#sunmicrosystems — Public Fediverse posts

Found an SS10 with a ZX card. Seller is asking USD 700. What happened to these people? Also, as expected, NVRAM is dead, so they are asking USD 700 for a machine that needs immediate computer surgery, both AUI and TP interfaces failing internal loopbacks (prolly NVRAM, not a dead LANCE chip – its register tests are passing) and no keyboard.

So the ZX is basically worthless without a Type 4/5 keyboard and it also needs a DB13W3-capable monitor

#retrocomputing #sunmicrosystems #vintagecomputing

Anyone need help setting up their SPARCprinter? #sunmicrosystems #sparc #printer #ephemera

Repórter Retro 124

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/04/29/reporter-retro-124/

#ReprterRetro #68000 #68020 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #Agfa #AmstradCpc #Apple1 #AtariSt #BareMetal #CalebeAdventure #Codeolences #DanielFalco #DNS #DockingStation #Emuladores #ENIAC #fMSX #GutBomb #IBM #IBMPCjr #Intel #Intel8085 #KonradZuse #LGP21 #MacSE30 #Macintosh #microsoft #MSXDev #NASDAQ #OldComputersSucked #PCXT #PowerBook #RaspberryPi #RetroCollective #RetroTechChris #SanderSouza #SBC #SunMicrosystems #Tan

Repórter Retro 124

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/04/29/reporter-retro-124/

#ReprterRetro #68000 #68020 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #Agfa #AmstradCpc #Apple1 #AtariSt #BareMetal #CalebeAdventure #Codeolences #DanielFalco #DNS #DockingStation #Emuladores #ENIAC #fMSX #GutBomb #IBM #IBMPCjr #Intel #Intel8085 #KonradZuse #LGP21 #MacSE30 #Macintosh #microsoft #MSXDev #NASDAQ #OldComputersSucked #PCXT #PowerBook #RaspberryPi #RetroCollective #RetroTechChris #SanderSouza #SBC #SunMicrosystems #Tan

Repórter Retro 124

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/04/29/reporter-retro-124/

#ReprterRetro #68000 #68020 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #Agfa #AmstradCpc #Apple1 #AtariSt #BareMetal #CalebeAdventure #Codeolences #DanielFalco #DNS #DockingStation #Emuladores #ENIAC #fMSX #GutBomb #IBM #IBMPCjr #Intel #Intel8085 #KonradZuse #LGP21 #MacSE30 #Macintosh #microsoft #MSXDev #NASDAQ #OldComputersSucked #PCXT #PowerBook #RaspberryPi #RetroCollective #RetroTechChris #SanderSouza #SBC #SunMicrosystems #Tan

Repórter Retro 124

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/04/29/reporter-retro-124/

#ReprterRetro #68000 #68020 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #Agfa #AmstradCpc #Apple1 #AtariSt #BareMetal #CalebeAdventure #Codeolences #DanielFalco #DNS #DockingStation #Emuladores #ENIAC #fMSX #GutBomb #IBM #IBMPCjr #Intel #Intel8085 #KonradZuse #LGP21 #MacSE30 #Macintosh #microsoft #MSXDev #NASDAQ #OldComputersSucked #PCXT #PowerBook #RaspberryPi #RetroCollective #RetroTechChris #SanderSouza #SBC #SunMicrosystems #Tan

Repórter Retro 124

https://retropolis.com.br/2026/04/29/reporter-retro-124/

#ReprterRetro #68000 #68020 #ActionRetro #AdrianBlack #Agfa #AmstradCpc #Apple1 #AtariSt #BareMetal #CalebeAdventure #Codeolences #DanielFalco #DNS #DockingStation #Emuladores #ENIAC #fMSX #GutBomb #IBM #IBMPCjr #Intel #Intel8085 #KonradZuse #LGP21 #MacSE30 #Macintosh #microsoft #MSXDev #NASDAQ #OldComputersSucked #PCXT #PowerBook #RaspberryPi #RetroCollective #RetroTechChris #SanderSouza #SBC #SunMicrosystems #Tan

This has to be the worst thing Sun has ever done.

#Sun #SunMicrosystems #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #UNIX #keyboard #keyboards #photo #workstation #Solaris #hardware

Au début des années 90, RDI a eu une idée simple :
“Et si on mettait une SPARCstation Sun… dans un portable ?”
Résultat : le BriteLite SPARC Laptop Workstation avec CPU SPARC et Solaris.

