Hello Henry,
On Mon, 9 Jun 2025 13:45:37 -0400
Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:
> How retro, and how little space? Is a pizza box form factor Sun
> workstation like, say, a SPARCstation 1 or 2 too new, or too big?
The pizza box factor would be ideal since it would fit on top of a desk.
Therefore the SPARCstation 1 or 2 seems reasonably sized to me. The
*biggest* I could accommodate would be something the size of a modern
full tower.
I do not have a strong preference for the era of the system. I'm more
interested in its historical signaficance
Something like a SPARCstation 2 or 5 might be ideal since you would be able to run a variety of operating systems both historic and modern - SunOS 4, Solaris, NetBSD, probably Linux if you really wanted to, NeXTstep, and I'm probably forgetting a few more. The historical significance of a system like that is that they were everywhere - Sun sold a ton of them and they were used in all sorts of applications, which also makes it a good entry level machine since they're fairly easy to come by and not terribly expensive. Parts are usually easy to find and inexpensive if you need them. You would also have options like using a modern SCSI emulator instead of a hard disk or connecting to an LCD monitor, but you could also do the full original workstation setup without too much trouble.
-Henry