I’ve been getting busy with my new Sun Ultra 5. I was quite fortunate to recently score a brand new in box, old stock vintage November 1998 Sun Ultra 5. This is a commodity-level workstation built by Sun to satisfy the need for a low-cost UltraSparc desktop computer that would run their Solaris range of operating systems.
This Ultra 5 comes with the following: UltraSPARC IIi 333 Mhz processor, 256 MB RAM, 9GB IDE hard drive, ATI Rage graphics. The graphics card will only support 24 bit colour up to a maximum resolution of 1152×900 (a classic Sun graphics resolution) so it is currently running at 1280x1024x8 bit. The internal hard drive comes pre-installed with Solaris 2.7 or 7 depending on what side of the marketing fence you live on.
What I would like to do is get SIMH running on this box. Solaris runs SIMH well apparently, so we shall see…
Sweet score! Did it include the PCMCIA expansion box (above the floppy drive)?
Nope, nothing behind the little door. I believe you can also fit a DAT drive in there, although an additional drive bracket is required.
That is beautiful.
Cool! Where did you get it from?
Straight off of eBay! The seller was really nice and helpful, threw in another brand new mouse (always handy), a load of SCSI cables (which will come in handy when I get the PCI SCSI card) and a copy of Solaris 9.
Well that’s great, I absolutely love eBay NIB success stories! And yeah, I’m jealous! :)
Wow, I remember rooms full of these, Ultra 5’s on almost every desk. We used to bitch so much about the crappy IDE disks :-)
Yep, heard lots about the poor performance of the IDE drive and controller! I’m picking up a PCI SCSI card next week which I think will be great, I was also thinking of putting a small IDE SSD card (probably 16GB) in as well, maybe as the root partition. Not sure whether the improved SSD performance over a hard drive will be noticed, but it seems like a fun experiment to try!