The history of SPARC, its not just a Sun thing

SPARC, the cpu architecture originally created by Sun for its workstations. However soon more than just Sun where involved in developing SPARC processors.

00:00 - Introduction
00:24 - Brief word from our sponsor
00:55 - Sun
02:15 - RISCY tangent
06:33 - RISC CISC whats the difference
10:00 - Register Windows
12:00 - SPARC is released
16:57 - ROSS Technologies & Hypersparc
22:10 - The time are changing
25:59 - Ultra Sparc going 64 bit
31:36 - Sparc 9 faster instructions
38:18 - Open Sparc
41:00 - Thanks

[mike]

I worked at Sun for 14 years then was assimilated by Oracle for 7 more years. Still worked on Sun stuff even though it was now Oracle. Then Oracle laid everyone off. So I still have fond memories of Sun. Nothing good to say about Oracle.

[mnsitelecom]

Back in the day I had a SparcStation 10, later with 4 Ross HyperSPARC CPUs and 128 Meg of RAM. We were running a manufacturing application developed by a company in Toronto by the name of Cherniak Software. They had ported it to the SparcStation at our behest from a Harris HCX-7/9 platform (of CCI Tahoe CPU / 4.3 BSD Tahoe fame). When they ported it originally to the Harris (they were at the time an Olivetti shop but we wanted Harris, it was the fastest thing they had ever run their code on. When they later ported it to the Sparc architecture, they were absolutely speechless. When we upgraded to HyperSPARC, they just stopped trying to come up with adjectives to describe how fast it was. Your video brings back memories. The very brilliant software engineer (I always joked that he considered a compiler merely a convenient way to generate object code - not a necessary one) who designed the database tools we used passed away last year, and the founder of the company the year before. I still use the tools they developed in another application today.

[bionicgeekgrrl]

Growing up sun, and therefore sparc were very much everywhere in our house as my father worked as an engineer (having previously worked at Burroughs), and whilst I never really used sparc outside of tinkering myself, there was always a few sparc systems running, which as an inquisitive kid obsessed with computers was great. Mostly it was what was deemed to be broken when removed from one of the major London banks when doing repair, upgrade or replacement. The rules then were as long as it was never sold or passed on it was fine if you could fix it. Generally my father was rather good at fixing most things so there was a enterprise server running in the garage for years, never needed any extra heating in there! Plus various types of sparcstation around the house.

My father moved into management at sun later on was made redundant by oracle 2 years ahead of retirement, but apparently he negotiated the package to cover his pension so he didn't lose out.

This was a great video and i look forward to the sun video at some future date.

[foobar]

That SS10 you have is actually an SS10SX, an incredibly rare machine, much rarer than the Hypersparcs you have in it. I'd very much appreciate if you could take some high res pics of the motherboard and post them online because there are almost no good pics of that machine.

[davidgari]

Breathtaking content.
I provided tech support for Autodesk AutoCAD on IBM AIX, HP-UX, SGI Irix, DEC Vax and Alpha, and various Sun workstations back in the day (mid-1990s).
All of these machines were a few yards/meters within my reach.
Good times.

[lawrencedoliveiro]

27:51 Worth noting that, while Alpha was 64-bit-native from the beginning, it did have some 32-bit compatibility in the form of “TASO” mode (“Truncated Address-Space Option”). This used only 32-bit addresses, and was used to run Windows NT, which if you remember, in spite of its much-vaunted portability across different processor architectures, was still only 32-bit at the time.

[lawrencedoliveiro]

13:35 NeWS, the “Networked (Extensible?) Windowing System”. This was based on PostScript, before there was such a thing as Display PostScript. So Sun added its own extensions for on-screen drawing and interaction handling. And then abandoned it all when X11 came along.

Some people really liked the idea of being able to load small pieces of autonomous code into the display server that could handle low-level user interactions without bothering the main processes running on the CPU. Done right, this could certainly make the system feel more responsive, particularly over slow networks or remote links. The problem (as with the whole issue of multithreading that became popular in the 1990s) was that synchronizing all these independent threads of control was very hard to get right, and was extremely prone to hard-to-reproduce timing-related bugs.

“Knock-knock.”
“Race condition.”
“Who’s there?”

[johnclemens]

Also, the Patterson and Hennessy Computer Organization and Design textbook is still possibly the single best textbook (in terms of going from zero to nearly an expert) on any topic I've ever read. Hugely influential.

