The history of SPARC, its not just a Sun thing 

I worked at Sun for 14 years then was assimilated by Oracle for 7 more years. Still worked on Sun stuff even though it was now Oracle. Then Oracle laid everyone off. So I still have fond memories of Sun. Nothing good to say about Oracle.

Back in the day I had a SparcStation 10, later with 4 Ross HyperSPARC CPUs and 128 Meg of RAM. We were running a manufacturing application developed by a company in Toronto by the name of Cherniak Software. They had ported it to the SparcStation at our behest from a Harris HCX-7/9 platform (of CCI Tahoe CPU / 4.3 BSD Tahoe fame). When they ported it originally to the Harris (they were at the time an Olivetti shop but we wanted Harris, it was the fastest thing they had ever run their code on. When they later ported it to the Sparc architecture, they were absolutely speechless. When we upgraded to HyperSPARC, they just stopped trying to come up with adjectives to describe how fast it was. Your video brings back memories. The very brilliant software engineer (I always joked that he considered a compiler merely a convenient way to generate object code - not a necessary one) who designed the database tools we used passed away last year, and the founder of the company the year before. I still use the tools they developed in another application today.

SPARC was the only machine used to develop ASICs back in the day. Used them for designing F22 EW and commercial graphics chips. We used SUN machines and some clones. Years ago SUN open sourced the SPARC processor. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSPARC. One of the only companies to open source something so amazing as a processor, even if older technology. Something I wish Intel, AMD, and Nvidia would do. If something is 20+ years old, open source it for enthusiasts. You can build SPARCs for FPGAs now days.

That SS10 you have is actually an SS10SX, an incredibly rare machine, much rarer than the Hypersparcs you have in it. I'd very much appreciate if you could take some high res pics of the motherboard and post them online because there are almost no good pics of that machine.

13:35 NeWS, the “Networked (Extensible?) Windowing System”. This was based on PostScript, before there was such a thing as Display PostScript. So Sun added its own extensions for on-screen drawing and interaction handling. And then abandoned it all when X11 came along. Some people really liked the idea of being able to load small pieces of autonomous code into the display server that could handle low-level user interactions without bothering the main processes running on the CPU. Done right, this could certainly make the system feel more responsive, particularly over slow networks or remote links. The problem (as with the whole issue of multithreading that became popular in the 1990s) was that synchronizing all these independent threads of control was very hard to get right, and was extremely prone to hard-to-reproduce timing-related bugs. “Knock-knock.” “Race condition.” “Who’s there?”

27:51 Worth noting that, while Alpha was 64-bit-native from the beginning, it did have some 32-bit compatibility in the form of “TASO” mode (“Truncated Address-Space Option”). This used only 32-bit addresses, and was used to run Windows NT, which if you remember, in spite of its much-vaunted portability across different processor architectures, was still only 32-bit at the time.

Growing up sun, and therefore sparc were very much everywhere in our house as my father worked as an engineer (having previously worked at Burroughs), and whilst I never really used sparc outside of tinkering myself, there was always a few sparc systems running , which as an inquisitive kid obsessed with computers was great. Mostly it was what was deemed to be broken when removed from one of the major London banks when doing repair, upgrade or replacement. The rules then were as long as it was never sold or passed on it was fine if you could fix it. Generally my father was rather good at fixing most things so there was a enterprise server running in the garage for years, never needed any extra heating in there! Plus various types of sparcstation around the house. My father moved into management at sun later on was made redundant by oracle 2 years ahead of retirement, but apparently he negotiated the package to cover his pension so he didn't lose out. This was a great video and i look forward to the sun video at some future date.

Also, the Patterson and Hennessy Computer Organization and Design textbook is still possibly the single best textbook (in terms of going from zero to nearly an expert) on any topic I've ever read. Hugely influential.

Breathtaking content. I provided tech support for Autodesk AutoCAD on IBM AIX, HP-UX, SGI Irix, DEC Vax and Alpha, and various Sun workstations back in the day (mid-1990s). All of these machines were a few yards/meters within my reach. Good times.

Thank you for the very informative video. I worked at Ross Technology from 1989 to 1996 and lived through a piece of what you covered. While Cypress Semiconductor was the original owner of Ross and initial primary silicon supplier, Cypress sold its interest to Fujitsu during a time when Cypress' overall business was struggling (thanks in part to a difficult technology transition in Cypress' wafer fabs). I lost a lot of sleep in those years :). When Ross stumbled at the Sparc 8 to Sparc 9 transition Fujitsu bought the remaining IP. Fujitsu had also been the primary backer of Solbourne computers and Amdahl. I wonder what the world of computers would look like if Fujitsu had acquired Sun instead of Oracle doing so.

I've good memories of SPARC architecture from before I started working for Sun. I was tasked with designing the hardware for an VMEbus FDDI card. Needless to say we had every processor vendor imaginable pitching up to offer their latest and greatest, all massively power hungry, stupidly expensive, and threatened to make the whole board a non-starter just based on cost. The Fujitsu rocked up with their SPARClite, low power (comparatively) and less than a twentieth of the price (just 25 pounds in small volumes) - it was intended to go into laser printers for the rendering engine. Some of money and space we saved by using that CPU was traded for giving it some dedicated fast SRAM to work in and FPGAs to do DMA and run the networking checksums. And that little 25Mhz CPU with its assist could work its way through socket buffers and saturate the backplane and the network. We had a bake-off against Cray, and won.

Love this channel so much! Always hits my retro computer fix without skimping on the lore and technical aspects. While most channels just share software clips and nostalgia, this channel is a beacon in the dark!

Also @12:43 - Motorola didn't start down the PowerPC path initially. They created the 88k architecture. The 88k was a bit of an alien architecture because it was a Harvard Architecture (code and data were in separate address spaces). Fun fact: the PowerPC bus architecture is based on the MC88110 bus architecture.

Fantastic video, I have a real soft spot for SPARC since designing a hobbyist system on a FPGA based around the Leon3 SPARC soft CPU and designed a video processor and other peripherals for it. I had it running Doom about a decade ago. It was amazing to have such a relatively powerful system to play with. It was really amazing of Sun to release the details for the SPARC architecture as open source. It is an interesting architecture to learn about with the register windows and things like that and the Leon3 project is very cool, would recommend to anyone looking to learn about designing their own FPGA system on a chip.

When I went to Brunel University in September of 1997 to study Computer Science we had access to two types of computer. 1) 486s running Windows 3.1 for Workgroups 2) Sun SPARCs and UltraSPARCs If you were stuck on a Sparc, we would ssh or rsh into an UltraSPARC and use it to do our compiling as it was much faster. We would even attach an X Server to it for a faster desktop.

LOVE SPARC! I had a sparcstation 5 for $200 when they were just 8 years old, currently spending a lot more than that to restore an SS20.

The most enjoyable video I've watched in ages. Worked with Sun from 1995 to 2010 and still have a soft spot for them. It's still Sun ZFS to me also (another of their fantastic innovations), I just can't call it Oracle to this day! Thanks for the video.

I have two SPARCclassic, SPARCStation IPX, and a Enterprise 450. I had a lot of fun when I got them and they helped out in my career as a System Administrator (HPUX, Sun Solaris, Linux). Thanks for the video, brings back great memories.

I used Sparcs in college and grad school, up to a 150mhz UltraSparc 128MB of ram in 1997. Everyone thought RISC and Sun were the leading edge of computing. We had no idea what was happening in x86 world or by what means they would dominate in performance (not just cost/performance, pure performance) in just a few short years. 😅

Seeing the little metal tabs on the Mbus cards sure brought back memories. One of my favorite things about the Sun workstations is the open prom bootloader. Able to do so much in there to netboot, or load from cdrom or boot from external scsi. It made maintaining the systems so much easier.

Excellent content. I love how you've been able to join the dots in my memory of computing history, in less than an hour of entertaining and informative content. You're a natural - plus have put a lot of effort in. I wish you all the best. I can imagine that once you're spotted by academia, these videos will be playing in colleges and universities all over the planet. Great content to introduce these technical details without baffling the audience through lack of context. Bravo 👏👏👏

Many thx for that ... after my microVax the machine I miss most is my Sparc workstation. Great days.

Many years ago I was using sun sparcstation ipx and then 5 and 10. I enjoyed this trip down sparc history lane. Keep up the good work.

Thanks for this video! I love old Unix machines and have both SPARC and UltraSPARC in my collection so this history was very interesting to me. Looking forward to that Sun history video whenever you get around to it!

Just thanks, before this I thought when Sparc was mentioned it was Sun Unix variant, It never occurred to me that it was an actual CPU. Great video, you obviously put a great deal of effort into your research. Also, I had to pause the video to laugh after "You have access to a great deal of electricity".

Nice video. When I was in grad school in Japan in the early 1990s we had a large number of Toshiba SPARC LT AS1000 laptops in the student labs. I used PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine) to turn them all into a fairly powerful distributed parallel supercomputer with quite good performance results.

Your "sidebar stack" reminds me of SPARC register windows. ;-)

Fascinating as always - and it seems like you've calmed down the stock footage visuals, so thanks for that :) SPARC was always my favourite of the 90s workstation processors, partly because of the architecture, but mostly because it had the coolest logo.

Great video! You made dry material fascinating to watch. I appreciate the depth of information you covered.

ARM also got conditional instructions, that everyone apparently ditched for doubling up instructions with thumb instead.

Very enjoyable and brought back some great memories from the 90s, especially the first time I used a 64-way SPARC box. One thing about RISC vs CISC is compiler technology and the limited amount of memory and CPU power of development systems. Given unlimited memory and CPU power, a compiler and optimiser can consider many more options for code generation and take advantage of a complex instruction set (see Itanium). But back then compilers were limited by the dev systems they ran on and much library code consisted of hand-optimised assembler for performance. Today, very few people can consistently write better assembler than a free C compiler.

Might have added a mention for Tadpole, who were the only company who build SPARC based Solaris laptops, as far as I recall. (ok, there was the microsparc-based Sun Voyager, but calling that a laptop is quite a stretch..) Also, while the Ross CPUs won against the Fujitsu microSPARC CPUs in terms of raw clock speed, their rather slow off-die cache hamstrung quite a few applications, especially databases (like Oracle, who were none too pleased), where a single 200MHz Ross CPU had trouble competing against the 125MHz microSPARC CPUs. Also oh my god the insane power those Rosses burnt. While you could theoretically put four CPUs (2 MBus cards of 2 CPUs each) into a SparcStation 20, it wasn't officially supported as it could overload the power supply (later SS10 compensated for that by adding 30W to the PSU), and you definitely wanted to add two more fans into the case to get the heat out because the two fans inside the PSU were woefully underpowered for that task.

I couldn't afford a Sparc based workstation in their heyday but I did use a Sparc based machine at work. It was a Meiko CS2 which I guess most people will be unfamiliar with. The CS2 was a massively parallel supercomputer (although ours wasn't so massive). It was based around SuperSPARC (and later hyperSPARC) processors along with optional Fujitsu μVP vector processors (we didn't have any of those). It was the successor to the Meiko Computing Surface which used Transputers and i860s. As the wikipedia page documents Meiko also produced a FPU for early SPARCStations and licensed the design to Sun for their MicroSPARC designs.

Thanks a lot for this detailed dive! This reminded me to include a conditional move instruction in my hobby CPU 😂

Never knew about Sparc but i did hear about RISC , awesome to hear about this unique cpu

SPARC was beaten by ARM on the idea of making instructions conditional. On ARM, execution of every instruction depends on the processor status result from the previous instruction. Two other innovations are that every instruction includes a register shift or rotate by an arbitrary amount, and the service instruction for implementing software interrupts.

Great stuff. I look forward to your future Sun video, where I will hopefully learn more about my SparcStation with "PC" expansion board 😸.

I love Sun Microsystem solutions, it was my 1st real server and workstation equipment and Unix env. I was introduced at my university, thanx to friendly administrator at my Uni. We had Sun UltraSparc server and Sparc workstations and Ray terminals. That was great years, end of '90 and begining of '00.

Always look forward to these videos. Can't wait for the next one. I know it takes a considerable amount of time to research, write, shoot and edit though.

Used to work for ICL /Fujitsu many years ago. We ran SPARCStations for some public sector stuff until 2004. Fujitsu, ICL and Amdahl were all part of the same group (Fujitsu UK). Love seeing the old stuff again.

How does this channel only have 54k subscribers. This is really good content.

This brings back lots of memories - I think it was the first RISC that I had ever looked at. I had kind of lost touch with where this all ended up, however. Kind of sad, I guess. Ironically RISC is now the domain of single board computers, embedded systems and smartphones.

I remember when we got our first Fuji Tahoe systems at SunSoft. We started to test Solaris 7 development builds for their sun4us cpus.

I have been an interested observer of the computer revolution for over 40 years. I have particular interest in the comparison and contrast of user and owner experiences relating to when they were good vs. when they were frustrating. Now nearing the tender age of 60, I am interested in the scientific study of the history of human and computer interaction, to see how it might be applied to raising computer customer expectations, to reduce instances of profit made off of people's ignorance, and try to increase instances of product makers doing a good job of solving specific problems. Some kind of coherent and interesting presentation of computer history, with emphasis on how things could have been done to improve owner and user experiences, might prove useful in giving current buyers of digital tech better intelligence, and then subsequently hold product makers to a higher standard for what they provide.

29:33 IBM Power (or at least PowerPC) used a similar idea. If you looked at the original 32-bit PowerPC spec, it was clear this was operating as a cut-down 64-bit processor, and making it a fully 64-bit instruction set was just a matter of filling in some gaps. Motorola did a similar thing with the original 68000 processor which, while being notionally 16-bit, was effectively a cut-down 32-bit processor. And again, the evolution to the fully 32-bit 68020 instruction set was little more than a matter of filling in some gaps.

One of my home workstations was a Sparc 5, with a sun monitor in 1996 (with solaris 2.5.1). It was new and unused (still in the box) that some father bought (or I bet just got included through buying some $$$$$ servers). for his son, but they found it more confusing since it wasn't a PC. When I bought it, I was already a unix administrator, so I loved it. At work, they gave me a SUN Ultra 2 Creator workstation with dual cpu and a high end video card amd a SUN monitor that was $50K CDN new... as sun stuff was crazy expensive. I'm still working with SUN/Oracle OS on SUN/Oracle hardware still to this day. Mostly T8 servers and running oracle vm, and lots and lots of LDOMs all on 11.4 (note, 11.4 will be going until at least 2034).

Thanks so much @RetroBytes! I've been looking forward to this video for weeks. P.S. Are you going to do another celebration for 65,535 subs?

Thanks for this trip of memories of my early computing career. My first exposure to mainstream UNIX systems was on 68000 based NCR tower, then SPARC based ICL. Moved onto Sun when ICL messed up their channel strategy. Worked on many server deployments.

Excellent video, I commented inline before you brought up Amdhal and Ross, Oddly back in the 80's Sun was next door or very close beside Ampex on the El Camino Real.... Ampex the audio/video tape maker invested in by Bing Crosby... One technology going out beside a new one

heh. when I was a student, designing a RISC processor from the ground up was one of our projects. great experience, and nicely within the scope of 'can be done in a semester or two, simply enough to complete, complete enough to run something'

I once owned a SparcStation 10, in 2001 or so, but none of the monitors I bought for it worked properly. A replacement of the video card was prohibitively expensive, so with heavy heart I eventually tossed the lot. It had two Ross Technologies HyperSparc processors inside and I was gobsmacked to see the attention to noise reduction and everything inside just oozed quality design once I opened up the case.

as usual awesome video, great research, fantastic presenation.

Thanks !! I worked at a place that put their own software packages onto Sun platforms. Sun-2, Sun-3, and Sun-4. Oh those SPARC machines were enjoyable to use all around.

Loved your bite at the government contract job IT projects, we have quite a few of those horribly scandalous projects in Norway as well. But then again, doesn't every country struggle with that...

When I first got into IT you would still see some old Sun Sparcstations set up in various server rooms. Apparently people really liked using them for terminals. At one place, I think it was Brocade or Hammerhead, they were using the Sun workstation just to translate a particular protocol from one type to another. All I know was that it was the last thing we took down and the first thing we plugged in when we redid their server room. What cracked me up was the Sun pizza box workstations that had the CDrom drive mounted on the side, not the front. So you had to have that side of your desk clear to allow it to open!

Very nice history of SPARC! I enjoyed it. Sun will always have a special place in my heart even though I came in near the end of it's life.

Fantastic. I would love to see more risc and some performance comparisons, and what the industry’s opinions were. All of them had their own bespoke workstations and bespoke flavors of unix, I can’t imagine anyone having more thank one type of risc workstation. I have heard the Alpha was the fastest, but by how much, and after DEC stopped, when did Sparc and MIPS catch up?

Back in the mid-90's i was at MCI - and our shop was all about SPARCStation 5's (oddball 85 MHz CPU), SPARCStation 20s, Sun Enterprise E3000s / 3500's, E5500's, E6500s, E10k's, and Sun UltraSparc 140s workstations. Good times.

Awesome story!!! Thanks a lot!!

I appreciate the visual illustration of a kettle of fish, what a nutty expression that is!

Thanks, I always wanted a video explaining about the SPARC processors, they feel "underrated" to me.

How much fun it would be bringing OpenSparc into the year 2023. Always wondered why comapnies picked RISC-V over a way more mature ISA, but yeah the GPL requires companies to share and they really dont like that. Either way cool video.

Really enjoyed this 42 minutes. Quality (and nostalgic) content

RetroBytes - The History of -- * instant upvote! *

SHOUTcast was initially compiled for Solaris Sparc. I ran an internet radio for a long time, the drum'n'bass channel was 2nd biggest on the net with BassDrive being larger. I briefly 'worked' remotely for Nullsoft on SHOUTcast right during the acquisition, while that meant my 'work' hit a brick wall, I did get some relay servers from AOL that kept us running with anywhere from 200-800mbps constant bandwidth (upto hundreds of tb/month) until AOL wanted to get the rest of the Sparc servers out of their racks in like 2009..Actually a ton of popular internet radio stations had the same relay servers. A huge chunk of internet radio pre-2009ish all went thru a Solaris box. So yes, all SHOUTcast development, the precursor to a ton of internet streaming, was initially developed for and compiled on Solaris Sparc boxen. Maybe RU-vid wouldn't be what it is today without SHOUTcast and by extension Solaris & Sparc!

Always interesting and detailed

Still use SPARC today! The M8 CPU is a freakin beast. Great chip. Intel and AMD are finally approaching what M8 was doing 5+ years ago. Just a shame what Oracle has done to their entire hardware biz. SPARC was on such a great path …. M8 is a pretty incredible swan song.

15:55 Interesting point about the multiply and divide. One of the key things that RISC designers were doing was analyzing instruction traces on real-world programs, to see how frequently particular instructions were actually being used. And it seemed they were finding that integer multiplies and divides were not really that common. I think the original SPARC had a “multiply-step” or “divide-step” instruction, something like that--you had to use several of them to perform a complete operation. I think later they realized that, just maybe, instruction traces were not telling them the whole story. Previously, the legendary Seymour Cray had floating-point operations in his legendary Cray-1 and successor machines, but he left out the divide instruction, because it would have taken too many steps and slowed down the execution pipeline. Instead, you had to multiply by the reciprocal of the dividend. There was a special instruction for computing the reciprocal, but it used some kind of successive-approximation technique, so you had to execute it twice to get full accuracy. One could argue this was a form of RISC--breaking down a complex operation into separate simpler instructions, to keep the hardware simple--and fast.

you deserve way more people watching your channel i like your content since im a history nerd and tech nerd most of my channels are videogames, history and tech channels i watch alot and your a great channel

Great video, thank you. I was at Teesside university in 1991 they had a lot of sparc systems.

Awesome video thank you very much have a good day!

I remember going on a field trip in 1999 got my computer programing class to an elevator company's test facility and seeing an ultrasparc server. It had 2 GB of RAM which blew my mind at the time.

Looking forward to the Sun video! It would also be neat to see one comparing the different RISC architectures. How similar are they to one another? What are the strong points of each RISC architecture and why do so many different ones persist in a market that has otherwise seen so many architectures and platforms die out?

I enjoy your videos. Thanks for sharing them.

It was 1990 when I installed the first 1 GB disk into my SPARC workstation. My colleguas and I were fascinated about that "unlimited" storage space!

Very Interesting, I love Proccessing Arch science. Especially modern alternatives to x86. Thank you.

You really brought back some memories.

This is no longer sparc, nor sun, it's the introduction to all the (less) common CPU archs! Everything from M68K to Power to MIPS to Sparc, all in the first 10min! So more CPU archs please! M68K! Power! MIPS!

Solaris was a bag O' joy ... ICK! SGI Irix was a joy, the dynamic kernel, the extendable FS across a raid or jbod, adding a FS or dsk or tty during runtime... I loved the IRIX flavor, but I also love rocky road ice cream so maybe its a preference

Great stuff.

YAY! I have been waiting so long for another RETROBYTES video!

Well actually.... Great video as always mate :-)

The ROSS being able to emulate the Motorola faster than the actual hardware is incredible. Tech advanced leaps and bounds in those early computing days.

32:17: I knew that in Britain they write "errour" instead of "error," but I didn't know you folks wrote "lable" instead of "label"! 😜 Anyway I loved the instruction set redesign nerd-out, don't hesitate from going into it in future videos!

Don't forget LEON, a range of SPARC architecture processors made by ESA for use in spacecraft. Sadly not open source though, like pretty much all ESA stuff.

Small nitpick, but the assembly you showed had 32-bit constants, encoded in a 32-bit instruction, leaving no room for the, you know, instruction. Instructions only allowed for a 13-bit immediate, so you had to use the SETHI opcode to set the high 22 bits. You can then ADD or OR the lower 10 bits to create a full 32 bit constant, repeat with a bit shift for a 64 bit constant. Otherwise video was very good! Also what hyperSPARCs are installed in your 10SX?

Excellent. Lived this stuff ... well ... Indigo 2 ... many years ago. $0.02 from Tasmania.

Correction, as powerful as a Vauxhall Nova, that has just done a ram-raid, on the Woolies pick-a-mix.

@4:30: it is at this point that I realized that the CEO of a company I worked at in the late 90s was the second author of the RISC paper (and that he worked at bell labs). Wow. Neat.

1:28 - Huh?! I've only got the beard since about an hour ago - how could you _possibly_ know that when making the video?! You must be a _true genius!_

I was a project manager for building fault tolerant versions of the Sun Sparc systems, enjoyed my time at Sun, albeit brief. There were some good people there that lost their livelihoods when Oracle fired the entire Campus.

I'M SPARC'S STRONGEST SOLDIER, THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS VIDEO

How you access data with instructions is actually far more impactful to the definition of risc vs cisc than the number of instructions. There are plenty of RISC ISAs out there with very large instruction counts and also some very simple CISCs that have a small number of instructions but it's whether or not the CPU is strictly load/store or not that really determines the classification.

I have a SparcStation 20 and an Enterprise 450 stashed away in a closet that I should get out sometime and fire up. I believe I have an old version of RedHat Linux on the SS20 and Solaris 7 on the 450. I have a set of Solaris 8 install CDs in one of my bins of Sun keyboards and mice. I also have a Sun CRT monitor in the closet too.

my last Sun was a SS20, loved that machine

I have a soft spot for SPARC. Really, one of the best processors I have ever worked with. And it is open source. Sadly, it never gained traction outside of a few niche applications. Have a SunStation 10 in the closet I used as my networks router and firewall for years before gigabit ethernet arrived.

I had heard a rumor that Unix, in an attempt to be portable, took a least common denominator approach by only using instructions that existed on all processors. This subset of very primitive instructions was all the Unix Assembler would utilize. CISC processors - such as Intel - had these instruction but fancy block, search and other instructions and extensions (think numeric coprocessor and MMX as an example). Unix compilation (and C) would never touch those. The benefit of those complex instructions were one command would result in self running loops etc at full processor speed. The disadvantage of the universal approach was you sacrificed memory (since more instructions were needed to do the same) in exchange for portability. When instruction caching came out fewer higher level functions could reside in limited cache. What was seem, empirically, was that CISC processors with custom non-portable drivers outperformed RISC even when RISC had a 20-30% speed advantage. Interestingly in modern multicore, multithreaded processors from Intel, they are part RISC and part CISC, having come cores that can only perform a subset and some a superset. This allows the much more evolved compilers/assemblers to load balance as needed.

Former SunOS IT person here. I miss the pizza box, but I don't miss supporting it.

thanks for this! Could you do a video on the HP PA series of cpus? their history is interesting and most people don't know they exist.

Love the "segway" gag.