You mean the classic Sparc/MIPS workstations? Then nothing much. They are beautiful reminders of a more diverse time in the past where multiple futures were possible. At best you can now run NetBSD on them and use them like a severely underpowered (yet power-hungry) Raspberry Pi.

I have a Sparcstation 1 and a Sparcstation 2.

I played more with the former (which had an official price of 49000$ at launch, I paid it 50 euro in the early 200s), It has a 64 MB of RAM (contemporary PCs had 1 or 2MB).

The bogomips in Linux gave a result of 49. While bogomips isn't anything of really scientific, it's around the same value provided by a 486 DX 4 120, released few years later (yes HW evolved quickly at the time).

It was fun to use in 2004 or so, at the time it was slow, but still usable to navigate internet and alike, but was already retrocomputing.

Today would be retro-retrocomputing. The only practical purpose would be the fun of experimenting with it

Neither are used for anything these days, the best models from both manufacturers are ancient.

That's not to say they are not interesting, or cannot be made to do productive things... but any modern low powered PC (or Pi!!!) will run rings round them

For the record I started my career using them, so I do have a soft spot for both the SPARC systems and the MIPS based SGI workstations; there's a working Sun Blade 1000 and an SGI Octane 2 and Indigo 2 hooked up on my home network, but they're not really used other than for messing about with period tools and games.

IRIX stuff has more interest for me, as it was wildly exotic and expensive when new, and I spent time in the 1990s using it in the final two years of my CS degree to write a multi threaded voice over IP system, and the IRIX audio API was so much more mature than other Unix platforms.

I have Sun Ultra 60 with dual Creator3D graphics, two 10k SCSI drives and I also have two CPUs for it, but for some reason I faced some stability issues with two CPUs, perhaps due to some NVRAM or Solaris configuration nonsense and which there are zero information available anymore, so there is actually just one CPU card inside currently. This configuration nonsense is one of the main things with many of these machines, they are really obscure and as they weren't sold for consumers, there really is very little information available in the internet from back in the day. Most information you will find are scraps here and there from people who try to revive these things.

I have had it for dozen or so years and after going thorough the pain to get it working properly after piecing enough of information from different sources of other Sun models and going through obscure FTP sites hunting for files, I haven't turned it on since initial tinkering and can't even say if it works nowadays. Although build quality is absolutely amazing and hardware is astonishing, it is the most boring retro box I have. The reason is that there is just so little interesting software available for it anymore. This blog post perfectly describes the software issues with many of these machines:

https://www.osnews.com/story/135605/the-mass- … x-workstations/

Besides having very little to do after the initial tinkering and wonder, after all, tinkering with different Solaris distros just gets old quite soon, these can't be used for home lab or home server either. They are just too slow for any practical use case, it is better to just use RPi and you have much, much more performance with a small fraction of power consumption while having better software availability. Not to mention the performance you get from some "real" server that is even remotely modern. And for example this Ultra 60 is just too damn loud. It has very heavy duty cooling, which makes noise, but the most annoying things are the 10k SCSI drivers which always get loud after they have been used for a while. You don't want to be in a same room with this system too long, the whine just gets irritating after some time.

While there are probably differences between all these Unix WSs as far as issues and challenges go, I'm personally not interested in getting another one or I wouldn't pay close the price they usually ask for these nowadays (I got that Sun for free back in the day, so I really don't complain). I'd say if you get one very cheap, why not see for yourself what's the fuss about them. Just be warned, many of these systems use heavily proprietary parts and design, so you might have useless box if you miss some accessories. For example Ultra 60 uses its own proprietary keyboard+mouse and AFAIK you can't even slap just any SCSI CD/DVD drive on it, it needs to have certain firmware in a similar fashion as many gaming consoles have.

Sun Workstations were not a thing I ever got to experience. I was a young kid in that era, and those were almost exclusively things found in the business world inside cube farms.

