[rescue] 670MP windfall in the surplus diving frenzy today.....

[Dave McGuire]

On June 20, BSD Bob the old greybeard BSD freak wrote:
> OK, with some trepidation, I lugs meself away a sort of 670MP box,
> today, from the surplus feeding frenzy diving pit.

  Have no trepidation, my friend.  The 4/600 is, in my opinion, the
finest piece of hardware Sun has ever produced.  Run it with pride.

> It appears to have a Ross CYM6002K addin board of some kind (6 hat
> chips on it plus two surface mount chips), and is full of 501-1739
> ram sticks.  No cabling was present.  One drive is left, and a slow
> single-speed cdrom (full height) is present (will this work on my
> older 3/xxx machines?).
> 
> 1.  What speed/rating is this cpu?

  It's probably an SM100...an utter piece of trash.  Sell it on eBay
and pick up an SM41 for a few bucks.  It will perform much, much
better.  An SM100 is an early dual 40MHz cacheless processor.  An SM41
(also at 40MHz) will kick its ass up and down the street.

> 2.  What is the Ross thingie, and is it good for much?

  The Ross thingie is the processor module.

> 3.  What cable is needed to hook back up into the internal box
>     drive cabling system (I am assuming a small HD50 cable of
>     some sort.

  A regular HD50 cable should do the trick...the other end will need
to be an HD50 or a DB50 depending on the version of the box you've got.

> 4.  What SunOS levels will run on it, although I will probably load
>     up NetBSD if possible.

  It's a sun4m machine...I don't recall when support for them was
introduced, but I've run SunOS4.1.4 on lots of them.  They should also
run recent Solaris (up to what release I'm not sure)...but
NetBSD/sparc runs REALLY well on them, and is an absolute pleasure to
use on that hardware.

  Picture this.  Take that 4/600 board out of the '70 box and put it
into a 3-slot (4/110-style) box.  Put two CG6 framebuffers in it,
running to two big 20" tubes.  Pick up an SM61 and slap it on the
board.  Load up NetBSD.  That makes for one really nice workstation!

              -Dave McGuire