You actually don't NEED a keyboard and mouse. You
can hook up a dumb
terminal (or computer running a com program) on Serial port A and it'll
default to using that port as console.
Or you can use the machine over the network to an X-terminal. Actually,
most Sun-3s end up as X-terminals...
OSes that'll run on the machine at NetBSD, SunOS,
Linux(?) and
older versions of Solaris(?).
The very first versions of Solaris (a superset of SunOS. Solaris equals
SunOS plus OpenWindows) does support the Sun-3 and Sun-3x architectures.
somewhat alpha and Solaris would be a nightmare
(imagine Win95 on a
386SX-16).
The problem is that Sun-3/50s have only 4 meg internally - not much for a
Solaris machine, especially one that may be running without a local disk.
Some Sun-3/50s have a third party memory board that increases the RAM to
12 megs - with an increase in performance. Still, the things are not fast
- they were built to be low cost network machines, like the later
SPARCstations ELC and SLC.
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net