In my view of the world, they are a lost era that I never got to see in the wild; a thing that existed, but only for a short time, and only for a few. An echo of a way things could have been, much like Amiga computers (I am American. Unlike in Europe, the Amiga did not have wide home user adoption here.)

Running a modern *nix on them is 'theoretically possible', but wont be any fun.

They are nostalgic for the lucky people who were in the right places, at the right times.

I was not so lucky. To me, they are pretty looking museum pieces.

I used a variety of Sparcstations circa 2000. They were big in the engineering departments in college. They had servers, workstations and thin clients. These were highly specialized systems. Like it was a lot more fun to use a Windows 98 machine from a consumer software standpoint. They were also usually noisy.

I wonder if it's possible to emulate a system to run Solaris or Irix. That would probably be enough exposure. 🤣

swaaye wrote on 2026-09-20, 13:43:

They were also usually noisy.

Oh yesss.

Not the machines itself, but the SCSI hdds that come with them.

I wonder if it's possible to emulate a system to run Solaris or Irix. That would probably be enough exposure. 🤣

On such old Sparkstations, Solaris was already something like Win 2000 on a pentium machine, it worked but was already too heavy.

More period correct would be SunOS 4. Which wasn't just a previous version of SunOS 5 (renamed as Solaris), it was a different flavour of Unix, with different ancestry.

I never bothered to emulate it but I think QEMU and some firmware bits should be all you need.

https://john-millikin.com/running-sunos-4-in-qemu-sparc

Some of them must have been using SunOS.

I don't really miss the old high RPM ball bearing HDDs! I had some noisy IDE ones too like various Quantum Fireball Plus. Rocks in a blender seeks and bearing whine.

Here's a shot of the UI that I definitely remember using.

The Solutor wrote on 2026-09-20, 14:18:

Oh yesss.

Not the machines itself, but the SCSI hdds that come with them.

Late 90s early 2000s Sun Ultras are very loud, not just the HDDs.

The mention of Pi above reminded me of a small form factor Sun workstation. A friend managed to get one free from a department. It was pretty old at the time.
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/20670 … PARCstation-LX/

Also the thin clients were called Sunrays. And they were fully capable little machines in their own right. The Citrix Windows 2000 they were setup to connect to would get overloaded and slow so I would sometimes just use the Sunray's own software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

swaaye wrote on 2026-09-20, 16:58:

The mention of Pi above reminded me of a small form factor Sun workstation. A friend managed to get one free from a department. […]
Show full quote

The mention of Pi above reminded me of a small form factor Sun workstation. A friend managed to get one free from a department. It was pretty old at the time.
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/20670 … PARCstation-LX/

Also the thin clients were called Sunrays. And they were fully capable little machines in their own right. The Citrix Windows 2000 they were setup to connect to would get overloaded and slow so I would sometimes just use the Sunray's own software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

Oh yeah the X-terminals were one solution to the noise problem then, that makes sense.

I only saw a little glimpse of this Unix workstation action myself, back in the turn of the millennium and a few years after. This was almost all of HP-UX variety to be more precise.
I, too, view these old machines as being historically important and not much practical use today.
A lot of things we think as "modern" computing were already thought about in the sixties with IBM/360 and all that lot, or even earlier.
Sun in the eighties seems almost like a Linux before Linux, there are certain similarities based on what I've read about it.

mr.cat wrote on 2026-09-20, 21:08:

Oh yeah the X-terminals were one solution to the noise problem then, that makes sense. […]
Show full quote

swaaye wrote on 2026-09-20, 16:58:

The mention of Pi above reminded me of a small form factor Sun workstation. A friend managed to get one free from a department. […]
Show full quote

The mention of Pi above reminded me of a small form factor Sun workstation. A friend managed to get one free from a department. It was pretty old at the time.
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/20670 … PARCstation-LX/

Also the thin clients were called Sunrays. And they were fully capable little machines in their own right. The Citrix Windows 2000 they were setup to connect to would get overloaded and slow so I would sometimes just use the Sunray's own software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

Oh yeah the X-terminals were one solution to the noise problem then, that makes sense.

