[rescue] Re: 224 mhz sparc 20?

[James Lockwood]

On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   Yes, Big Mike had two of those for a while.  They were neat.

A 224MHz/1MB HyperSparc would be very neat if you could keep it from
melting down.  That machine could well be the fastest SunOS-4 capable box
in existance.

>   What was it like?

The thickness of the patch wires exceeded the thickness of the boards.
This wasn't like the neat Sun FCOs I saw on many 4/300 boards, this was a
rats nest of wiring, extra sockets, and separatable subboard assemblies.
It was slower than a stock GT for bitblitting, if that's possible to
imagine.  I think more waitstates were introduced for debugging purposes.

I once had a Sun SS2 board that ran at 50MHz CPU/25MHz Sbus.  It was a
true Sun board (as opposed to a "SS2+" clone), and the oscillator was
mounted in a completely stock fashion with no signs of desoldering.  No
barcode.  I've always wondered if it was an escapee.

Does anyone else collect weird odds and ends?  I think I now have roughly
5% of the production run of 501-1454's (SS1 add-on FPU), if the FEH note
that 130 of them were shipped is correct.  Found the first one, thought
"this is cool", dropped it into a box.  The other 6 trickled in after
that.

-James