Living my best Sun Microsystems ecosystem life in 2025

I love my ultra 45, it’s certainly the best looking of the early 2000s unix workstations!

I lucked out and got a system with 16GB And 2x procs, added in the XVR-2500 and PcPro to play with. It’s also ex-Lockheed Martin which is fun/mildly alarming!

Since this thread is likely to draw knowledgable sparc people, there’s a totally unrelated question I have - I have a sun blade 150, and was looking around on the motherboard. There are few jumpers that say things like “x86 debug” or x86 rom something - and the socket is technically 378… and from what I can research, the chipset worked with x86… Was there a point at which the sun blade motherboard was setup to work with either sparc or x86?! ( not so crazy given ev6 alpha chipset works on x86/the zx1 chipset worked on itanium and hp-parisc? )

> No “AI” writing aids, no “AI” summaries, no ChatGPT, no Gemini search nonsense, nothing. I take pride in doing research and writing properly, without the “aid” of digital parrots with brain damage, and if there’s any errors, they’re mine and mine alone. Take pride in your work and reject “AI”.

This guy better not be using spell check with a tantrum like that tagged to his opening line.

I sold an old Ultra45 from my lab on eBay rather than letting the university people scrap it.

It went for the equivalent of $2000 (which I later donated to a charity) and attracted quite a bidding war. Apparently at least one major airport (I won't say where or in which bit of the world) used one to control its landing light system and were, through a weird network of contractors, looking to buy more hardware for redundancy...

I have also put an IndyO2 SGI machine on eBay that similarly found a repurposed fate. We are now finally at the point where the machines I held on to as a teenager much to my mum's chagrin are now becoming highly valuable again!

I would love to hear counterpoints -- The Sun Ray thin client experience seems interesting, but the modern version of that seems to be the web/app/cloud ecosystem we have now (where the load and storage of your interaction are resident on some other system, potentially freeing up your local device from resource needs). Specifically, a self-hosted collaborative model with Nextcloud + Collabora or similar. I do wonder what workloads or designs would be fit for a more "time-sharing" approach.

> Solaris, meanwhile, which had long been available on x86, saw its “own” ISA SPARC live on in the server space until roughly 2017 or so, and was even briefly available as open source until Oracle did its thing.

Maybe worth noting that SPARC was (is?) licensable:

* https://sparc.org

OpenSPARC is under GPL2.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12578083

(200x) "Never bet against x86" -> (202x) "Never bet against ARM"

Note that the rise of Linux was caused by the rise of low cost, high performance x86 CPUs. There was a period of time when it was obvious you could get much more bang for the buck from x86, but there wasn't a viable OS to use (for servers). Yes NT existed, and we shipped binaries for NT but it was always an awkward fit to run server software on NT. So Linux, which at the time was kind of crappy (unreliable, didn't have threading) was improved by various vendors' efforts to the point where they could re-target their server products into PC-class hardware. Sun was sunk by the people who were downstream in the value chain leading back to Sun's revenue working hard to design Sun out of the loop, by means of PC-class hardware and the Linux OS.