I only saw a little glimpse of this Unix workstation action myself, back in the turn of the millennium and a few years after. This was almost all of HP-UX variety to be more precise.
I, too, view these old machines as being historically important and not much practical use today.
A lot of things we think as "modern" computing were already thought about in the sixties with IBM/360 and all that lot, or even earlier.
Sun in the eighties seems almost like a Linux before Linux, there are certain similarities based on what I've read about it.

Linux killed the commercial Unix market. No question about it.

megatron-uk wrote on 2026-09-20, 21:20:

mr.cat wrote on 2026-09-20, 21:08:

Oh yeah the X-terminals were one solution to the noise problem then, that makes sense. […]
Show full quote

swaaye wrote on 2026-09-20, 16:58:

The mention of Pi above reminded me of a small form factor Sun workstation. A friend managed to get one free from a department. […]
Show full quote

The mention of Pi above reminded me of a small form factor Sun workstation. A friend managed to get one free from a department. It was pretty old at the time.
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/20670 … PARCstation-LX/

Also the thin clients were called Sunrays. And they were fully capable little machines in their own right. The Citrix Windows 2000 they were setup to connect to would get overloaded and slow so I would sometimes just use the Sunray's own software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

Oh yeah the X-terminals were one solution to the noise problem then, that makes sense.

I only saw a little glimpse of this Unix workstation action myself, back in the turn of the millennium and a few years after. This was almost all of HP-UX variety to be more precise.
I, too, view these old machines as being historically important and not much practical use today.
A lot of things we think as "modern" computing were already thought about in the sixties with IBM/360 and all that lot, or even earlier.
Sun in the eighties seems almost like a Linux before Linux, there are certain similarities based on what I've read about it.

Linux killed the commercial Unix market. No question about it.

That's correct, it did. Anything you can do with the old Unix boxes you can do with Linux, cheaper.
I was thinking about some of these open source projects that got their start in this period (e.g. Linux/GNU, so named because the userland existed before Linux kernel).
EDIT: Obviously thinking more of the server side here. LAMP was very much a thing.

Let's talk about the monitors, SUN ones were usually great. I used the 20" trinitron one that came with the SS2, on my PCs for years.

One of the best monitor I ever touched (I had just to build a simple VGA adapter), but it was HEAVY like 35/40Kg, my desk is still bent today in memory of that monitor. It was also an electrical power hog, rated 350W albeit, you know, that's the maximum value, with the monitor set at the maximum refresh, with the maximum light emitted. In normal desktop usage it was more likely around 200W. Still a lot. That's the only reason that convinced me to buy a LCD monitor.

A friend tried the same path with a HP monitor from a HP-UX workstation, it was way more complicate. Not sure about the connector (likely a normal VGA) but the monitor natively didn't like standard PC/Vesa refresh and reasoutions, so a lot of work was required to build custom ones with tools like Powerstrip.

megatron-uk wrote on 2026-09-20, 21:20:

mr.cat wrote on 2026-09-20, 21:08:

Oh yeah the X-terminals were one solution to the noise problem then, that makes sense. […]
Show full quote

swaaye wrote on 2026-09-20, 16:58:

The mention of Pi above reminded me of a small form factor Sun workstation. A friend managed to get one free from a department. […]
Show full quote

The mention of Pi above reminded me of a small form factor Sun workstation. A friend managed to get one free from a department. It was pretty old at the time.
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/20670 … PARCstation-LX/

Also the thin clients were called Sunrays. And they were fully capable little machines in their own right. The Citrix Windows 2000 they were setup to connect to would get overloaded and slow so I would sometimes just use the Sunray's own software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

Oh yeah the X-terminals were one solution to the noise problem then, that makes sense.