A lire : https://www.silicium.org/index.php/blog-catalogue/ordis/us/rdi-britelite-2

#RetroComputing #Unix #SunMicrosystems #SPARC #Workstation #TechHistory #silicium

GlobalTalk Chat looks slick with the CDE theme.

#MARCHintosh #GlobalTalk #SunMicrosystems #CDE

A personal history about #AppleTalk and #SunMicrosystems

https://akapugs.blog/2020/03/21/680/

#MARCHintosh #GlobalTalk

Someone did it ! A #sun3 clone https://github.com/54weasels/sun3_60
#sunos #sunmicrosystems #m68k #unix

I found this reply that I made in 1984 to Dennis Ritchie in the net.followup newsgroup. I was at the time lobbying Sun to add 8-bit character set support to the firmware, but they wanted to hold out for a 16-bit system, like the as yet unnamed Unicode. There was eventually an interim solution but my memory of that is a bit foggy.

#Usenet #DennisRitchie #C #Pascal #emacs #VT100 #charactersets #ISO8859 #languages #Swedish #programming #unicode #SunMicrosystems #Värmland

A fascinating look back at 1994: Bud Tribble explaining the pivotal alliance between NeXT and Sun Microsystems.

It’s incredible to read how OpenStep was pitched as the "mature" object-oriented solution back then—laying the groundwork for the architecture we still use today in macOS. Real engineering history.

#RetroComputing #NeXTSTEP #SunMicrosystems #TechHistory #Unix #OpenStep #Apple

https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/nextworld-interviews-bud-tribble

@Gammitin

Nice. This used the #CDE desktop, based on #Motif. I did prefer the earlier #OpenWindows / #OpenLook, though. Partially because I was involved in the development of that.

#SunMicrosystems

Thinking about selling my Sun TAAC-1 VLIW board. Introduced in 1987, it was a coprocessor for VME Sun-3 systems, and the world's first "Board Level General-Purpose Graphics Processing Unit", according to some.

Approximately 400 were made.

Photogenic little beastie, among other things.

If you're interested, please email: [email protected]

#Sun #SunMicrosystems #VLIW #RetroComputing

https://www.cyclingeu.com/493927/reviving-the-sunray-sun-microsystems-forgotten-terminal-server-thin-client/ Reviving the SunRay: Sun Microsystems’ Forgotten Terminal Server & Thin Client ##germany #Bicycling #BicyclingGermany #Biking #BikingGermany #Cycling #CyclingBorkenGermany #CyclingGermany #Deutschland #phintage.phunsites.net #retro #retrocomputing #solaris #Solaris9 #sun #SunMicrosystems #SunTerminal #SunThinClient #SunFire #SunRay #SunRay1G #SunRayServer #THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR #V120 #Vintage #VintageComputing

Didn't remember I had one of these too, yay me. #suntember #sparcstation4 ##sunmicrosystems #nvram

Feb. 11, 2004: Andy Bechtolsheim rejoins #SunMicrosystems through the acquisition of #Kealia, bringing in servers designed around the AMD #Opteron. Video of Andy showing off "Thumper" - 48 drive dual Opteron system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zQ5RLAyA7w #Suntember

☀️🌻🖥️🌞 In addition to the SPARCstation 20 (pictured), we also host the SPARCstation IPX, SPARCstation 4, SPARCstation 5, and SUN UltraSPARC 1.

#computermuseum #computerhistory #slovenia #ljubljana #softwareheritage #digitalheritage #nostalgia #sunmicrosystems #museo #retrocomputing #solaris #vintagecomputer #vintagecomputing #informatica #sparcstation #microprocessore #tecnica #90s #italia #germany #sparc #vintagesun #maribor #kranj #slovenija #sunultrasparc1 #80s #sparcstation4 #workstation

Sun Open Look VHS tapes uploaded by Play with Junk:

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SKMtH3_TO8

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kjcewrp6HNc

#SunMicrosystems #OpenLook

I've just realised that #LibreOffice inherited the names of the applications in its suite directly from #SunMicrosystems #StarOffice.

