Comparison of MGR, SunView, OpenWindows and X11R6 (2022)

Summary

Who needs a jack-o-lantern when you've got a bright orange gas plasma display? This is a 1990 Solbourne Computer S3000 all-in-one workstation based around the 33MHz Panasonic MN10501, irreverently code-named the Kick-Ass Processor or KAP. It is slightly faster than, and the S3000 and the related S4000 and later S4000DX/S4100 directly competed with, the original gangsta 1989 Sun SPARCstation and SPARCstation 1+. Solbourne was an early SPARC innovator through majority owner Matsushita, who was a SPARC licensee in competition with Fujitsu, and actually were the first to introduce multiprocessing to the SPARC ecosystem years before Sun themselves did. To do this and maintain compatibility, Solbourne licensed SunOS 4.x from Sun and rebadged it as OS/MP with support for SMP as well as their custom MMU and fixes for various irregularities in KAP, which due to those bugs was effectively limited to uniprocessor implementations. Their larger SMP systems used Fujitsu (ironically), Weitek and Texas Instruments CPUs; I have a Series5 chassis and a whole bunch of KBus cards Al Kossow gave me that I've got to assemble into a working system one of these days. This particular machine is a fairly upgraded unit thanks in large part to Stephen Dowdy, formerly of the Solbourne Shack and the University of Colorado, where he maintained them. In particular, besides tons of OS stuff and documentation, the SBus RAM expander card giving this machine a total of 56MB ECC RAM came from his old S3000, and it also has a SCSI2SD along with a 256K L2 cache CPU module stolen from an S4100. The 1152x900 monochrome display is compatible with the SBus bwtwo. Just like I retain a great fondness for PA-RISC because it was my first job out of college, I have similar affection for Solbournes because one of my first undergraduate Unix accounts was on a department Series6. KAP was an interesting processor with a great name, but its sometimes serious issues more or less directly led to Solbourne's demise as a ...