This is a 1990 Solbourne Computer S3000 all-in-one workstation based around the 33MHz Panasonic MN10501, irreverently code-named the Kick-Ass Processor or KAP. It is slightly faster than, and the S3000 and the related S4000 and later S4000DX/S4100 directly competed with, the original gangsta 1989 Sun SPARCstation and SPARCstation 1+. Solbourne was an early SPARC innovator through majority owner Matsushita, who was a SPARC licensee in competition with Fujitsu, and actually were the first to introduce multiprocessing to the SPARC ecosystem years before Sun themselves did. To do this and maintain compatibility, Solbourne licensed SunOS 4.x from Sun and rebadged it as OS/MP with support for SMP as well as their custom MMU and fixes for various irregularities in KAP, which due to those bugs was effectively limited to uniprocessor implementations. Their larger SMP systems used Fujitsu (ironically), Weitek and Texas Instruments CPUs; I have a Series5 chassis and a whole bunch of KBus cards Al Kossow gave me that I’ve got to assemble into a working system one of these days.
[…]And it turns out that particular computing environment was really the intersection point for a lot of early GUI efforts, which were built and run on Sun workstations and thus will also run on the Solbourne. With some thought, deft juggling of PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH and a little bit of shell scripting, it’s possible to create a single system that can run a whole bunch of them. That’s exactly what reykjavik, this S3000, will be doing.
This is by far the coolest thing I’ve read and learned about in a long, long time. This is an amazing source of information and collection of screenshots and explanations.
It emerges that someone is trying to get MGR working on modern OpenBSD. Demo here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYhs9E2W5MI
Tried to post a link to https://github.com/hyc/mgr/commits/master is Howard Chu’s (openLDAP chief architect) working copy of MGR. It’s 0.69 + some Linux patches. I built it a few years ago on a then recent distro (gentoo)
Youtube eats the link (and whole comment though) It was buildable on Linux of 2015 so probably recent Linux also… it includes an X11 client for MGR.
Should be possible to even port it to wayland … its not crazy complex.
Solaris 7 came with 3 – OpenLook, CDE, and Gnome – out of the box already, so what’s another to add to the mix?
Plan9’s 8 1/2 and Rio probably have Sparcstation ports (8 1/2 definitely ran on Sparc but was originally developed for the Gnot terminal with Motorola 68020 CPU). not sure if the code or binaries for any of that are still out there… probably.
I’d say 4, since TWM + Athena widgets were also a part of the base SunOS/Solaris
I know the post is about Sparc, but I can’t stop looking at the BeBox 😀