#RetroComputing #WindowsNT4

40 years later, X Window System is far more relevant than anyone could guess - Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Often times, when I am research... - https://arstechnica.com/?p=2032813 #sunmicrosystems #xwindowsystem #astrophysics #dumbterminal #wayland #zaphod #linux #tech #unix #vax #x11 #x

Blade count: 4 Blade 100, 2 Blade 150. Obviously #nvram is dead on all. #sunmicrosystems

I can feel my deadline growing shorter not longer

#Tech #Computer #RetroTech #Retro #RetroTechnology #RetroComputers #VintageComputer #RetroComputing #Magazine #Sun #SunMicroSystems #OpenLook

Sigh, of course the #NVRAM battery is dead. What else would it be eh? Who was the idiot at #sunmicrosystems that decided that using NVRAM chips with integrated batteries is a good idea ? Deserves a public flogging.. grr #ffs

What the history of OpenBoot, Phrack, Mudge & Solaris, can teach us about the wisdom (or not) of Apple’s building their iPhone security debugging-backdoor-NSA-hack thing

In the days before people really, really, cared about security — when it was more amazing that mainstream computers worked at all rather than that they offered falsifiable guarantees about privacy and integrity, and most of all in the days before hackerdom decided that it would be great if all the world’s computation ran on “…surely 640Kb is enough for anyone?” glorified MS-DOS personal computers rather than on architectures specifically designed to carry the weight of “big data”… back in those days there was the concept of a monitor.

By monitor we don’t mean VDU nor LCD screen, but instead that what you considered to be your entire computer operating system was something which could be paused, inspected, poked, amended, restarted or halted, all by a little parasitic computer system which probably polled the device tree and booted it up in the first place. The consequence of the monitor was that — beyond being a mere “boot loader” — you were essentially running your entire operating system kernel under a live debugger on a 24×7 basis.

This “debugger” was the monitor; sometimes it was separate hardware, sometimes it was just a firmware-level subsystem with which you could interrupt your operating system at any point, and call back into. At Sun Microsystems (in particular, but much the same was available elsewhere) the monitor evolved into a complete and flexible little solution called OpenBoot, which subsequently became a PCI standard (it is/was(?) even in MacOS) and it was massively powerful.

Unfortunately: with great power comes great responsibility, which (per the first paragraph) people were not really aware of, yet.

So, in July 1998, Mudge posted in Phrack an article titled “FORTH Hacking on Sparc Hardware” explaining how to use the monitor to change the UID of your shell process to be zero/the root user:

Fire up the trusty OpenBoot system via L1-A and get the pointer to thecred structure via :ok hex f5e09000 18 + l@ .f5a99858ok goNow, get the effective user id byok hex f5a99858 4 + l@ .309   (309 hex == 777 decimal)ok goOf course you want to change this to 0 (euid root):ok hex 0 f5a99858 4 + l!ok gocheck your credentials!Alliant+ iduid=777(mudge) gid=1(other) euid=0(root)

tl;dr — press some keys, type a magic incantation in Forth and you become “root”

Let’s just say that OpenBoot was a very powerful and essential medicine… but that provision of that power caused security side-effects/issues that were not going to go away in any short period of time. An excellent little white paper from GIAC provided a synopsis and context from a few years later, in 2001.

The technique of elevating user privileges by manually editing system runtime memory is an exploit that can be used to subvert all operating system security measures. This vulnerability is not operating system platform specific and exists in all computer hardware that utilizes a programmable firmware component for hardware control and bootstrapping procedures. This paper will explain this vulnerability as a class of exploit and utilize the SUN Microsystems’ OpenBoot programmable ROM (PROM) and Solaris as a technical example.

https://www.giac.org/paper/gcih/182/privilege-elevation-system-memory-editing-sun-sparc-platform/101427

Speaking as one of the people who had to clean up the mess: we/Sun Microsystems should have done a lot more to mitigate the ability of people to get at this powerful medicine; this issue was significant amongst others which drove Sun’s internal security community to create and force the adoption of the “Secure By Default” initiative, and to formalise customer provision and promote adoption of the Solaris Security Toolkit which (amongst many other configuration changes) locked-down several different routes by which the OpenBoot monitor could be exploited.

From the perspective of 2023: this all should have happened 5, perhaps 10 years before Mudge’s posting, but there was neither the corporate will — nor customer will/expertise — to address the matter at that time.

