SPARCstation 20 emulator running on Linux

Of course, you are right, if it sounds dodgy, then it often is.
The ebay vendors (uk) were just selling unused media kits, which is
I think legal. I'm quite happy to buy a copy of the media kit for
what is an obsolete os, but not until I have evaluated the sunscreen
firewall app, the object of the exercise. This used to be a separate
and expensive product, with a lite version shipped free with Solaris
8, but sun gave the whole thing away with solaris 9.

Sometimes we are in a hurry, etc . What to do about orphaned os's
and applications, where there is no longer a mechanism for licensing
or getting media kits from the original vendor ?. Similar question in
one of the dec newsgroups recently about running rt11 or rsx on old
pdp11 hardware. Dec sold the os's to a third party years ago and they
subsequently closed down, so how to stay within the law ?...

Regards,

Chris

 

Hmmm, it can perhaps be done. I've used PDP-10s since the 1960s even
before I joined Tymshare in 1967, and DECsystem-20s until the mid
1990s (last one being a 2020 after many 2060s).

A longtime acquaintance, Mark Crispin, has a "cloned" TOPS-20 system
running:

<http://www.dutchtronix.com/DEC-TOPS-20.htm>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Crispin>

Heh, Mark had two DEC-2020 in his home in Mountain View CA last time
I visited him; he's since moved away from Silicon Valley:

<http://panda.com/mrc/>

I've written 1000s of programs (mostly in assembly language for that
platform, later using C with a compiler from SRI) and it'd be interesting
to see if they'd function in the TOPS-20 emulator. Point being: Mark and
friends seem to have not encountered any legal encumbrances with their
endeavor. I don't know if the same would be true with what we're discussing
in this thread regarding Solaris 9 -- I am not a lawyer.

 

[ ... ]

Note that Solaris 10 comes with "ipf", which is also a firewall
building product.

And, as others have said -- pre Oracle, Sun allowed free
downloads of Solaris 10 for evaluation purposes, with a question on how
many systems you wanted to use it on, and no time restrictions. And, at
times, they would send you for free a set of three DVDs and one CD. Two
of the DVDs were Solaris 10 for UltraSPARC and for x86 platforms, a
third was the compiler suite and IDE (for both platforms), and the
CD-ROM was the "Software Companion" (pre-compiled open source packages
for both platforms).

Understood. It is difficult. Getting manufacturer supplied
media kits is the best bet. The free download versions of Solaris 10 is
the next best. (When downloading, you could download one DVD .iso, or
five CD-ROM .iso files to burn your own DVDs or CD-ROMs. If it is *you*
who filled out the form on Sun's site, you are fine. If someone else
did it, you are in more questionable territory. And if it from some
sites, I would never allow the code to run on my hardware for fear of
embedded malware.

Good Luck,
DoN.

 

Hello

Could someone tell how to install Solaris 7.0 on the emulator? I still have the original cds.

Many thanks

Ed