Sun stuff was remarkably well built physically, too. At least the server gear i was scrap sourcing and extending the life of. It was possible to do things like swap parts on power supplies, because the designs were not full of tricks to prevent that.
Those monster backplane slots were full of delicate little pins that were easy to bend, but the pins themselves were actually made tough and hard to break so a fine touch could have a hope of straightening them.
They made all their docs available, and kept them up for a very long time. The PDFs of the service manuals were immensely valuable.
I was so happy opening a Sun box and wondering what tools I'd need to do whatever job I was doing, and discovered a Sun-branded screwdriver mounted inside the case.
It made it clear that someone had really cared about the user it when it was designed.
I worked at Aim Tech (of Aim benchmark fame) on a performance management tool Sun contracted with us to build for its servers that had a physical view - photorealistic images of the rack and each board with component level highlighting of status/failures. Way over the top compared to any other system I ever worked on.
Comments
Sun stuff was remarkably well built physically, too. At least the server gear i was scrap sourcing and extending the life of. It was possible to do things like swap parts on power supplies, because the designs were not full of tricks to prevent that.
Those monster backplane slots were full of delicate little pins that were easy to bend, but the pins themselves were actually made tough and hard to break so a fine touch could have a hope of straightening them.
They made all their docs available, and kept them up for a very long time. The PDFs of the service manuals were immensely valuable.
I was so happy opening a Sun box and wondering what tools I'd need to do whatever job I was doing, and discovered a Sun-branded screwdriver mounted inside the case.
It made it clear that someone had really cared about the user it when it was designed.
I worked at Aim Tech (of Aim benchmark fame) on a performance management tool Sun contracted with us to build for its servers that had a physical view - photorealistic images of the rack and each board with component level highlighting of status/failures. Way over the top compared to any other system I ever worked on.