[Sunhelp] Newbie Tips

[James Lockwood]

On Fri, 2 Jul 1999, Michael Radtke wrote:

> 	The machine, which is a square pizza box chassis is labeled on the front
> as a Sparc station 1.  The label on the bottom says it is model 147,
> service code 4/60, part number 600-2461-02.  The date is listed as Jan,

The first in the pizzabox SparcStation series, originally coming out in
1989 and listing at $9k at the low end (I still have the promo poster up
on my wall).  It's a 20MHz SPARC sun4c machine, still supported by the
latest Solaris revs, but on the slow side.

> 5th, 1990.  I opened up the box, and found 2 hard drives, a floppy, a
> processor, and a Weitez chip.   The floppy has a number on it:
> 0005180-8908029520 and another number on it 3701207-01.
> 	The HD's don't concern me much at this point (I don't have anything to put
> on them yet!), but the floppy does.  How can I tell if it's a 720k or 1.44
> MB drive?  Also, all the memory slots are empty.  Is there supposed to be

That's a 720k floppy, I believe (the 1.44 were 3701420).

> some memory installed, or is there memory onboard elsewhere?  The MB has
> the number 5011382061137 on it, if that helps. 

There is no memory on the motherboard.  Memory is added in 4 sets of 4
SIMMs (1mb or 4mb), 30-pin, parity, with 100ns or faster access time.  You
can have a maximum of 64mb.

> 	As far as the monitor is concerned, it is an HP, model A0288A.  I realize
> that this may not be the ideal listserv to find out about the monitor, but
> I guess it matters for the video card.

No idea on this one.

> 	So, given the above, I need to find:
> 		1)  A CHEAP graphics card

Expansion is done via sbus slots (the three long black connectors on the
motherboard).  You can find cheap framebuffers these days (especially
the old cg3 series) but none of them are set to drive a sync on green
monitor if that is indeed what you have.

> 		2)  Info on the type of floppy drive, mostly so I know how to install the
> OS, (it will probably be NetBSD)

If it is indeed a 720k floppy, you can use any normal 1.44mb PC floppy
drive (but you will lose autoeject, of course).

> 		3)  What to do about memory

Grab some 1mb SIMMs if you can, they should be either free or very close
to it by this point.  Most PC memory from the 386 and early 486 days will
work.

-James