At VCF West this year, I was browsing the buy/sell area and came across a SPARCstation 10. I said to myself, “Wow, that’s great. I wish there were a SPARCstation 20 up for sale.” A few hours later, I was walking around again and found a SPARCserver 20 had been dropped off on a table. So, it seemed reasonable to purchase it and bring it home.

At some point I’ll do a full writeup on this system, but for now, just a couple pictures and some initial thoughts. The SPARCstation 20 is objectively a well-designed object. It packs class-leading power for its time into a very small footprint, is easy to work on, and is visually appealing in a very 1990s sort of way.

This one came with:

  • Dual 75mhz CPUs
  • 320 MB RAM
  • 2 Seagate HDDs, Solaris 8 installed
  • 2x HME Ethernet cards

The SPARCserver 20 differs from the SPARCstation 20 in one way – it has no graphics by default. This one will require a Sun vSIMM installation to show off Solaris.

SPARCstation 20 with books on top

The SS20 with some other purchases from VCF West.

SPARCstation 20 under couch

Compared to some of the other fire-breathing big iron workstations I have, this might well be the “cutest” computer I own. You can store this little system anywhere! Here it is under a sofa for temporary safekeeping before being moved to the rest of my collection offsite.