Doug McIntyre wrote:
> retrocomtoday@aol.com writes:
>> Excuse me for sounding dumb, but I've just picked up the above machine
>> with three external SCSI drives, an optical mouse and keyboard, and a
>> 21" massive monitor. I've no idea what spec this machine is, what it
>> does or what it is useful for, so any advice, help or pointers are
>> welcome.
>
> This was quite the workstation for the early 1990's.

Yes, very nice for its day.

The only real problem I have found with SS20's is the heat - put a
couple of modern 10,000 rpm disks in it and they will get very very hot.

> The CPUs ranged from 50MHz up to 170MHz, you could have up to 4 in
> some configurations (only 2 MBUS slots though).

I thought Ross did a 180 and possibly a 200 MHz CPU.
>
> You should be able to run Solaris 8 on it. Mostly you can run SunOS v4.1.x
> or Solaris 2.3 through 2.8. It'll run NetBSD or some versions of linux too.

Why not Solaris 9? It was only 10 which needs a 64-bit machine.

> Its a SPARC CPU. You should be able to find more info in the Sun
> Hardware Service Manual
>
> http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/801-6189-12
>
> As well as many sites around the Net, as it was quite a popular
> machine for its time.