Over the past couple of weeks I have worked to reconstitute a Sun Sparcstation 1 (aka Sun 4/60) that I procured from UW Surplus way back in 1999, and which had been sitting on a shelf since then. The label on the front says it was priced at $0.00, however I think that was just the label the originating department slapped on it – I actually paid $18.99, tax included.
The disk drives had both died, but a SCSI2SD board (both V 5.2 and V6 / 2021) worked as substitutes, with little difference in performance. I set up both SunOS 4.1.4 (aka Solaris 1.4) and Solaris 2.7 (aka Solaris 7) – but the performance of the later Solaris was nearly intolerable. The video card that came with it was has a very odd Sun specific monochrome output, but I was able to acquire a color card at low cost off of eBay this year, and swap them out.
The machine has two Ethernet ports – one on the mainboard (le0) and the other on an SBus expansion board (le1) – the latter has a coax “thin net” connector. I don’t have that, but fortunately I have a couple of AUI cable to 10BaseT adapters so I was able to hook it up to my network.
These systems used a Mouse Systems optical mouse – and I got a mouse with the system, but not the mouse pad – and the pads are now essentially made of “unobtanium”. I found a site on the web where someone had printed their own – dark red horizontal stripes and vertical blue ones. It does not work very well, but at least it does work.
Somewhere along the line I also got a Sun SCSI cartridge tape drive shown in this photo. I have used that with PCs to recover cartridge data, but in this photo it is just for show.
For more info, including links to the PDFs I used to create the mouse pad, visit my UNIX® workstations page.