Sun

Turned out the hard disk died (which has happened to me on the other two S4100s I own, so I should have suspected it). To the rescue: a SCSI2SD.

Now we have probably the world's first and only solid state media powered Solbourne S3000. It doesn't really boot any faster, but at least it boots. I'm also relieved that my OS/MP media is bootable still. One annoyance is that the SCSI2SD won't let you create 512-byte-sector CDROM SCSI targets, at least not yet.

Anyway, here it is running off my trusty boots-anything Toshiba external CD-ROM, installing OS/MP 4.1C. I love the S3000. They're just so wacky.

Ah, how I long for the days of the tall return key...

Is it sitting on your ironing board though? Or is that one of those handy portable workbenches from the Home Despot. I need a bunch of stuff from the Home Despot. I think we all do...

It's actually one of the portable tables from WalWart. I have two, though the IMSAI 8080 I'm trying to restore is somewhat permanently occupying the other.

Since this picture was taken, the S3000 was moved back to its old position and reconnected to everything, with a little "USB tail" sticking out of one of the slots in case I need to reconfigure the SCSI2SD card again. I really like how terminator power alone is sufficient for it.

Today finished installing OS/MP 4.1C and all the Grumman patches, configuring YP/NIS and getting some basic tools on it like perl, tcsh and gzip. Tomorrow I'll install X11R5 (it only has sunview on it right now) and Netscape Navigator.

Fond memories of Solbourne, so happy to see one running again. Netscape Navigator? No port of something later...?

I was looking at pictures of one of the Solbourne keyboards, and I couldn't figure out why it has both two minidin-8 ports (like a type4) AND ALSO an RJ12 jack. How does that work?

Not sure. I've never used the second mini-DIN.

Netscape Navigator? No port of something later...?

I'll be getting gcc on it, so maybe ...
The nice thing is that it'll be SunOS 4.1 compatible in general, if it works, since OS/MP is binary compatible.

robespierre wrote: I was looking at pictures of one of the Solbourne keyboards, and I couldn't figure out why it has both two minidin-8 ports (like a type4) AND ALSO an RJ12 jack. How does that work?

It has two mini-din connectors so that you can plug the keyboard cable on either side. The mouse plugs into the RJ12 jack in the middle. This is similar in spirit to the Sun type 4, except that on the four, the mouse goes into the unused mini din connector.

ClassicHasClass wrote: I'll be getting gcc on it, so maybe ...
The nice thing is that it'll be SunOS 4.1 compatible in general, if it works, since OS/MP is binary compatible.

I was trolling, Mr. TenFourFox. But yes, AFAIR binary compatible, just not kernel compatible, so many things could be built on one and run on the other. IIRC was true for our CORBA implementation at $WORK circa '92-93 - a mix of Solbourne server and desktops with enough (more expensive) Sun workstations to be certain and to test/certify builds.

I did get sunview, openwin and X11R6 to run simultaneously on it thanks to judicious juggling of $PATH and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Sort of the best of all worlds.

It would be nice to have a more recent Mozilla on it. Netscape 4 is kind of slow. Netscape 3 was better, but it's Netscape 3, so ...

... or, you can throw more CPU at the problem. I got adventurous and pulled the KAP/L2 module from an S4100 I had sitting around doing nothing, swapped the jumpers and put it in the S3000. Now, the crystals are unchanged, so it still runs it at 33MHz, not 36MHz as it does in the S4100. But! The cache is enabled, correctly detected by the kernel, and Dhrystone jumped from 14.6 VAXMIPS to 22.3. That's 53 percent .

Now Netscape 4.61 doesn't run so badly after all.

I'm not feeling crazy enough to desolder the crystals for that extra 3MHz, though.

http://www.floodgap.com/iv/2840

I thought the 4100 L2 cache was off-chip? That said, I've never compared my S4000 and S4100 to spot the differences on the mobo...

It is indeed, it's on a separate module that the KAP fits into. I basically just pulled the whole assembly off and put it in the S3000.

The S4000 has at least two motherboard revisions. The earliest has no jumper blocks. I checked and my S4000 is one of these; the board just says "IDT-CPU." The second revision is labeled "S4000/S4100" and has two sets of jumpers near the KAP and another back next to the first SBus slot. These control whether the L2 cache is enabled. At least ROM version 2.0 is required (but my S3000 had 2.1 ROMs, so no problem). Both my S4100s and my S3000 are this revision.

Solbourne apparently ended up using the same board for the entire IDT line, so the later S3000 and S4000 are exactly the same board as the S4100 except for a different clock crystal next to the KAP. On the S3/4000, it's 66MHz divided down for a 33MHz clock; on the S4100, it's 72MHz for a 36MHz clock. So the "S3000DX" still runs at 33MHz, but with the L2.