As far as I know, Solaris 7 was the last OS to support the sun4c architecture (ss2, IPX, IPC, ELC, etc). Solaris 8 will run on sun4m machines (5, 10, 20...most (all?) machines with mbus processors + the sparc5 and a couple others) just fine, but you'd better have a) a lot of ram, or b) no graphics or it will be pretty slow on all but the newest sun4m's. If someone is interested in getting a media copy of Solaris 7 for an old sun4c machine (and is feeling pretty brave, as you'd better have a lot of ram...at LEAST 32MB for it to run even halfway reasonably without graphics, more if you want to run the X server without the machine thrashing to death), let me know... I've actually run an ss2 with 64M ram as a NAT firewall with solaris 7 and it actually worked pretty damn well :) George Lewis said: - Dan Wright (dtwright(a)uiuc.edu) (http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright) -] ------------------------------ [-] -------------------------------- [- ``Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honeydew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise.'' Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

NetBSD/sparc and NetBSD/sparc64 are even better. Peace... Sridhar On Fri, 3 Aug 2001, wanderer wrote:

Anybody see the Cray YMP-EL on ebay today? http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1261228599 The seller claims that it was used at Apple to design the Mac... The folklore goes that Woz walked into Cray's building and just asked to buy a Cray. Much later Seymour was heard to comment that he thought it was funny Apple used a Cray to design a Mac, since he himself used a Mac to design the next generation Crays... In the end, Apple didn't have a real use for the Cray, other than a nice ornament, though some say it may have been bought and used to simulate and design production tooling for some Apple products... Still, if it is ~that~ - machine - it would be quite a piece of history to own... There was a T-shirt that sold on ebay recently that says: "My other computer is a Cray"..;) Strangely enough, Apple did have some deal with Cray to offer Macs as front ends to Crays... Heinz

Bill Bradford wrote: I stand humbly corrected... s/Woz/Jobs/ What a shame to make the YMP VME Force IOP pretend to be a lowly Mac or be relegated to NFS service... Heinz {snip} Originally purchased to help out on a computer on a chip project, the machines eventually earned their keep running MOLDFLOW an injection plastic modelling program ( producing some results in the form of Quicktime movies) and later as a file server. Other applications were CFD codes for disk drive design improvement and one source reports ".. they sometimes ran the first XMP as a single user MacOS emulator ... They had a frame buffer and a mouse hooked up to the IOP." T3d cube of cubes logo animated by changing the size of the surrounding balls. What is less known however is that the small active display panel on the T3d was an Apple powerbook. The powerbook ran a Macromedia presentation showing the T3d cube of cubes logo with an orbiting growing/shrinking sphere. The display at one site was changed to alternate with a presentation plaque display. It was rumoured that one site engineer ordered a collection of spare bits that, over time, comprised a complete new powerbook. The recent (Sept 1999) launch on the www.Apple.com web site of the G4 Macintosh computers displayed a YMP-8D computer on the processor page. Whilst there was no direct reference to that particular machine the was a requote of the Seymour quote about "using an Apple to simulate the Cray-3" in a sidebar. ( prob this should be Cray-2 ED). The G4 is being touted as a "Supercomputer for the desktop" and with the performance figures of a Gigaflop/s (1 CPU) it is certainly up to at least 1992 supercomputer cpu speed. The YMP pictured on the site would have had 0.333 Gflop/s per cpu but was sold as sustaining 1 Gflop/s, for the whole machine, on real life applications. It remains to be seen if the G4 can match the memory size, memory bandwidth and IO capacity of this 8 year old Cray. Supercomputers these days do a Teraflop/s. There is however no doubt that it will be cheaper to buy.

I'm still curious if this machine is the Apple one ... { What was the Cray connection with Apple ? Cray and Apple, seemly at opposite ends of the computer spectrum, do have some subtle links. It was known that Seymour Cray used an Apple desktop some of the time when designing the Cray-2. It is also known that Apple had a sequence of Cray machines starting in March 1986 with an XMP/28 followed by another XMP in Feb 1991. A YMP-2E arrived later in 1991 and finally an EL Steve Jobs after he just walked into the Cray facility in Mendota Hights. } So Jobs could have still bought the first machine, the XMP, the other machines arriving later and the EL making the pilgrimage to MIT (the ebay seller has an MIT email address..) Regards, Heinz "Francis. Javier Mesa" <javi(a)cse.ucsc.edu> wrote:

It's not that it makes a difference but normally one doesn't find a whole Cray for sale on eBay and now suddenly there are two, one in Boston and one in Germany, and both were claimed to have come Jeff -- Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File http://www.cchaven.com http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757

I posted the URL for the Boston machine and then the next day Heinz Wolter posted the URL for the German Cray. In his post, he stated that the seller was claiming it came from Apple. That is where I took that information from, as I can't read German. Jeff -- Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File http://www.cchaven.com http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757

On Fri, Aug 03, 2001 at 03:11:30PM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote: http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/park/abm64/CrayWWWStuff/Cfaqp3.html#TOC1 There it is. The active display panel on a T3d was a powerbook. Bill -- Bill Bradford mrbill(a)mrbill.net Austin, TX