[SunRescue] 3/60 toy today.... now what to run on it?????

[Peter Koch]

Hi Bob!

>...a fine and complete 3/60 pizzabox thingie.

The Sun 3/60 is IMHO the best design of the Sun3 series.
And it was the best selling Sun ever in these days.
Thus it is not a rare machine.

>...what might folks suggest to run on such
>a fine ancient old dinosaur? 

Why not run SunOS 4.1.1 on it? I do and i enjoy it very much.
Or run NetBSD on it. Works like a charm.

>What are the usual ram configs for a 3/60?

The more the better. The 3/60 can hold 24 standard 1 MB SIMMS
with parity. That is a HUGE amout of memory for such a slow
machine, but either SunOS or NetBSD will gladly make use if it.

>What would be a usable os to run on it, if it only has 4M ram?

Nothing, seriously. I have some 3/50 which have 4 MB soldered
onto the mainboard and these are pretty useless, cause they
start paging and swapping as soon as you start a gcc or X11.

Memory is dirt cheap for the 3/60. If you were located in 
europe, i'd send you 24 MB. And it's normal 30 pin SIMM
which can be found in many PeeCees. You only need such SIMMs
with parity (e.g. 9 or 3 chip). Mac SIMMs won't work.

>I have SunOS 3.5, 4.1.1U1...

If you want to go with 4 MB, try 3.5.

>Anyting strange in getting a 3/60 up?

No. pretty cool thing and almost painless. Software installation
is exactly the same as on the 3/160 or 3/260, but the hardware
isn't that complicated.

The only thing you should know are the jumpers near the battery.
There are six jumpers (marked 4,8,12,16,20,24) which determine
the amount of RAM, one switches between AUI and BNC (called EXTUR)
and one switches resolution from 1152x900 to 1600x1280 (HIRES).
That's it!

>Where would one find any on-line docs...

Sun3/3x-Archive, Peters Sun3 Zoo, ...

>Will it run a 150mb tape, or only a 60mb tape?

It will run a 60 MB tape drive. Get the newest PROM images from
the sun3arc and then it will do with 150 MB streamer too.

Tschuess

Peter