[SPARCbook] Re: S3000 Hard drive type

[Ian Spray]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2001 19:18:54 +0100
Emanuelsson Paer <Paer.Emanuelsson at kst.siemens.de> wrote:

> Considering I'm the proud (original!) owner of a Sparcbook-1, I
> suppose I qualify as historian.  :-)
> 
> When did Tadpole start using internal SCSI drives?  The SB-1 has IDE
> drives, but of course no internal SCSI at all.
> 
Both the SB-1 and SB-2 had custom boot ROMS, and very different
architectures from the later models.  These early machines were basically
meant to run SunOS at the best price point, and be portable (this was
before my time at Tadpole, so I can't be exact) but they weren't intended
to look like Sun machines from a standard O/S load.

With the SB3 (the original 'unlettered' 50MHz machine) there was a move to
using OpenBoot as the startup system.  This meant that the devices that
were used in the design could still have been custom, but it was
beneficial to try and mimic a Sun machine as it meant that there was less
customisation required before the standard O/S load would run.  The SB3 is
quite similar to the SPARCclassic - it has the same CPU, SBus slots
(although they never break out onto standard connectors), SCSI hard drive
etc.

As the machines progress, this approach is built on, and (ignoring things
like running temperature) these OBP machines will boot a standard Solaris
CD-ROM.


HTH,

-- 
Ian Spray          :  Software Engineer     :  Tadpole-Cycle
iws at tadpole.co.uk  :  +44 (0) 1223 428 224  :  http://www.tadpole.com/