A few weeks back I managed to pick up an incredibly rare laptop in immaculate condition for $50 on Kijiji: a Tadpole Technologies SPARCbook 3000ST from 1997 (it also came with two other working Pentium laptops from the 1990s).
So, what makes this the coolest laptop of the 1990s?
I used to long for a Tadpole SPARC laptop about 15 years ago, when they came with dual processor models. Amazing technology.
Cool Article I remember those SparcBooks so cool. Been a longtime fan of OSNews keep up the great work.
Very cool article. I love late 19080s and 1990s tech…. especially tech from the 1990s. It’s very refreshing to see a “regular joe / jane” like ourselves be able to afford a SPARC Book. I’d love to see more SPARC articles, as well as some articles (like this one) for NeXT machines, IRIX machines, and other 1990’s early 2000s tech.
Thank You Very Much,
— Jedd
The Sparcbook 3GX is what I have, I have 64MB in it right now but there is supposed to be a way of upgrading it to 128MB… but that required some sort of factory modification?
It’s also worth mentioning that the TurboSparc is not the fastest 32bit Sparc from the era…. That would be the HyperSparc which went up to 200Mhz and was faster per clock then the TurboSparc which was basically a faster/better revision of the MicroSparc.
A TurboSparc falls behind even a 85Mhz SuperSparc-II in some cases. Granted so do some of the lower clocked HyperSparcs depending on workload.
The fastest HyperSparcs are the 200Mhz and 142Mhz models, with 166 and 180Mhz models in between (the 142Mhz has a 1MB cache and the faster ones only have smaller caches)… so their performance depends on workload.
See here for benchmarks:
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~hans/spec_table9907.html