Sun Ultra Enterprise 3000

[DoogieLabs Vintage Computer Collection]

I picked up an Enterprise 3000 that had been sitting at the recycle for a few months. Every time I saw it I passed it up because I couldn’t spend a great deal of money on something that’s well, useless. However, this very last time it was made available to me for what basically amounts to scrap value so I finally accepted the offer. I have restored the system to fully working condition, and took video of it along the way.

Full system specs can be found here: http://sunstuff.org/hardware/systems/sun4/sun4u/ULTRAEnterprise3000/

Full Manual for this system can be found by clicking on this link.

Here is a video I made of a full system tour, I hope you enjoy 🙂

I haven’t really used it for anything other than a nice looking end table. I would like to experiment with BSD more, but I use the V120’s for that since they use substantially less energy and are still SPARC Powered. My end goal for this particular machine I think will be for long term storage (although the v880 does that too), or a backup web server for when the main V880 is down for maintenance, etc. It may end up with Solaris 9 or 10 on it eventually, but I guess we’ll just see how it goes. I am actually surprised by the speed that the OS boots and is usable. Yeah, maybe not in the GUI but the CGSIX frame buffer is not known for fast screen drawing abilities.

I will have to test compile something and see how fast it is compared to other machines, you know what I should also run UnixBench and compare scores. Expect to see that coming soon.

Here are some hi-res photos taken of the server when I first got it: