Temple Univ. haul

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Sat Oct 4 21:44:28 1997

> You actually don't NEED a keyboard and mouse. You can hook up a dumb
> terminal (or computer running a com program) on Serial port A and it'll
> default to using that port as console.

Or you can use the machine over the network to an X-terminal. Actually,
most Sun-3s end up as X-terminals...

> OSes that'll run on the machine at NetBSD, SunOS, Linux(?) and
> older versions of Solaris(?).

The very first versions of Solaris (a superset of SunOS. Solaris equals
SunOS plus OpenWindows) does support the Sun-3 and Sun-3x architectures.

> somewhat alpha and Solaris would be a nightmare (imagine Win95 on a
> 386SX-16).

The problem is that Sun-3/50s have only 4 meg internally - not much for a
Solaris machine, especially one that may be running without a local disk.
Some Sun-3/50s have a third party memory board that increases the RAM to
12 megs - with an increase in performance. Still, the things are not fast
- they were built to be low cost network machines, like the later
SPARCstations ELC and SLC.

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Sat Oct 04 1997 - 21:44:28 BST