On Sun, Dec 31, 2023, 4:38 PM G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
At 2023-12-31T15:06:15-0800, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 31, 2023 at 04:46:49PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> > At 2023-12-31T16:31:00-0500, Clem Cole wrote:
> > > But the key is that it ran on 68K's.
> >
> > I don't think that's the case.
>
> OpenFirmware is Mitch Bradley's baby.  I believe it ran on 68k Suns,
> there was some sort of boot prom there.

At 2023-12-31T18:08:36-0500, Phil Budne wrote:
> OF had its origin in Sun OpenBoot PROM (OBP), which, ISTR, first
> appeared in the SPARCstation 1 (sun4c kernel arch) along with SBus.
> Earlier (VME) based SPARC (sun4 kernel arch) systems had only a Sun-3
> like boot PROM (single letter commands, no Forth).

Thanks for the clarifications, gentlemen.  My first Sun experience was a
SPARC IPC--a bunch of them, actually, in a "freshman engineering lab"...

The Sun 3 systems had a similar interface (L1/a etc) but no 4th and a different set of ROMs.

Warner

Regards,
Branden