[rescue] storing old Suns and parts

[Alan Perry]

That is an interesting response for someone subscribed to a nominal Sun rescue mailing list.

My original collection was Sun lunchbox systems. Then it expanded to Sun clones and a few Sun 4c/4m pizza boxes (and a SPARCbook). Then it expanded to sun3 desksides and VME boards. I have done a bit of thinning as well.

And I have had around a couple dozen Sun 4c/4m/4u pizza boxes come in as “rescues”, broken and unknown condition machines given or sold very inexpensively that I repaired and quickly sold on (for the price of the parts needed to get them running well).

In my experience, one can’t expect them to stay in an operational state after being left in storage for a while. Every time I use one that had been sitting for a couple years, something is broken that had been working before. I was very sad to discover a Ross 150MHz MBus card now fails self-test.

I have converted a few IDPROMs to external battery but not enough. I am now used to setting those values by hand.

A while back, almost all of the Sun 424 disks I had died within a year of each other. Now all of my QIC drives (4 of them) don’t work (and I need to read a bunch of QIC tapes to get my sun3s working).

Everything except the sun3 stuff is in my home office. The sun3 stuff is in the garage; this stuff doesn’t seem to mind the temperature changes in the garage.

alan

> On Apr 8, 2026, at 12:23, Lionel Peterson via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:
> 
> Walter,
> 
> I apologize for asking, but why are you holding on to all this stuff?
> 
> Hear me out.
> 
> You are making a significant investment ("I've bought a garage"), to what end?
> 
> I've been to Dave McGuire's LSSM in PA, and I can understand what he's doing, but are your systems actually interesting enough to justify warehousing them? The devices you listed so far seem pretty common, and in need of repair/part replacement.
> 
> Ideally, the equipment should be stored in an environment as close to a traditional office environment, and maybe left plugged in to to perhaps extend the life of NVRAM parts (assuming the PS never really turns off).
> 
> I ask about your intentions because that will shape the responses.
> 
> A few years ago I significantly reduced my Sun collection, realizing that I could logically keep myself entertained/happy with one, high-spec U60 system, that various old SS/5, SS20, and Ultra 2 systems were just redundant and taking up too much space.
> 
> You don't have to justify your collection to me, but if we know your plans, we can make better suggestions.
> 
> Hope I didn't offend,
> 
> Ken
> 
>>> On Apr 8, 2026, at 14:07, Walter Belgers via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:
>>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> Either my collection is too big, or my house is too small. I've thought about giving (most of) my collection to a museum, but this has been unsuccessful.
>> 
>> I've now bought a garage as storage. It's part of an appartment complex, so the temperature/moisture levels should be better than in a garage that has no heating/conditioning whatsoever. Of course, it will be much worse than in my home.
>> 
>> Any tips on storing stuff? Sparcstations and other Sun boxed, spare cards (sbus, VME), boxed with OSes on tape/CD, documentation, etc.
>> 
>> I was thinking about keeping the documentation and books at home. I want to put in (heavy duty) shelves for the systems, use big plastic boxes for parts. Maybe put some bags around the systems. A dehumidifier is not really an option I think, there is mains power, but I cannot go there very regularly to check on it.
>> 
>> I've just started to make an inventory of my stuff, seeing if the systems will still run after having been shelved so long. The first four systems: SPARCstation 20: still working! SPARCsystem Netra i4: one DIMM dead, disk dead, NVRAM empty (was fixed but battery empty again). SPARC Xterminal1, dead. SPARCstation 4: I had to hit the disk because of stiction but then it booted although NVRAM empty. I've built a whole bunch of GW-48T02-1 repair boards but I don't think I'll put them in at this time.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Walter.
>> _______________________________________________
>> rescue list - http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org
> _______________________________________________
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