[geeks] valuation on a sparc 2 / ss10?

[Peter L. Wargo]

On Saturday, January 12, 2002, at 11:40 , Geoff Reed wrote:

> just bought a SS10 ~ 3 mos ago for $15 bux, good mainboard, PS and 
> floppy but damamged case... got a new case for it for $2.50.....   
> 'course with 4 Ultra 1's that i've repaired over the last ~ year, i'm 
> not sure why i'm bothering with my sparc 5's, 10's and 20's anymore, 
> they're all uniproc machines :(

Ahh, but one with 2 procs is a nice system.  I find a 256M/Dual 75 SS20 
to *still* be useful, after all these years.  The SS20 was an *amazing* 
system, easily one of the top 5 systems Sun made.

IMO, those would be (in no order):

Sun-2/120 (First "really useful" deskside Sun)
Sun-3/60 (Kicked butt as a technical workstation - color, 24M of RAM)
SPARCstation 2 (The SS1 made us drool, but the SS2 was truly ass-kicking)
SS 1000 (Proved that MP was actually useful, and is still a good box 
with an SSA)
Ultra-2 (Last, best desktop sbus system - and a great server as well.)

(You will notice the lack of the E10K, which we all know is one of my 
favorites.  It's really not a "Sun" system, in that a goodly portion of 
it was really designed by Cray, and can be traced back through FP 
Systems to Celerity.  It was a good purchase, however...)

There are a couple of other notables:
SPARCstation 1 (12.5 MIPS in a desktop?  Wow!)
SS10 (First MP desktop)
E450 (Workhorse, plain and simple)
386i (What NOT to do!)
F15K (Scales to over 100 CPU's)

-Pete