Saturday, February 05, 2005

EBay'ed A SPARCstation

I have been trying for a while, and yesterday I succeeded winning an eBay auction for my own Sun Microsystems SPARCstation 5 (for EUR 25.50, in case you wondered).



OK, there is no Sun monitor included, and it's probably not in the same condition as on the image above.

Having my private Sun at home would have been unthinkable some years ago. The first time I sat in front of the purple box was back in 1992 at university. For me, this kind of computing power - standing on my desk - had been unheard of before. I don't remember the exact specs, but I think it was a SPARCStation 2 running SunOS 4 (before it became Solaris), and what I also know is that we used Patrick Naughton's famous screensaver. The hard-disk's capacity was about 400MB, five times more than the one of my private Atari TT workstation back then.

Later - during my first employment - I actually did some Java training at Sun in 1997, using a SPARCstation similar to the one I purchased now. And our middleware was running on a Sun Ultra Enterprise Dualprocessor system, but I hardly got to see it - we still had our Windows machines and connected to the development and testing machines using Hummingbird's eXceed X11 for Windows.