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Solaris Solicitations (Patreon)

Published:
2025-04-07 18:33:30
Imported:
2026-06

Content

Anyone out there who used Sun (or similar workstations e.g. microvax 3100) for their job, preferably (though not necessarily) prior to 1999? Would like to know what you used them for, what software you ran, what decisionmaking process led to that particular platform if you know. Bonus if you ever had a SPARCbook, would love to know what purposes those were bought for. Lots of anecdotes on Usenet but I figured I'd cast a wide net.

Not interested in hobbyist stories :p I know everyone and their brother got a castoff Sparcstation in 1999-2004 before the prices skyrocketed and ran a web server on it, but that's not the angle I'm looking for. Thanks!

Comments

Datashed Retrocomputing

I was a UNIX admin for ~200 Sun workstations (mix of SPARCstation 5, SS20, Ultra 5, Ultra 10, Ultra 60, Blade 1000, Blade 2000) plus a Fire 15K in the early 2000s. There were also SGI boxen running IRIX, Cray UNICOS, big IBM pSeries running AIX, and even an Alpha workstation on Tru64 UNIX. Solaris-wise, experience from SunOS 4.1.4 through Solaris 8 in a paid capacity, but have kept up personally through 11.4 and the Illumos distributions.

Andre Hinds

I worked as a technical writer at Amoco in the late 1980s. My office was located amid the Artificial Intelligence group there. While I was forced to use the IBM mainframes to create my documents, and would have preferred to use a Macintosh, the AI group was all using Mac software, but because IBM ruled the roost at Amoco, they couldn't buy anything from Apple. They all ran AUX, the Mac implementation of UNIX, on Sun workstations. I inadvertently became the Mac guy for their group, and I got to learn about Solaris as a bonus.

Lawrence Billson

I worked at a consulting firm in the late 1990s. We were a Sun reseller, and used to also represent "Sun Professional Services" - a bit like how a car dealership would sell as well as service a manufacturer's product. We all had Sun workstations on our desks - SS10s, SS20s but mostly SS5s. We'd use them for general computing stuff - writing reports, goofing off on the web, emails and a bit of scripting and software development to support our consulting engagements. Software wise, we'd use FrameMaker for our report writing. Netscape Navigator for email and web. Happy to answer any specifics that I can remember if you have questions.

Stefan Szomraky

We used Solaris (ex SunOS) in the CAD/CAM department 1997-2002, mainly because it allowed remote access through X-Window from every other terminal, but also the CAD/CAM software (Phillips Printed Circuit Board factory in Klagenfurt) only ran on those machines (SPARCstations S20 and S5). I vaguely remember the last years we switched to Solaris on x86 machines. I think Pentium PROs? A nice anectode is that the installer of Solaris 7 (or was it 8?) allowed you to open a terminal while it was installing, which allowed you to open a web browser that was on the install CD, which then in turn allowed you to go to websites, like "adult entertainment", which made us look at "adult pictures" while installing the OS (which took ages). I think we thought this was "ok" because it left no trace on the live CD? It was also the 90s, so the Internet was far less "logged and firewalled" :) Everything else was DEC/DIGITAL, including OpenVMS on the servers (which features a file system with built in Version Control, very handy for a CAD/CAM department)

Will Dunn

In 2001, I started working for a webhosting company that was VERY VERY small scale - it was run out of an office space above a bar in a college town and we had 5 T1s (which we used zebra and later quaga + bgpd to balance between). Over time a lot more of our servers were just normal PCs running redhat (pre-RHEL), but the owner started out with a bunch of SPARC IPCs and IPXs and SPARCStation 10/20's that he got at a surplus auction that a college ran. So, by the time I left, I think we had maybe 30 linux boxes and ~120 sun boxes. We had I think two boxes that were quad-proc ultrasparc's, but almost everything was just a "lunchbox" or "pizzabox". We had piles of EDO ram and 50-pin scsi hard drives. We also had a couple of 20-something serial port multiplexers, because the sparc boxes, if they didn't detect a keyboard/mouse/monitor would just treat the serial port as a terminal, so we had one of the boxes set up effectively as a KVM. You could BREAK into effectively the BIOS remotely with that. Most of ours were running SunOS 5.7 / Solaris7, IIRC. It was my first experience with actual UNIX. It was insanely stable. We would rent them out to people as dedicated servers, but we also ran shared hosting on the ultra-sparc boxes. We ran them as mail servers, NFS servers (we had a small directory that we'd mount everywhere with tools and stuff, and by the way, the native solaris NFS implementation is soooo good). We had a couple of them running rpc.statd servers, hooked up to heavy-ass 17" Sun CRT monitors - those ones with the 13W3 connector - sitting on arms mounted to the wall (!!!) displaying graphs of various vital stats in the office - network traffic, CPU on the shared boxes, etc. We had one running fax software with a modem, converting incoming faxes into PDFs and emailing them to staff@. We had two different boxes, creatively called mon1 and mon2, that would monitor the network and page us (literally non-alpha numeric-only pages) to actual physical pagers if there was trouble - we had a whole system worked out for what the numbers meant. I think my favorite was a little IPC we had sitting in the office where our desks were - all it did was check if there was new unread mail (literally by checking the mail spool on the sendmail server) that had come into staff@, and if there was, it would literally cat a PCM audio file of a gong being hit to /dev/audio so we would know to check the email. We didn't have a ticketing system, so hearing the gong come out of the pc speaker was how we knew to check the mail. We used nmh (the "new mail handler") on the command line so that multiple people could read and reply to customer mail. It was like a more primitive mutt, if you can believe that. The router was linux, because there were no functioning solaris drivers for the T1 cards that interfaced with the dmarc's, and for no particularly good reason, the DNS server was slackware. Other than that, when I got there, pretty much everything was solaris. My first workstation there was actually a sparcstation 10 running, of all things, NT3.51. I am probably one of a non-zero but pretty small number of people who have actually run internet explorer natively on sparc hardware. Oh - and it had an optical mouse! One that you had to use the special sun microsystems mousepad that was actually a metal plate with a very specific grid drawn on it, but still. I don't remember a lot else, most of this is in the mists of time in my memory. I am still a sysadmin by trade, and even in the world of kubernetes and aws and terraform and jira, I ... miss how janky it all used to be. Edit: oh, we also had a backup server running Amanda that would backup to a tape system and we would store the tapes in one of those fire-proof boxes - which I later learned wouldn't do a damn thing for the safety of the tapes, all they are is a box with permanently wet plaster inside that will release steam inside the box, making it less likely that paper documents would spontaneously burn at high temp, but it would have still melted tapes. And I think we also had an FTP server running some version of the accursed wu-ftpd that was constantly having security issues, and we also ran a local news server - as in, a local copy of usenet that we provided to clients, minus alt.binary. Good lord, I sound like a dinosaur.