[johnhorner]

Thank you for the very informative video. I worked at Ross Technology from 1989 to 1996 and lived through a piece of what you covered. While Cypress Semiconductor was the original owner of Ross and initial primary silicon supplier, Cypress sold its interest to Fujitsu during a time when Cypress' overall business was struggling (thanks in part to a difficult technology transition in Cypress' wafer fabs). I lost a lot of sleep in those years :). When Ross stumbled at the Sparc 8 to Sparc 9 transition Fujitsu bought the remaining IP. Fujitsu had also been the primary backer of Solbourne computers and Amdahl. I wonder what the world of computers would look like if Fujitsu had acquired Sun instead of Oracle doing so.

[rallokkcaz]

Love this channel so much! Always hits my retro computer fix without skimping on the lore and technical aspects. While most channels just share software clips and nostalgia, this channel is a beacon in the dark!

[DavidCookeZ]

I've good memories of SPARC architecture from before I started working for Sun. I was tasked with designing the hardware for an VMEbus FDDI card. Needless to say we had every processor vendor imaginable pitching up to offer their latest and greatest, all massively power hungry, stupidly expensive, and threatened to make the whole board a non-starter just based on cost. The Fujitsu rocked up with their SPARClite, low power (comparatively) and less than a twentieth of the price (just 25 pounds in small volumes) - it was intended to go into laser printers for the rendering engine. Some of money and space we saved by using that CPU was traded for giving it some dedicated fast SRAM to work in and FPGAs to do DMA and run the networking checksums. And that little 25Mhz CPU with its assist could work its way through socket buffers and saturate the backplane and the network. We had a bake-off against Cray, and won.

[nicomputerservices]

Fantastic video, I have a real soft spot for SPARC since designing a hobbyist system on a FPGA based around the Leon3 SPARC soft CPU and designed a video processor and other peripherals for it. I had it running Doom about a decade ago. It was amazing to have such a relatively powerful system to play with. It was really amazing of Sun to release the details for the SPARC architecture as open source. It is an interesting architecture to learn about with the register windows and things like that and the Leon3 project is very cool, would recommend to anyone looking to learn about designing their own FPGA system on a chip.

[ctid]

The most enjoyable video I've watched in ages. Worked with Sun from 1995 to 2010 and still have a soft spot for them. It's still Sun ZFS to me also (another of their fantastic innovations), I just can't call it Oracle to this day! Thanks for the video.

[OmegaSparky]

Also @12:43 - Motorola didn't start down the PowerPC path initially. They created the 88k architecture. The 88k was a bit of an alien architecture because it was a Harvard Architecture (code and data were in separate address spaces). Fun fact: the PowerPC bus architecture is based on the MC88110 bus architecture.

[BrandonNedwek]

Thanks for this video! I love old Unix machines and have both SPARC and UltraSPARC in my collection so this history was very interesting to me. Looking forward to that Sun history video whenever you get around to it!

[TechRyze]

Excellent content.

I love how you've been able to join the dots in my memory of computing history, in less than an hour of entertaining and informative content.

You're a natural - plus have put a lot of effort in. I wish you all the best. I can imagine that once you're spotted by academia, these videos will be playing in colleges and universities all over the planet.

Great content to introduce these technical details without baffling the audience through lack of context.

Bravo 👏👏👏

[MostlyPennyCat]

When I went to Brunel University in September of 1997 to study Computer Science we had access to two types of computer.
1) 486s running Windows 3.1 for Workgroups
2) Sun SPARCs and UltraSPARCs

If you were stuck on a Sparc, we would ssh or rsh into an UltraSPARC and use it to do our compiling as it was much faster. We would even attach an X Server to it for a faster desktop.

[KirbyZhang]

I used Sparcs in college and grad school, up to a 150mhz UltraSparc 128MB of ram in 1997. Everyone thought RISC and Sun were the leading edge of computing. We had no idea what was happening in x86 world or by what means they would dominate in performance (not just cost/performance, pure performance) in just a few short years. 😅

[rcjmack]

I have two SPARCclassic, SPARCStation IPX, and a Enterprise 450. I had a lot of fun when I got them and they helped out in my career as a System Administrator (HPUX, Sun Solaris, Linux). Thanks for the video, brings back great memories.

[combusean]

LOVE SPARC! I had a sparcstation 5 for $200 when they were just 8 years old, currently spending a lot more than that to restore an SS20.