Support for a Sun2/120

[henry at zoo.toronto.edu]

>If I was to buy a Sun2/120 and later in life need to get it fixed and did
>not have a University of company to pay the bill, but did have a knowledge
>of electronics and could replace parts on boards or use a scope/meter how
>much and how hard would the repair bills be and how long would things take
>to get?

I'd say this is not a recommended approach.  The trouble is, to use this
approach you generally need two things:  detailed hardware documentation,
and access to parts.  From Sun you get neither.  Sun hardware is Top
Secret, even the old stuff.  And many of the parts will probably (I've
never seen a Sun 2 board) be things like PALs and ROMs that can't be
ordered from an ordinary parts supplier unless you have programming data,
not just part numbers.

Troubleshooting something like a Sun CPU wouldn't be a trivial task even
so, given that it's complex logic run very close to its limits.  (On the
Sun 3 they relaxed the design a little bit to give greater margins and
make the things easier to build.)  The lack of documentation and parts
would make it next to impossible, I'd say.

                                    Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu