The LAST SUN Workstation Made: Sun Ultra 45 Overview (UltraSparc IIIi) 

This video shows why Sun died. Once X86/64 hardware became good enough, you could purchase 3 or 4 Dell servers running RedHat for the price of one Sun Sparc Server, and it was faster than the Sun machine.

I used to be a huge Solaris fan, until Oracle came along and mucked everything up. That's when I turned to linux and never looked back.

Suns...SGI...the good old days. Like good old high school memories.

Love Sun workstations, always have. They're so elegantly designed and you can work on them virtually without tools. They also ran a seriously good Unix O/S, absolutely bulletproof.

Back in the late 90's early 2k I worked at one of Sun's Data Centers in Colorado.

When I worked at Sun, I had an Ultra 60 as my daily. I somehow kept it when they moved everyone over to the dumb terminals powered by the E10ks.

When I was at the university a researcher had a sun workstation and we could only watch him messing around with a "real UNIX". For the rest of us we only had a few PCs running Windows and a Linux server which we could login using Telnet and it ran like molasses. At home I had a Compaq Presario 486 running DOS. I wish I still had this computer.

Love the way they designed cooling system ,simple and finesse just blowing straight trough .

the harder you hit the return key the more pro you are. and now lets open the terminal and get some work done. :D great machine.

Holy shit..wow this looks so modern and beautiful

Hi mate, as a bit of a Unix nerd. I've always wanted one of these. The case is so slick, I think they also did an X86 in the same case until 2010ish?? I'd love to have my main rig in this case, would be fun trying to get my normal X86 gear in there. Anyway rambling, Unix forever - it is great that Sun open sourced Solaris before they died, Was their last hurrah - now we have open source proper Unix.

This machine is indeed beautifully made. I have an Ultra 10 and just received a new NVRAM chip for it. It is the Creator 3d model running Solaris 9. I wonder if I can get a higher version of Solaris to run on my Ultra 10? You are so right about the iPhone invasion ruining computing. EVERYTHING goes for "crazy prices" on eBay.

It was my childhood dream to get an Sun Ultra with CDE. Unfortunately those were rather .. expensive and the only thing I managed to buy was a Sparcstation 5.

❤Sun Netra, where I started learning Unix. Back in 2000, found out there is a speaker hidden inside that unsimiling server! out of curiosity I converted some MP3 to AU format and somehow managed to copy that into the server and if remember correctly, played it loud using 'sox'... such a satisfying moment.

I've never had one of these but we did have an nmr instrument in chemistry lab that ran on a Sun 5. I have an Indigo 2 that I built up with all the bells and whistles and its been packed up in my garage for over 15 years. With COVID stay at home I am tempted to fire it up for fun again. When I had it running I was using a static IP address and did not shut off sendmail. I noticed that my disk space was running lower each month and then figured out that someone had hacked it and there were thousands of emails on it advertising viagra sales. Actually my internet company said I had too much traffic and that alerted me to the problem. That was before they required DHCP for internet. Although I have the 50lb monitor that came with it I just bought a 13W3 cable with dip switches on it so I can run a flatscreen monitor instead. Looking forward to the SGI bootup chime!

Envy... Gorgeous machine indeed.

Just finished putting one of these workstations back in service to support a project that doesn't have the money to update their code! Solaris 10. I've been working with Sun hardware since the IPX days.

Not entirely sure, but those connectors look more like SAS, with that bulge in the middle, where SATA would have a gap. That of course means that you could run SATA drives in it.

These machines were soooo well built. I have 4 of them that are no longer in use and I am coming to grips that I need to take them to the recycling center. Time moves on! :-)

Nice, I might have more fun with this workstation than my SGI Indigo 2 , but in reality not sure what I can do with any of these old workstations other than live in the past.

I remember going through the same sort of slowness with my IntelliStation POWER 285 redrawing the browser screen. Basically, the older versions of Firefox had some sort of acceleration for redrawing the screen, whereas the newest I could run there (the venerable Firefox 3.6) painfully paint the screen against the framebuffer every second. But after debugging it a bit, I saw that the act of processing HTML and loading pages actually runs quite fast. And yes, I unboxed a new IntelliStation POWER 285 years ago and it is SUPER LOUD. Perfect with noise-cancelling headphones though.

I used a Sun workstation at one stage of my career. I don't miss it.

what a beautiful machine and OS...

Wonderful development systems.

I never had one of these. The newest Sun that I had was a Blade 2500, which was a generation earlier. It was a nice machine, but obsolete when I sold it.

Pretty awesome.

Today is the first day of my sun ultra 40 as a desktop 🙂two dual opterons do the job .will max out the ram as soon as I get my hands on the right ram sticks.

I wish sun was still around. I really want one of these machines, but alas theyre incredibly expensive for the performance. I wish they never died at the hands of oracle, so much needs to be undone.

Do you by chance have a copy of the latest (1.6?) BIOS for the Ultra 40 m2? Oracle is no help :P

Man, those guys who designed this case could easily created a company and made so much money.

That is a thing of beauty

From what I remember Solaris till the very end was co-shipped with JDS and CDE. JDS is no fun. Doesn't the CDE session appear as on option on the login screen?

What is the relevance of the machine? What is the selling feature?

Very cool!

Proprietary Unix's died because of Linux. Why spend twice as much for a Sparc Machine when you can get a Dell Running RedHat for a third of the cost? The Mac also probably played a part in that too, you could at the time get a Mac for half the price of a Sparc based machine, and the Mac can run MS Office and other commercial software.

agree with your opinion on bloatware. they don't seem to consider end user experience.

Looks like a return to form after the more cheaply built Sun Blade 2500.

Argueably, the last 'real' Sun boxes are the final ones built on the SBUS architecture. Is there anything after an Ultra-2? Sadly, it has been 18 years since I've run any of my boxes.

@20:10 "the iphone would change computing for the worse... in my opinion" He's not wrong

It certainly is a beauty! And I was raised on IPX's )))

nice i'd love to have one of thoes :)

I used to use these at work doing chip design.

That Oracle logo is painful

I am starting to Sunderstand something now.

FYI, the XVR-2500 isn't even a Sun design. It's a 3DLabs Wildcat Realizm 500 with OpenFirmware. Sun's last bespoke design was the XVR-1000 I think, though the XVR-600/1200 might have been commissioned by Sun even though they used off-the-shelf 3DLabs GPUs.

Does this run Solaris 11?

Solaris 10 will swap itself sick on 2GB of RAM. I found this with a pair of Blade 2000s I used to have - one had dual US-III/900s and 2GB, the other dual US-III/1200 and 16GB. The second one was *much* faster in interactive performance than the 30% increased clock speed would imply. The dual 900 lugged and lagged running Firefox - hell, X in general was slow, except for basic stuff in CDE. The dual 1200 was quite usable. Both were running Solaris 10 update 11 with XVR-1000 graphics cards.

What is the diference between a server, a workstation and a desktop?

hey man, are these old sun boxes worth any money? We got a bunch of them laying around at work.

does this machine require some commands and stuff knoweldge? because ive got none lol but im interested in getting one myself

beautifull beast SPARC machine , Beutifull like the mac G5

The iPhone ruined computing. Thank you for that, I needed a good laugh today.

I remember finding a Sun USB keyboard in a Cash Converters store that had the Solaris keys on the left, but also had "PC Keyboard" indicators, and I believe it was the original keyboard that would've went with one of those.

This was the last Sun SPARC workstation. What was the last Intel-based Sun workstation?

It's suprisingly more quiet than SGI Tezro.

salam from an island near australia and new zealand

How to enter in bios??

yeah you are right it's a beauty... but because intel and amd made huge amount of crappy x86 they had more money and more chance to use newer lithography

What sunk the Unix vendors was Linux obviously, and nVidia graphics and Windows 64 bit. The Windows boxes were cheap and plentiful and very performant and really good at gaming. The Linux variants over time, took over the engineering workstation market. It was sad to see Sun go under and of course SGI. Interestingly, the only Unix variant still around is AIX running as USS on IBM z/OS mainframes. Mac OS is a course still in use also.

I would love to see this machine using modern hardware on this machine, maybe using a GPU like an Intel Arc A380 or an AMD Radeon RX 6400 (because both graphic cards don´t need external power supply connections), and also an SSD Sata. It could be interesting see the performance that can be reached using new hardware like that 😎

Can you watch a youtube video on this computer?

If you want to know how and why the Solaris and hardware engineers left, look up Bryan Cantrill, he's done several talks about it.

I guess these are the most collectible - dvi monitors, usb keyboard, no proprietary stuff to track down and spend top dollar for.

Is that a 2017 copyright date I am seeing at 6:30 ?

