Sun 3/80

I have the main board (and frame buffer) from a Sun 3/80. They have been in a box for years (20 years or more?). I decided for whatever reason to pull them out and spend some time with them.

I can't say exactly if I am doing this project for "nostalgia" (whatever that is) or just why. It is one of those projects I was always saying I was going to tackle one day and the day came.

I powered up the board. You can read about that. One capacitor on the board exploded, but after I removed the remains it has run just fine.

I read out the bootrom and that has turned into the biggest project. I have always enjoyed disassembling and analyzing bootroms and here I am doing it again.

I may not do more than that. I might repair the NVRAM chip and see if I can get this thing to network boot. I don't think I have any Sun install media anywhere and don't really care about that. What I might do is get it to boot and run some "bare metal" hello world type thing and then pack it all back in the box. You can read some of my thoughts about all this in my "compare" essay. Time is precious. Fun as extensive fooling around with the Sun 3/80 may be, there may be things that are even more fun and more worthwhile.