How many SPARCs is too many SPARCs?
14 comments
·September 5, 2025ben1040
technothrasher
I once did this type of "dumpster dive" for NeXT cubes. I managed to get eight perfectly working cubes. I then, feeling generous, started offering them up to my friends. Before I realized what I'd done, I'd given them all away and ended up without one. Oh well.
sokoloff
Sorry to not have all the details handy, but if anyone in New England is interested in a smaller-scale version of this, I have in a storage unit around 45 minutes north of Boston what I recall to be around 3-4 old Sparcs, probably Sparc 20s. Similar story: not powered on in decades and I'd be happy to give them away to anyone who wants them and who avoids turning the process into a pain in the backside. Multiple 17" CRT monitors as well...
I'm not in a rush and you shouldn't be either, but if you can make use of them or just want them, my email is in my profile.
"My gain of shelf space is your loss..."
kps
Ditto in kw.on.ca. A few Sparc pizza boxes and (IIRC) a 3/60, among other things (mostly DEC).
thomashabets2
When my local inversity was throwing out their old SPARC stuff I filled my car to the point where it looked like a cartoon caricature of an overstuffed car.
I had two full racks of SPARC, DEC Alpha, SGI, and other trash, in my one bedroom apartment.
Now my experiment hardware is raspberry pi and RISC-V stuff (visionfive 2 & orangepi RV2). Much more manageable with space, noise, and power bill.
nathan_douglas
I did the same thing in college, in 2003 or so! I had a whole polyglot UNIX lab in my college dorm room; pizzaboxes, SGI Indigo 2's and an Indy, a NEXTStation, random PPC Apples, an Atari Mega ST 2... I remember my RA checked it out and he just looked at it and nodded. No clue what anything was, just "yeah, technically this isn't breaking any rules..."
chasil
I have an Ultrasparc workstation that I will need to unload soon, big and purple, vaguely near Chicago.
Craigslist is a last resort.
anonzzzies
I have 5 E450s, 20 sparcstations 5s, about as many ultra 5s + 10s and a few of those square older boxes. They all still work and i'm waiting for something. Such a nice machines, especially the E450s were dreamy at the time. I gave a demo where we should a 'cluster of EJBs', indestructible(...) software dev on 2 E450s. It was impressive, but stupidly overpriced... We made nice money but for me that era was about the hardware, after that everything because just 'PCs'.
lizknope
I got my manager at my first job to buy an E450. I think it was around $40,000.
All of our chip design software ran on Solaris and we needed a new faster machine compared to the 200 and 300MHz Ultra 2 machines we had.
I remember it came on a palette and it was 3 inches off the ground. I wondered how we would get it off the palette. Then we started reading the instructions and it came with 2 wooden ramps that fit into slots on the palette and we just wheeled it down the ramps because the server was on caster wheels. We just rolled it into our server room.
I was 22 and it was just so cool.
waz0wski
I keep a SPARCStation 20 around for some nostalgia
NetBSD still supports it, and a wide variety of other SPARC systems https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/sparc64/
rjsw
There are semi-regular posts to the NetBSD port-sparc and port-sparc64 mailing lists from people looking to find new homes for SPARC systems.
liotier
> "MORSE SPARCstation 2 - The second SPARCstation 2 has a MORSE sticker on it"
MORSE was a big Sun reseller in Europe in the 90's. I haven't heard their name since the dot-com bubble popped !
nathan_douglas
The "funny story" in the next article hit a little close to home for me.
ThePowerOfFuet
Having just bought a new-in-box (late 2008 manufacture date according to the sticker) Sun Type 7 keyboard with UNIX layout (and no Oracle logo!), this post hit me right in the feels.
20+ years ago during undergrad my OO design class had us writing C++ on Solaris. We were told that unless it compiled and ran on Sun we'd get a zero.
This was also before ewaste regulations came in and some engineering school departments would just throw decommissioned hardware out on the loading dock for people to pick over. One day a pile of SPARCstations showed up and my roommates and I grabbed them all.
We put together two working SS-5s by picking and pulling parts from about eight of them. Had our own mini Sun lab in our living room so we didn't have to go out in the snow and try to stake out an open machine in the engineering computing center.