classic

Sun SPARCclassic (4/15)

Another in the lunchbox series of compact workstations from Sun, this machine is a bit of an improvement upon the previous IPC and IPX workstations. The form factor is basically the same, but internally it’s built a little better; instead of the ports being part of the mainboard, this design puts the rear ports onto a PCB that is fixed on the case and the mainboard plugs into a large edge connector. The board also has better SIMM slots which include ejection clips, a huge improvement over the previous ones that you basically had to pry the SIMMs out of.

This machine also has an on-board 10BASE-T transciever, though it doesn’t seem to be fully compatible with modern gigabit switches. I believe it only works in half-duplex mode. I bought an old 10BASE-T hub and it works without a hitch on that.

While refurbishing the machine I found a loose SMT capacitor floating around in the bottom of the case - after looking the board over thoroughly I found where it belonged and re-soldered it.

Hardware

• 50MHz TI TMS390S10 microSPARC (SPARC V8)
• 48MB 72-pin parity RAM
• On-board cg3 framebuffer
• Sun GX (cg6) framebuffer SBus card
• Seagate Hawk 2XL 2.0GB SCSI disk
• OpenBoot PROM v2.12
• Sony 1.44MB floppy drive