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Sun Microsystems
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Sun Blade 100
A later Sun desktop workstation.
MakerSun Microsystems
EraTo be confirmed
TypeUnix workstation
About this object
The Blade 100 belongs to Sun’s entry-level workstation range. It offers a comparison with the earlier SPARCclassic elsewhere in the collection.
Inspect the original photograph
Technical record
Sun Blade Workstation
| Introduced | Blade 100 in 2000; Blade 150 in 2002 |
|---|---|
| Processor | UltraSPARC IIe at 500–650 MHz |
| Memory | Up to 2 GB PC133 |
| Graphics | PGX64, or Expert3D on larger models |
| Storage | IDE, a departure from Sun's SCSI practice |
| Operating system | Solaris 8 and later |
Architecture
Sun's answer to the cheap PC workstation, and the compromises are visible: commodity IDE disks and PC133 memory in a machine that still ran Solaris on SPARC. The UltraSPARC IIe was built for low power rather than peak throughput. It is a good record of the moment when the economics of proprietary Unix workstations stopped working.
Record & provenance
The Blade 100 belongs to Sun’s entry-level workstation range. It offers a comparison with the earlier SPARCclassic elsewhere in the collection.
Reference: ATX-OBJ-134-IMG-5200
Source: collection inventory, photographs, and notes accompanying Serious Machines (Amir Husain, 2024).