Hello, I've a use case that could matter for some others, but as the units aren't networked I can get by with using EOL'd version of the OS to meet the client's needs.
Several 'on hour photo' style shops were given/sold Kodak and other equipment with a sun4m based architecture. The boards -aren't- Sparcstation IPX, LX, or Classics, but the boards will work in a pinch as replacements... they fit against the exposed card-edge slot. Anyway... a client had a drive failure on one unit, and asked me to see if I could get another OS running with the same functionality. NetBSD as of say four years ago ran, but I am not sure if it was -just- SUN compat, or if the SRV4 was added and required as well... (We utilized a few of the binaries salvaged to do some processing to what we recovered what was on the old drives) as well as a binary to use the slide scanner and ... some other function that I am not recalling. There was also another case of some astronomy lab data that a few grad students at the Uni in town needed converted from an old SunOS data set to something readable by a modern program. I know that was -only- SUN compat, but it worked like a charm. What I'd ask or suggest is, along with the docs being shoved in the attic, perhaps an idea of what legacy or EOL'd version one many expect these things to have been functional, so in this wonderful world of Emulation, people could spin up a VM of a previous OS and try in a properly sandboxed manner? -Brandon
