[SunRescue] SUN3 Monitors

[James Lockwood]

On Mon, 15 Nov 1999, User Bernd wrote:

> We still have some SUN3/260 running in our production environment,
> equipped with 19" SUN Monochrome Monitors of type L7601S-Y01 .
> The monitors are at end of life now.

I'm fairly sure you mean L7201S-Y01, manufactured by Motorola.

> Does anyone know if
> - Monitors of this type or equivalent are available somewhere in good shape or
> - those displays can be replaced by a PC Multisync and some kind of
>    adapter ?

These are ECL monochrome monitors that use different signalling levels
than conventional analog monitors.  In addition, they're the (rare!)
high-resolution 1600x1280 Motorola version.  These are prone to breakdowns
much more often than the low-resolution (1152x900) version.

These monitors have not been manufactured in years and are quite rare in
working condition on the used Sun market.  The low resolution versions are
nearly as common as dirt, but the 3/260 can't drive them with the onboard
video.  It's theoretically possible to convert the signals to a format
that a modern analog monitor could handle (which would need to run at
89KHz/67Hz, nontrivial) but there is no off the shelf converter that I
know of to do this.  I built one at one point but it's not a commercially
available product, it was a desperate hack to get my 3/60 running on a
Hitachi 4119.

You probably have two choices here.  If you don't really need a graphic
display then get a serial terminal and hook it to ttya as your console.
This works very well and terminals are very low maintenance.  Your other
choice is to get a VME color framebuffer (such as a CG3 or CG5), this can
connect to a modern color monitor with the aid of an adaptor.

My sympathies go out to you, I was maintaining a dozen machines running a
10-year old Sunview app until early this year.

-James