BreakPoint wrote on 2022-05-24, 13:18:

Never dealt with Sun systems before. I have few questions regarding this board. 1. Is this ATX board? 2. Do i need additional po […]
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Never dealt with Sun systems before. I have few questions regarding this board.
1. Is this ATX board?
2. Do i need additional power connector and if so what pinout is?
3. Where is PS-ON switch?

Believe its system board from a SUN microsystem Ultra 5/10 - Google on line for the manuals

Sun systems are nice and the Ultra 5/10 are the start of their transition to PC-likeness. PCI replaced SBus and VGA replaced 13W3! Still not nearly as PC-compatible as Alphas but its a start. On these machines IIRC the keyboard and mouse is still the special sun type 5 or 6 though - not PS/2. You'll also want to find the PCI Riser board if you want to add any additional cards though its probably not necessary given what it has on-board. If you did want to install any additional expansion cards the sort that would typically include an Option ROM (SCSI, VGA, etc) will need to be Macintosh compatible I think - PC ones won't work (Forth bytecode in ROM rather than x86 machine code). The Ultra 10 should run Solaris 10 though it will be a little on the slow side. Linux should work well.

As for powering it on, the Sun keyboard has a power button in the top right corner just like a Mac which is how you'd normally do it. They all had a button on the machine itself somewhere too for when running headless. Older machines had it in the form of a momentary contact rocker switch on the power supply at the back but I think with the Ultra 5 and 10 that moved to a push button on the front.

The Service Manual should give you all the details you need including the pinout for both of the power supply connectors on page 218. The second smaller connector (J13) isn't described by newer versions of the service manual which is interesting - perhaps they switched to a different PSU at some point

Some more information starting on page 92 (that's tell Adobe Reader to go to the 92nd page, not the page marked 92!) of this doc:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/FE/800-4006- … l_1_Sep2000.pdf

If you want some pictures of specific areas of the motherboard from a working Ultra 5, let me know which specific areas of the board and I'll post some pics.
Piece of advice - make a note of the number on the orange sticker on top of the NVRAM - as you might need it if you replace the module, or do the dremel+coin cell holder modification.

Thank you, guys.
I powered board with modern EVGA PSU. Additional +3V connector left unconnected. There was no need to search for soft-power button because board booted right after I turned on a PSU.

The cases for these systems were manufactured by Mitac, who did the Packard Bell 'frog' cases too. If you can't find a Sun Ultra 5 case, try one of those 😜

I played around with an Ultra 5 a bit back in the day. Not bad, but far less interesting than the SparcStation 20. It's ideally suited for Solaris 9, but I'd struggle to think of a good reason to run it these days. It's less unique than the old Sbus Sun systems and far less powerful than later PC type stuff.

Yeah, I think the SPARCstation 20 is my favorite SPARC machine though the IPX/IPC is pretty neat too. I've got a pretty big selection of UNIX workstations but I've always struggled with finding something to actually do with them once they were setup and running. The sort of work they were intended to be used for is of no real interest to me, the software is probably hard to come by now and even if I could find it I wouldn't know how to use it. In that regard Alphas are perhaps the most interesting because they can run Windows NT and most PC software. But then so can a PC.

Neat hardware, Neat operating systems in some cases, but no software to run on them that is still interesting or useful today even from a vintage computing perspective.

dionb wrote on 2022-05-26, 23:48:

The cases for these systems were manufactured by Mitac, who did the Packard Bell 'frog' cases too. If you can't find a Sun Ultra 5 case, try one of those 😜

Hehee that is a good description ! Some early Unisys boards have similar back panel layout too, and requried a riser also...
The things they did back then ;p

davidrg wrote on 2022-05-27, 01:08:

Yeah, I think the SPARCstation 20 is my favorite SPARC machine though the IPX/IPC is pretty neat too. I've got a pretty big selection of UNIX workstations but I've always struggled with finding something to actually do with them once they were setup and running. The sort of work they were intended to be used for is of no real interest to me, the software is probably hard to come by now and even if I could find it I wouldn't know how to use it. In that regard Alphas are perhaps the most interesting because they can run Windows NT and most PC software. But then so can a PC.

Neat hardware, Neat operating systems in some cases, but no software to run on them that is still interesting or useful today even from a vintage computing perspective.

If you see "vintage" as gaming - sure. But outside of that you can still use them for all manner of server/workstation stuff, and you can use the hardware for modern applications with OSs like NetBSD, which still runs (up to date) on old Sparc32 hardware.

That said, my SS20 is also more of a conversation piece than actually doing anything useful. Fortunately I have one of the two TFTs with 13W3 connection (Sun X7127A - 18". And yes, I lust for the 24" X7134A) so it doesn't take up too much room, like my old GDM-20E20 used to.

I have a SunPC card with 5x86-133 on it. If I can ever find a version of Solaris that will run it in that machine (2.6 should work, but I can't get its installer to boot), I can even use it for old DOS games 😜

Yeah, I used to use my SPARCstation 5 as a headless linux box back around 2005 I suppose and it did the job quite nicely. Unlike old PCs it didn't complain about a missing keyboard which was nice. But these days I've got a regular x86 linux server running 24x7 plus loads of Raspberry Pis so its kind of hard to justify running Linux on any of these things. Perhaps one day if electricity prices drop a lot. I've never actually tracked down copies of actual workstation software for any of this stuff beyond what comes on the CDs. I get the impression Maya, AutoCAD and the other off-the-shelf software for these things is hard to obtain not that I'd know how to work it if I ever found a copy.

So yeah, to me they're mostly conversation pieces and interesting in general to just look at/mess around with. See the different approaches to designing things when cost was less of a concern. Like the FORTH implementation in the Sun OpenBoot firmware. Or the equivalent on Alpha which is really a small operating system. For some reason that supports multitasking (ps gives a list of background processes, you can run stuff in the background with & like on unix, it will spawn multiple shells on different devices which can all be used simultaneously), its shell supports pipes and I/O redirection, it has a few simple utilities like grep, cat and a text editor, it can read/write FAT floppy disks. Not sure why all that is necessary for booting VMS and Unix but its there.