🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2008-06-29, terryc <newssixspam-spam@woa.com.au> wrote:

	[ ... ]

> My 2c is that if you are going to go out and spend $$$ to buy hardware,
> then buy X86 system hardware rather than sun stuff. Especially if you have
> some hardware skills and can buy  yumcha x86 stuff. The parts will always
> be reuseable in other systems.

	Tell that to my collection of ISA cards which won't work in the
PCI slots of newer Intel boxen.  And what is the meaning of "yumcha"?
I've never encountered it before.  And for that matter -- what about the
ST-506 interface disks from the old PCs?  You have to find a controller
which will fit in a PCI slot and talk to the disk on anything made since
the IDE interface came into common use.  And good luck fining one of
*those* with a PCI connector. :-)

> I've just brought home a courier van full of old sun hardware and I can
> bet you, that apart from scsi stuff (hard disk, cdrom), that bugger all
> will be interchangeable. <damm, just realised there wasn't a keyboard or
> mouse in the whole van of stuff. bugger, yep the sun keyboard and mouse
> are special and there are different models.>

	Hmm ... Sun-2/120 -- Keyboard and mouse separately connect to
back of system with RJ-11 connectors.

	Sun-3 machines up through some UltraSPARC systems (including the
Ultra-5, Ultra-10 and Ultra-60, but not including the Sun Blade 1000 and
2000) use Sun keyboards with 5-pin mini DIN connectors, and the mouse
plugs into the keyboard and is routed to its own serial interface inside
the box.  Yes, there are different models of keyboards, but most
keyboards will work with most systems, and the latest DIN-connector ones
will work with all of the older systems with no problems.  Going with an
older keyboard (several versions older) and a newer system you will find
that some keys are missing, such as the one for cycling power, or the
ones for adjusting monitor contrast and brightness and sound volume).
All in all, you can use almost any of these keyboards with any system
with a mini-DIN connector as a user's keyboard with no problems.

	The most recent ones (e.g. the Sun Blade machines and some
others) use USB keyboards.  You can use Windows keyboards or Mac
keyboards with just some key labeling wrong so you need to look up what
does what.  For that matter, I am using a Sun USB (unix style, with the
control key to the left of 'A') on a Mac Mini, and the Mac is quite
happy with it -- and so am I, since I'm not stuck with having to use a
keyboard with "CAPS-LOCK" to the left of the 'A' key. :-)

	So -- unless you have something *really* old (e.g. Sun-2), or
something *really* new in your truckload of Sun stuff, any Sun keyboard
you can find should work for most things.  You can even use the ones
with CAPS-LOCK to the left of 'A' if you so prefer. :-)

	Yes -- my Sbus cards won't work in the newer PCI Sun systems, but
my ISA cards won't work in newer PCI bus Intel systems either.

	And if you want a really serious keyboard problem, try getting
one of the earlier Wyse PC-XT clones to work with *anything* other than
a Wyse keyboard -- something like a big fat 12-pin connector, with
parallel data transfer instead of serial.

	Or -- try the Solbourne systems -- Sparc desktop machines
(faster versions of the SS-2), but with a keybord using the same
connector as the Suns, but a different pinout.  Plug either keyboard
into the other machine and you blow a fuse (which was replaceable back
in those days -- little bi-pin fuses in sockets on the system boards.

	Try getting an PC-XT power supply to work in a later Intel
system.  Good Luck!

	So -- cover the same period of time (since I started playing
with PCs and Sun boxen) and you'll find lots of hardware
incompatibility in *both* lines.

	Enjoy,
		DoN.

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