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Desktops and mini PCs

Sun SPARCstation

8owners with an opinion
100%of verdicts positive
3/0positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and portability; criticized for reliability.

What people wrote

Likes it
I miss my 11/83, which was connected to my network through a SLIP connection to a Power Mac running Yellow Dog Linux and connecting to the Internet via dialup. It was the late '90s, and it shared my small apartment with a DEC AlphaServer running VMS, an HP 3000 running MPE, an IBM System/36, an IBM AS/400, a Wang OIS, a SparcStation 1, and a NextStation. I miss them all. I do still have an external SCSI TK50 in an MicroVAX 2000-style lunchbox enclosure (complete with carrying handle) in good working order, though, and have toyed with the idea of installing a Raspberry Pi in the enclosure alongside the tape drive to emulate a VAX.
Likes it
Ok, let’s talk apples to apples. I’ll talk about RAM instead of disk, and I have a workload example for you. As a graduate student in AI in 1995, I bought (with granting body’s money) a workstation for running my PhD experiments. It was a Sun Sparcstation 5, and it had 192MB of RAM. That was a lot of RAM in those days, and we spent the money so we could do experiments at what was then the frontier of personal workstation performance (though not big iron). The 192MB of RAM DIMMs cost $27K in 1995 dollars, or $58K in 2026 dollars. Just the RAM. The maxed out Mac Studio today, with 256GB of RAM is $10,800. The upgrade to max RAM is $4K. This machine smokes the Sparc 5 so hard it’s not even funny (as does my phone, of course). The RAM is 1/10 the price of my student workstation’s RAM. It is simply not true, however you cast it, that storage (static or dynamic) has never been more expensive. We can talk about bloated installs without saying stuff that is not at all true. It’s good to know our history. You can call it pedantry, I just prefer true things.
Neutral
a friend of mine had a sun-3/xxx as an end table. (uncertain what model but it was about the size of an end table, probably with casters) I owned many sparcstations. Once I bought a bunch of pizza-boxes for peanuts. Not many worked, but mix and match memory + graphics cards and some did.
Neutral
I can remember carrying a Sun machine around for demos in '95 or so - the IPX was easy to carry but the monitor less than easy. What I particularly remember is getting the occasional electric shocks from the monitor when carrying it (presumably from energy stored in capacitors) and being really careful not to drop it as our two person company only had one Sun monitor!
Likes it
I had a SPARCstation 5 on my desk in 1997. I took an SBus graphics card out of another machine. It would boot just fine without it. Then I put it in my SS5 and connected a second monitor. People around me thought it was amazing that I could have 2 monitors on the same machine. We got a few Ultra 2 machines and then an Enterprise 450. I still remember being so excited when it arrived on a palette and when we unboxed it it came with 2 wooden ramps that attached to the palette so you could roll it down to the floor. One engineer got an Ultra 60 as his desktop but by 1998 we started replacing most desktop machines with Linux / x86 and running everything remote and displaying to our local machines via X11 with the Suns in the closet. We also had a Sun Enterprise 4500 with around 16 CPUs at the main office. By 2003 we started replacing our Suns with AMD 64-bit machines and Linux. All of our semiconductor design software was already Unix / X11 so it was easy to port to Linux. Around 2004 the switch was complete and we never used Suns anymore. They just fell behind the price / performance curve and couldn't compete with Linux / x86-64 anymore.