I only saw a little glimpse of this Unix workstation action myself, back in the turn of the millennium and a few years after. This was almost all of HP-UX variety to be more precise.
I, too, view these old machines as being historically important and not much practical use today.
A lot of things we think as "modern" computing were already thought about in the sixties with IBM/360 and all that lot, or even earlier.
Sun in the eighties seems almost like a Linux before Linux, there are certain similarities based on what I've read about it.

Linux killed the commercial Unix market. No question about it.

Linux didn't kill the Unix workstation market, these computers weren't replaced with similar Linux desktop systems. Linux (and in part Windows Server) did eventually kill the Unix server market outside of some niches, but the reasons are still very much similar: commercial Unix was largely tied to expensive and proprietary hardware solutions. As ICT became more and more common during the late 90s, companies wanted fast and affordable scaling, something proprietary Unix systems didn't offer while at the same time Unix systems couldn't offer any significant advantages over commodity hardware and licence-free Unix like OSs like Linux and BSD. Gradually Unix just didn't make financial sense anymore.

Unix workstations with one exception were killed mainly by faster and especially cheaper commodity hardware. Unix WSs died pretty much overnight when dot com bubble ended and companies stopped throwing money to overpriced HPC workstation hardware. Engineering and graphics workstations were mainly replaced by much cheaper x86 Windows desktops and in some cases with PowerPC Apple products, which were more or less the only long term survivor of RISC wars and Unix desktop and workstation market. And while Power ISA is for all practical purposes dead, Unix is still there in workstations with MacOS, but Apple really never aimed or competed on the high end Unix WS market against SSun, SGI, DEC/Compaq/HP etc. Which probably was good for the company in the end.

Wintel at the beginning had more impact than Linux.

With pentium Pros and NT4 Wintel machines, started to look way different from the joke that DOS/Win9x and 486s/Pentiums were, hence started to be evaluated seriously by sysadmins as a (way) cheaper alternative to many scenarios dominated until then By Sun/HP/SCO/SGI and alike, Linux at the time was essentially a toy for enthusiasts, but *BSD started to make a dent in smaller server applications as well.

Then HP commited a suicide with the Itanium adventure, Caldera/SCO committed a suicide with their pointless lawsuits, then Linux matured.

And traditional Unix setups ended in a crossfire From MS/BSD/Linux. Each of them occupying a niche that once belonged to commercial Unixes (Unices if you prefer) .

The rest is recent story.

Linux absolutely did kill commercial Unix. I've spent the last 30 years working in that sector and the writing was on the wall by the late 90's.

At the beginning of my career HP and Sun were still big players; you wanted high transaction web services? Sure, you bought a fridge sized Sun (Exxxx series, and then later the Fire series, and maybe some Netra).

Scientific research? You were probably a CDE on Solaris (or even SunOS) user, and many of my colleagues in the research side of academia were doing just that, but even by 2000 or so the numbers of people running Linux as a viable desktop for that specific purpose was increasing.

But by the early 2005 or thereabouts Linux was making massive headway into the web, database and file storage hosting areas. Oracle did their best to kill off Solaris and the last vestiges of Sun Microsystems hardware, and eventually they succeeded, but it had been a rotting corpse for all but the most die hard shops for a long time.

SGI imploded and dabbled with x86 for a bit, and changed named several times over as it clung on to some ultra high end HPC hardware, but underneath it was all Linux by then.

Even the big traditional Unix applications all transitioned to Linux away from AIX and Solaris to RedHat and SuSE.

I don't disagree that Windows NT, 2000 (and especially) XP did a significant erosion of the workstation sector, let's face it - those vertical integrators couldnt hope to keep up with the huge pace of the commodity PC hardware.

The only use these days would be retro computing and experiencing something different.

I have a SUN Ultra 5 and boxed copies of Solaris 8 (last version for MIPs processors I think) and some MIPs compatible office app. I bumped up the RAM to 512MB and put a bootable 68 pin SCSI card and a 10K drive for a better experience.

The Sun Ultra series used the Sparc CPU architecture. MIPS is a totally different architecture.
Ultra Sparc was supported through to Solaris 10.