I was (still am) the target audience for low-end workstations and HEDT machines. The problem with that 3-grand price-point for the Ultra5 was that I could (and did) buy a dual 300Mhz Pentium II (slot1) machine for roughly the same price. And let me tell you, running multi-tasking and multithreaded workloads, that thing was a price/performance monster. It was actually around this time I began transitioning off fancy RISC hardware (I’d been a frothing AlphaAXP fanboy). By 98 I’d been on NT for 3 years (starting with NT 3.5) , but also did quite a lot of work on Solaris. I had one of these Ultra5’s at work, and I was not impressed. It was a fairly base spec machine, and man did it feel slow compared to both my (then) new dual PII box, and my 1 1/2 year old Alpha machine. And this wasn’t apples to oranges because I had a dual boot with Solaris 7 on my dual PII, and it was just all-around much snappier. In no small part this was due to the dual PII also having (an onboard) Adaptec AHA-2940UW controller driving two 10,000RPM Seagate Cheetah HDDs (the most amazing spin up sound ever). For roughly the same price, that x86 machine (a huge tower Gateway machine - GP6-2 is the model IIRC) had two processors, UW SCSI, and an AGP 3D Labs Permidia 2 3d accelerator. Now don’t get me wrong, higher spec Sun stuff was some amazing stuff (I’ll never forget my awe at the cluster of Starfire E10000’s that one of our customers had), but the Ultra5 was just kinda meh at that base spec. (And for the record, NT was not clunky, and Solaris itself had the nickname “slowaris” at the time. Furthermore, NT is still very much alive and, well, Solaris really isn’t.)
Thanks Pat. I've just gotten a Sun Blade 100 and will be doing a video on that next. I'll also release some code to generate the commands to reprogram the NVRAM which is a bit of a bear on the blade series. Good luck to you and your son!
Hey bud, can you give me the approximate physical clearance between the nvram socket and the riser card? I'm designing a modern nvram adapter/replacement using a newer RTC chip still in production with a replaceable battery. I think it will work on the ultra 5 and similar models, though I'm targeting the sun blade series since that is what I own myself. However your pictures of the motherboard in this video show that it's close to the riser card and mounts so I'm not sure if there is enough clearance with my current design.
Hey - sure! The distance from the edge of the green chip carrier to the adjacent motherboard slot for the riser card is 2.8mm. The distance from the NVRAM socket on the motherboard to the motherboard slot for the riser card is 4.8mm. Let me know if you need anything else.
Hello... please, can you help me. I have the same sun ultra 5. today coming to me. i like to boot, but there is "rado console login" and then "Password". Is there a standard? i very don't know anything of those sun ultra 5, is my first! thanks
U5 vs U30... The 30 ALWAYS wins. SCSI beats the [censored] out of IDE. I had an admin "upgrade" my system to a U5. Despite the much faster processor, my productivity tanked. CPU speed does no good if it's sitting there idle 90% of the time waiting for a crap-slow IDE disk. (He gave me lip for it. So I countered with "if it's so damned good, run the clearcase servers on them." CC was running on a pair of U1E's.)
A battery design dependency that makes this machine useless. How do u fix the clock battery problem? U can not. There is still a demand for these machines as proprietary apps in medical , eg DLX from GE, and net servers fields are running, currently, on Solaris. The battery design is the killer flaw. It is not just doing a surgical operation to change the killer battery, but u have to program it with the same parameters , if u saved them on a sheet of paper, needed by theedical Apps to run properly. Great machine with a killer fatal flaw. A Medical equipment worth a million dollars depending on a 10 cent battery that could fail any time during a life saving medical procedure; a battery very difficult to change and to reprogram. When Sun sold the compact foot-print Sun 5 , and others, to the top medical manufacturers to run their life saving apps, Sun failed to disclose this fatal flaw. Why would Sun install the Mac address and 15 other crucial parameters on a non battery dependent nvram? It would make the machine useless once it fails in 2 to 7 years..
Well, those batteries tend to last more than a decade, so not entirely "useless". There are ways to replace the entire RTC, or just the battery glued to them. (This isn't an issue unique to Sun.)
I was (still am) the target audience for low-end workstations and HEDT machines. The problem with that 3-grand price-point for the Ultra5 was that I could (and did) buy a dual 300Mhz Pentium II (slot1) machine for roughly the same price. And let me tell you, running multi-tasking and multithreaded workloads, that thing was a price/performance monster. It was actually around this time I began transitioning off fancy RISC hardware (I’d been a frothing AlphaAXP fanboy). By 98 I’d been on NT for 3 years (starting with NT 3.5) , but also did quite a lot of work on Solaris. I had one of these Ultra5’s at work, and I was not impressed. It was a fairly base spec machine, and man did it feel slow compared to both my (then) new dual PII box, and my 1 1/2 year old Alpha machine.
And this wasn’t apples to oranges because I had a dual boot with Solaris 7 on my dual PII, and it was just all-around much snappier. In no small part this was due to the dual PII also having (an onboard) Adaptec AHA-2940UW controller driving two 10,000RPM Seagate Cheetah HDDs (the most amazing spin up sound ever). For roughly the same price, that x86 machine (a huge tower Gateway machine - GP6-2 is the model IIRC) had two processors, UW SCSI, and an AGP 3D Labs Permidia 2 3d accelerator.
Now don’t get me wrong, higher spec Sun stuff was some amazing stuff (I’ll never forget my awe at the cluster of Starfire E10000’s that one of our customers had), but the Ultra5 was just kinda meh at that base spec.
(And for the record, NT was not clunky, and Solaris itself had the nickname “slowaris” at the time. Furthermore, NT is still very much alive and, well, Solaris really isn’t.)
My son is restoring a sun blade 150 and I think his search history on my computer pushed this video into my youtube feed. Interesting video though.
Thanks Pat. I've just gotten a Sun Blade 100 and will be doing a video on that next. I'll also release some code to generate the commands to reprogram the NVRAM which is a bit of a bear on the blade series. Good luck to you and your son!
Hey bud, can you give me the approximate physical clearance between the nvram socket and the riser card? I'm designing a modern nvram adapter/replacement using a newer RTC chip still in production with a replaceable battery. I think it will work on the ultra 5 and similar models, though I'm targeting the sun blade series since that is what I own myself. However your pictures of the motherboard in this video show that it's close to the riser card and mounts so I'm not sure if there is enough clearance with my current design.
Hey - sure! The distance from the edge of the green chip carrier to the adjacent motherboard slot for the riser card is 2.8mm. The distance from the NVRAM socket on the motherboard to the motherboard slot for the riser card is 4.8mm. Let me know if you need anything else.
Hello... please, can you help me. I have the same sun ultra 5. today coming to me. i like to boot, but there is "rado console login" and then "Password". Is there a standard? i very don't know anything of those sun ultra 5, is my first! thanks
how widely used this machines were? I mean were they used more or on pair with windows and mac at the time?
U5 vs U30... The 30 ALWAYS wins. SCSI beats the [censored] out of IDE. I had an admin "upgrade" my system to a U5. Despite the much faster processor, my productivity tanked. CPU speed does no good if it's sitting there idle 90% of the time waiting for a crap-slow IDE disk.
(He gave me lip for it. So I countered with "if it's so damned good, run the clearcase servers on them." CC was running on a pair of U1E's.)
A battery design dependency that makes this machine useless. How do u fix the clock battery problem? U can not. There is still a demand for these machines as proprietary apps in medical , eg DLX from GE, and net servers fields are running, currently, on Solaris. The battery design is the killer flaw. It is not just doing a surgical operation to change the killer battery, but u have to program it with the same parameters , if u saved them on a sheet of paper, needed by theedical Apps to run properly. Great machine with a killer fatal flaw. A Medical equipment worth a million dollars depending on a 10 cent battery that could fail any time during a life saving medical procedure; a battery very difficult to change and to reprogram. When Sun sold the compact foot-print Sun 5 , and others, to the top medical manufacturers to run their life saving apps, Sun failed to disclose this fatal flaw. Why would Sun install the Mac address and 15 other crucial parameters on a non battery dependent nvram? It would make the machine useless once it fails in 2 to 7 years..
Well, those batteries tend to last more than a decade, so not entirely "useless". There are ways to replace the entire RTC, or just the battery glued to them. (This isn't an issue unique to Sun.)