14:24 as a Windows XP x64 Edition user, I'm offended.

The hell is that watch you have its both disgusting and beautiful at the same time

I remember when the Sun Ultra Sparc CPU's at 500mhz were destroying 1.5MHZ Intel X86 CPU's.... shame Sun and their platform didn't continue to grow and lead.

Looks great for installing Debian.

Still can see SUN Workstation in Semiconductor fabrication plant

It's really heavy to pick up!

Can you do the entire video again, with a version of Solaris that does not show the ugly "Oracle" logo ? Seriously.. why they died? Easy, inm the top days of workstations (1987-95) PCs were 10x slower, and we had a non-multitasking Windows 3 and later 95. And maximum pixel size was what...640x480? On the mac side there was a large address space, but an obsolete os. Workstations had the address space and os-robustness needed to run large CAD software, develop RDMBS applications, etc. When this particular Sparcstation came out PCs had a real multitasking and robust OS, address space was not limited, they were as fast and costed maybe 10x less. And they could connect to large screen with a huge amount of pixels. No IT manager would buy a workstation anymore. PS: do you run any other channels ? Your voice sound familiar.

I miss java desktop system.

I need that case for building my gaming pc

I’m still using my old SS5, although only as a terminal to control my actual workstations/servers. Powerful as my new Xeon HP stuff is, the keyboard is sssooooooooo much nicer on the Sun. I despise how people write code today, I’m always bollocking people for writing sloppy terse shit code, I don’t give a fuck if there is mountains of cpu cycles and storage. That’s why stuff crashes all the time these days, personally I won’t stand for it 😡😂

Hi folks. I´ve got one Ultra 45 in beautiful shape and no usage for it. Anybody interested?

there is solaris 11.2 available since 2-3 years, you can update the machine to recent os.

Messiest Desktop of the Year Award! (j/k)

They managed to kill this beauty of a hardware.... why and who is the suspect? we need warrants for their arrest.

Anyone who's ever been to a college campus has likely seen at least one Sun UNIX workstation with Solaris at some point. These were everywhere, a relic of the times when nerds were interested in UNIX and tech and not hoarding plastic crap they bought on Amazon.

Just was looking at the T2000 sunfire server it had a 1.2ghz cpu with 8 cores and 32 threads totally overkill for 2005 bet it wasnt very good in real world use though?

This is when u have reached ultra nerd status.

Have my Sun45 here, works fine and i got a PC Emulöator Card. Firefox is evil bloatware. From modern software i expect to not be so ressource hungry like the modern scriptkidz shitty things nowadays. ;)

There is something seriously wrong there. When you consider that machine was intended to run programs like CATIA and run calculations for oil exploration and economic simulations it should not be having any problem at all with a poxy browser.

"...and I get my ass kicked by this UltraSPARC III CPU."

Wow.The desktop environment looks like Win XP.

can your camera shake more? -_-

I liked it very much how you stated the sofware is becoming more and more bloated and resource hungry. What people don't understand that many of those old workstations were and actually still are more than capable of doing modern stuff but there are no progranmers that know how to optimize code and use smart algorithms, pity and sad, we're running into Idiocrasy movie...

Not thrilled by the looks, looks a bit like a cross between a PC and a Mac Pro of the era. Best looking Suns were the beautifully minimalist pizza box sparcstations 1,2,10 and the rare as hell SLC which was Sun's $5000 iMac from 1990

Give it liquid cooling

These are interesting but for a little bit more money nowadays you can get a dual Xeon HP840 running Win or any LInux distro, a better choice unless you want Solaris to play around with. In the 90s I was even able to install Solaris on a Mac Centris. 610.

so jealous .. lol rip Sun Microsystems. SunOS , Solaris, OpenSolaris "It's a UNIX System , I know this.."

Geeks run Oracle's Solaris in an Oracle Virtual Box on a Raspberry pi :-)

Beautiful PCs are nothing but a beautiful door stop. It was a slow system for its time. If they were that great sun microsystems would have bought oracle

Thank God for double speed playback on RU-vid.

Uncool running without nvram

Radeon

hahahaha, dont spend too many time on hipster browsers.... "what can we expect from a cpu...."

Kinda a disappointment of a machine considering- that desktop env is trash. But I'd be interested to know what kind of heavy work was being done on these in their time.

Lol sun get rekted

Is anyone else cringing when they look at the mess in front of the keyboard?