[Sidneys1]

A couple years ago I got a reply to a Craigslist ad I had posted looking for 90's and 00's era computers people were looking to get rid of. This guy said he used to run a small website starting around 1995, and had a couple "SUN servers" taking up space in his storage unit that he'd love to get rid of.

He was a bit of a curmudgeon, going on about how his business partner screwed him out of a "seven-digit payout" when his domain eventually got bought by some Japanese company. But a minivan rental and some elbow grease later I had a whole pile of hardware that he was all to happy to be done with: A Sun SPARCstation 20, a Sun ULTRA 1 Creator, an Axil Ultima 1 (a third-party Sun clone), an gorgeous amber Wyse CRT terminal, and a few other odds and ends.

I wrote a more detailed list on my blog [1], but so far all I've managed to do with them is get the drives out and cloned and the ULTRA 1 running (an involved process as the internal BIOS memory lost power long ago, wiping such transient properties as "what is my MAC address".

[1]: https://sidneys1.com/retrocomputing/2022/06/03/retro-roundup...

[shrubble]

The Sun Rescue email mailing list has people who can help (I’m on the list also); much lower volume than in previous years but still helpful.

http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org

[porphyra]

I was excited to read about cool hardware including a gorgeous amber Wyse CRT terminal, and disappointed that there were no pictures whatsoever on the blog post.

[Sidneys1]

Here, eat your heart out: https://sidneys1.com/retrocomputing/2024/10/04/booting-sun-s...

[Sidneys1]

Yes, I got ahold of these just weeks before moving to a new state. Things have been a bit chaotic since then. Here's a video of it booting, though!

https://youtu.be/lGCLvFzGYX8

[mikeruiz]

Love those terminals, was just thinking about looking for one!

I remember that the programmable MAC address feature occasionally came in handy when dealing with recalcitrant / braindead software ‘entitlement’ schemes vendors would occasionally require.

[Sidneys1]

I absolutely adore the terminal. It appears to have several VT-compatible modes, so should be very usable with modern Linux. Except I don't have the accompanying Wyse keyboard with the appropriate setup keys required to switch compatibility modes. Gotta trawl ebay for one one of these days...