Master_T Posted April 29, 2008 Share Posted April 29, 2008 Hello everybody,I bought an old sun Ultra 5 workstation a couple of days ago; I was wondering about installing NT for SPARC on it (according to Wikipedia, NT4 was released in several version complied for SPARC, ALPHA, MIPS and x86 architectures), but I can't find it anywhere, not even trought my MSDN subscription.Anyone to help me? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nmX.Memnoch Posted April 29, 2008 Share Posted April 29, 2008 SPARC support was never publicly released (as stated in the Wikipedia article). Most NT4 deployments were done on either x86 or DEC Alpha. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cluberti Posted April 29, 2008 Share Posted April 29, 2008 And as good as the DEC was, it was still 32bit on a 64bit processor (boo) . But yes, SPARC was an OEM release, mostly Integraph as the vendor. Also note that even if you do manage to get your hands on a SPARC version of NT4, there won't be any easily available service packs and updates (those were only released for the DEC and x86 - for all other architectures, it was up to the OEM to port and recompile, from what I remember.However, a good debian sparc install for the Ultra5 might be a good choice . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nmX.Memnoch Posted April 29, 2008 Share Posted April 29, 2008 And as good as the DEC was, it was still 32bit on a 64bit processor (boo) .Yeah, but they were still PDQ! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cluberti Posted April 29, 2008 Share Posted April 29, 2008 True. Although considering they couldn't really run anything not inbox, that's not much use . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nmX.Memnoch Posted April 30, 2008 Share Posted April 30, 2008 Couldn't they be used as PDCs/BDCs and file servers? But yeah, their use was limited since the full BackOffice suite wasn't ported (IIRC). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cluberti Posted April 30, 2008 Share Posted April 30, 2008 Yes, and correct . Used them for homebrew apps anyway. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nmX.Memnoch Posted April 30, 2008 Share Posted April 30, 2008 Sometimes I wish DEC had kept Alpha and Microsoft would've continued support... When I was stationed in South Korea there was another gentleman who had a Digital box running NT 3.51. That was absolutely one of the fastest NT 3.51 boxes I'd ever seen...and it was running all of a 486/DX2 66! I don't recall how much RAM it had, but I do remember that it had a SCSI drive subsystem. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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