's.. Never had a 2. they run from 40-50mhz from memory. If this is stock, its probably got ye olde sunos 4 on it, or if your lucky solaris 2 aka sunos 5... of if you REALLY lucky, its got netbsd..

as others have said, needs hard to get scsi stuff, video is less important if you can ssh in.

these machines run like molasses.

At worst, your nvram might be dead, if so, you will have lost the MAC on the network and hostid... the mac is no problem, the hostid is another issue, huge faq's are dedicated to restoring this. its a huge pain in the ass.

spiroyster wrote:

Video will be 13w3 connector and possibly require sync on green compatible display

13W3 cables are quite a mess, not all of them have the same pinouts and the same signals wired.
I've built a 13W3 -> VGA cable for a Sun Ultra1 station, after some trial and error (FIY, the TurboGX and a couple of Sun boards uses only the composite sync):

Also on older boards, the NVRAM/RTC and battery are all in one chip, which is most likely to be dead by now.
Unluckily, this chip isn't compatible with the DS1287, but can be "repaired" almost in the same way:

The software side also has to be modified (the MAC address and a few parameters are also stored in the NVRAM).

Having a keyboard and a mouse would also be nice. I did manage to grab one as well as half a 13W3 cable when I got mine, but I am not sure a PS/2 keyboard would work just by using a mini-din-8 connector.

However, if you have no keyboard plugged-in, the video won't be enabled, but the machine will be fully usable over a serial console.

For the software, it is obviously quite different from a PC, however if you have some experience with Linux, you won't be too lost (old Solaris releases are easily available on some abandonware websites, but NetBSD and Linux could also work fine).

I've put most of the cable wirings, pictures, some explainations as well as useful links/documentations on my website:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr& … t-text=&act=url

I used an old Sun system to learn Solaris 9 and 10 for work. Other then that using it to learn diffrent versions of SunOS/Solaris it doesn't have much practical application unless you have to support it or develop for it.

Oh forgot to mention I also have a literal stack of ram and SCSI drives for these things. Saved em from the scrapper 😜

I hope I don't get hanged for saying this but I'd get it for the case and turn it into a PC. Sell the guts and mod the inside of the case to fit at least a mini-ITX board.

I remember back in the early 2000s looking at buying an Ultra on eBay, and even considered a new low end model, but I never bought any of them. Back then there were sellers with pallet loads of Ultra 5s especially. One thing that held me back was my insistence on getting a particular configuration option (I think it was video related) and it was hard to get sellers to tell me if that particular option was installed.
At the time Suns were still relevant and I had used them occasionally in college, but today I'm not sure what the use would be. All I can think of is to compile and test software projects on it just for the sake of expanding beyond the comfort zone of x86. They're cool looking machines and running Solaris would be unique, but I think it would end up just being a museum thing.

I don't know what the situation is now, but back at that time Sun used to host the Solaris install ISOs on their web site for free. I downloaded them (the SPARC version, not x86) from Sun.com in anticipation of buying a machine. I think I still have the burned CDRs, obviously never tested. I think the same was true with HP's HP-UX. As long as there's no clone hardware that can run it, they probably just figured the OS license goes with the hardware and has implicitly been paid for.

Will they run Quake? That's all that matters.

Errius wrote:

Will they run Quake? That's all that matters.

actually they did make quake for solaris 😀

I believe you can search for quake1.09-sparc-sun-solaris2.5.1.tar.Z

it ran on SS5's etc. probably wont run so well on an SS2, not sure what framebuffer requirement is for it.

$15 is too much. I remember the junk guys showing up with palettes of these things in the late 90s-early-00s to unload at computer shows (along with SGI Indys for some reason). They couldn't give the things away since getting them up and running was so damn expensive (SCSI everything, non-standard RAM, etc.) They weren't particularly useful for running software back then either.