sun2 and early sun3 isn’t X10 or X11 era at all.

I saw in the early 90s the move from sun3 to sun4 and saw a bit of the difference – X11 (X10 ?) is slugish on a sun 3/60 (which is far faster than a sun2)

Cool. I remember working with entire cabinets of full-height SCSI drives in a RAID (or was that JBOD?) One of the cabinets had about 20 GB and the other 40 GB.

> When you see $44000 the first thing you should look for is what the competition was selling for.

I think the competition was DEC VAX-11. Admittedly a Sun-2 was slower than a VAX-11.

On USENET in net.unix-wizards
From: Russel Sandberg
Date: Jul 21, 1983
Subject: Re: mixing 256k & 1M memory boards – (nf)

We just got our sun up running Berkeley 4.1c with a
Fujitsu 80 Mbyte disk. Here are the benchmark results:
cc hello.c on SUN
10r 1.1u 2.2s 32%

We also ran the benchmark on some of our vaxes. Here are those
numbers:

VAX/780 rp07 disk, dual memory controllers, 4.1bsd
4r 0.4u 1.4s 45%

VAX/750 Fujitsu 160, SI 9900 controller, 4.1bsd
6r 1.0u 1.8s 46%

VAX/750 Eagle, SI 9900 controller, 4.1c
6r 1.0u 2.4s 57%

VAX/730 Fujitsu 160, SI 6600, 4.1c
12r 2.2u 6.2s 66%

Below is another benchmark that we run on virtual memory systems.
We tried it out on the National 16032 system at USENIX and it
crashed! Here are some numbers from our machines: (only real
time is given)

780 (4.1bsd): 0:20
750 (4.1bsd): 0:28
750 (4.1c): 0:30
730 (4.1c): 1:02
SUN (4.1c): 8:56 (slow!)
Masscomp: 12:56 note: ran out of memory at 70 (not virtual memory)

If people would run this test (time vmbench) on their own systems
and mail me the results I will post them to the net.

*****************************************************************
vmbench.c
*****************************************************************
#include

main()
{
int i, pid;
char *a, *malloc();

pid = getpid();
if (fork()) {
/* parent waits for last child signal (for time) */
pause();
}
for (i=0; i<100; i++) {
a = malloc(10000);
if (i%10 == 0) printf("%d: a=%x\n", i, a);
if (fork()) exit(0);
}
kill(pid, SIGINT);
}

https://sourceforge.net/projects/bsd42/files/4BSD%20under%20Windows/v0.4/sun2.zip/download

This GitHub repo can also be used:
https://github.com/lisper/emulator-sun-2.git

professionally I’ve spent hundreds of thousands on single machines in the mid 90’s. An array of over 300 4GB scsi2 disks is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination, nor is high end systems.

Compaq quad pentium pro servers with hundreds of megabytes to gigabytes of ram back in the 90’s were substantially more expensive than their desktop peers, despite having the same CPU’s and OSs.

It is foolish to use inflation calculators on computer prices.

1) Documentation for inflation calculators states that they work best, possible work at all, with low cost items.

2) Computer prices are set to target a particular range consumers.

3) Computer prices are based on the price of comparable equipment.

When you see $44000 the first thing you should look for is what the competition was selling for.

Go look at the 1990 prices of high-end PeeCees and compare them to high end today and they are not far apart.

No one is going to spend $99,532.18 on a Sun 2 so that amount is just a faerie tale.

Tenox has now uploaded them here: http://tenox.pdp-11.ru/sunos_solaris/sparc/sources/

Yeah I was pretty surprised myself! I would have expected to have heard about this on TUHS or any of the other old geezer Unix things out there.

Compared to TME it’s straight forward. Lol

Why am I only finding out about this now? This is awesome.

it is in “01 02 03 etc” files in the archives…

Oh good! I’ve found, for me at least, TME to be completely impossible to compile. I have plenty of SPARC systems, but I’ve yet to find any m68k Sun systems.