[rescue] sparc 2 and 10 things

[john]

My CAD installation is naughty and I do fear action by the developer if 
the news that I'm using his 1992 software unlicensed.  I know it's nuts 
but I understand his pov.

If you are trying to revive old sparcstations, be ready to replace the 
battery-ROM which has the hostid.  I did and it's not big deal - good 
advice online.

you will need either a cd drive or a tape drive to load OS.  I suppose 
could be done over network, but I never did it and don't know how. The 
Sun CD/ drives of that era could be Sony based and used a caddy to load 
the c/d.  It is unlikely that any of these still work because of 
defective electrolytic capacitors but the sun box will hold a panasonic 
cd drive and the advice on how to set it up is also available online.  I 
think I needed to set jumpers on the drive to make it work with the sun 
SCSI daisy chain.

Software used to come on qik 1/4 inch cartridge tapes.  These worked 
with a 'rubber' belt which in almost all cases has now decomposed - 
making the tapes useless. I had a case full of these things left over. 
Some of them had good belts but unfortunately software cartridges 
frequently were on off sized tapes so that a belt for a 300 that is 
still good can't be moved to a smaller cartridge.  I was able to move a 
belt from cartridge to cartridge about four times before it too failed. 
but I was able to extract the tape contents. if there is a place to buy 
belts, I'd sure like to know where.  They have to be sized to the length 
of tape in the cartridge.

the 1992 Exabyte 8mm cartridge drive still worked fine.  And all of the 
8mm tapes read without a hiccup.

I bought a couple of disk caddies (the ones that you mount the hd drives 
on that go inside the case) from http://www.memoryxsun.com/ as well a 
two sony cd drives before I discovered that they cannot be any good.  
X-memory is a nice outfit. I didn't try to get my money back and i think 
they really didn't know that these were all likely to be bad.  i had the 
outside case so it was easy to put something else in it.

Back to the SS 10 CPU question.  Given that multi processors may not do 
much more than a single would running 4.1.4, there is still the issue of 
pep. We replaced sun processors with Ross on the SS2's in 1991 IIRC. I 
may be completely confused here but it seemed like one conversion 
doubled performance.

I can buy a number of differenent CPU's from X-memory or maybe Ebay - 
haven't checked.  So question is which would make sense to look at, or 
should i just stick with the base TI which I have now?

john