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by ben1040 276 days ago
20+ years ago during undergrad my OO design class had us writing C++ on Solaris. We were told that unless it compiled and ran on Sun we'd get a zero.

This was also before ewaste regulations came in and some engineering school departments would just throw decommissioned hardware out on the loading dock for people to pick over. One day a pile of SPARCstations showed up and my roommates and I grabbed them all.

We put together two working SS-5s by picking and pulling parts from about eight of them. Had our own mini Sun lab in our living room so we didn't have to go out in the snow and try to stake out an open machine in the engineering computing center.
5 comments
technothrasher 276 days ago
I once did this type of "dumpster dive" for NeXT cubes. I managed to get eight perfectly working cubes. I then, feeling generous, started offering them up to my friends. Before I realized what I'd done, I'd given them all away and ended up without one. Oh well.
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jghn 276 days ago
We had both SPARCstations and IBM RISC workstations running AIX. Our assignments were always graded on Solaris. But the IBMs had better keyboards, so I used those. The downside? I had a real knack for finding constructs that'd lead to a segfault in Solaris but not AIX.

I was too lazy to do things like shell into a remote Solaris machine to double check before submitting though. I was YOLOing before it was cool.

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jdblair 276 days ago
I had a SPARClassic at home in 1996! It was pretty underpowered, but it worked great as long as you didn't use X. I worked from my brand new PowerMac 7200 over ethernet to the SPARClassic, which gave me MacOS + Solaris as a development environment.
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lloydatkinson 276 days ago
I wish I'd grabbed some of the PS2 devkits my university were throwing out, they had them all stacked up in an unlocked storeroom.
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m463 275 days ago
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.

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