So when I look at Apple, and there’s an apparent hardware debugging widget in the memory which can be driven by undocumented means to poke the entire system, for a device which they are literally advertising as robust and secure, my reactions are basically:

1. Dude…
2. Dudes…
3. Dudettes…
4. What the fuck?
5. This is history repeating itself…
6. Like really, what the fuck?
7. At least when we did it, it was in a world where hardly anyone cared.

#apple #essay #mudge #openboot #operationTriangulation #sunMicrosystems

https://alecmuffett.com/article/108789

#SunMicrosystems' #OpenLook is the bestest looking GUI EVAR and I wish I could run #olvwm on my Macs https://fosstodon.org/@delan@kolektiva.social/111203848069416958

At the first Digital Crafts Day on Friday we had Richard's SUN Iced Tea. A must have for a Java and #sunMicroSystems fan boy! #DCD #Richard

Here are the next two #SparcStation pizza boxen. One is an #SS5 the other an #SS20 like the first.

#VintageComputing #RetroComputing #Sun #SunMicrosystems #unix

Annual #introduction #ComputerHistory

I'm a retired (3rd time) techie with an incredibly lucky career and family.

I'm most famous as being employee number 8 of #SunMicrosystems, and I got to work with the Bell Labs #UNIX team for a summer during the birth of V7 #UNIX.

My Silicon Valley career started with #Amdahl in 1978, followed by Sun for 12 years. I've since founded 4 startups (see profile).

I toot about #ComputerHistory; I've been there for much of it.

Annual #introduction #ComputerHistory

I'm a retired (3rd time) techie with an incredibly lucky career and family.

I'm most famous as being employee number 8 of #SunMicrosystems, and I got to work with the Bell Labs #UNIX team for a summer during the birth of V7 #UNIX.

My Silicon Valley career started with #Amdahl in 1978, followed by Sun for 12 years. I've since founded 4 startups (see profile).

I toot about #ComputerHistory; I've been there for much of it.

Annual #introduction #ComputerHistory

I'm a retired (3rd time) techie with an incredibly lucky career and family.

I'm most famous as being employee number 8 of #SunMicrosystems, and I got to work with the Bell Labs #UNIX team for a summer during the birth of V7 #UNIX.

My Silicon Valley career started with #Amdahl in 1978, followed by Sun for 12 years. I've since founded 4 startups (see profile).

I toot about #ComputerHistory; I've been there for much of it.

Annual #introduction #ComputerHistory

I'm a retired (3rd time) techie with an incredibly lucky career and family.

I'm most famous as being employee number 8 of #SunMicrosystems, and I got to work with the Bell Labs #UNIX team for a summer during the birth of V7 #UNIX.

My Silicon Valley career started with #Amdahl in 1978, followed by Sun for 12 years. I've since founded 4 startups (see profile).

I toot about #ComputerHistory; I've been there for much of it.

European Investment Fund puts $30M in Fabric Ventures’ new $120M digital assets fund - Despite their rich engineering talent, Blockchain entrepreneurs in the EU often st... - http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/5MhEYC__95w/ #europeaninvestmentfund #chinesecommunistparty #acceleratorventures #europeancommission #cryptocurrencies #decentralization #managingpartner #sunmicrosystems #fabricventures #europeanunion #felixcapital #northamerica #unitedstates #blockchains #technology #rpx

Als Sun Microsystems ca. 2005 eine neue Generation x86-Server (auf Basis AMD Opteron) einführte, haben sie dazu einen sehr unterhaltsamen Videoclip produziert. Und dieses Format danach dann noch mehrfach genutzt. Weil ich die einzelnen Teile kürzlich mühsam zusammen suchen musste, habe ich die für euch mal in eine Playlist zusammen gestellt. Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb5_ZDo_8Gd7XFnCNws5cCY8Z0MtGANK5 #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #itguy #sunmicrosystems

Why Vinod Khosla thinks radiologists still practicing in 10 years will be ‘causing deaths’ - Doubling down on comments he’s made throughout the years regarding AI’s potential impact on the medi... more: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/JZ0djf-OJcI/ #artificialintelligence #creativedestructionlab #sunmicrosystems #vinodkhosla #toronto #health #khosla #tc