The Proxima system is a Sun Microsystems SPARCstation 2 (circa 1992). The basic "pizza box" was purchased (1999-03-27) at a hamfest sans disk or memory for US$30. It did come with a completely outfitted motherboard including the 40MHz SPARC Sun4c CPU (LSI Logic 64811), single ended SCSI-2 controller, AUI Ethernet interface, two serial ports, 3.5" floppy drive, and built in audio. The aquisition (2001-01) of a 13w3 to VGA converter (from AnySystem.com and was the result of a US$14 winning bid on eBay) for the "cgsix" S-bus color framebuffer card (1152x900) in combination with a Sun type 4 keyboard and mouse ($US10 from a local hamfest) has allowed the SPARC graphics potential to be realized. Previously, the console was serial port "A" (9600, 8N1). A Quantum LPS525S 525MB disk and 16MB of parity RAM (16 x 9 chip 70ns 1MB "PC" SIMMs) have been added. The 16MB RAM is insufficient to allow Solaris to install but it was more than sufficient for Linux. Hopefully, after increasing the disk and memory to something more reasonable (1GB and 32MB respectiviely) it will then be capable of dual booting into either Linux or Solaris.

Note: SPARCStation 2s use a NVRAM/EEPROM combination to maintain the system time and other configuration parameters (e.g., Ethernet MAC address). The NVRAM can become very forgetful (or even corrupt) when its internal 3 VDC lithium cell runs down. Replacement 2k x 8 NVRAMs can be procurred from Sun or Mouser Electronics (part 511-M48T0215PC1 and, in 2001-01, cost about US$12). The NVRAM can be "reprogrammed" using one of the methods outlined in the Sun NVRAM/HostID FAQ. The EEPROM may also be password protected. This can be bypassed using the procedure outlined in the posting " re: PROM PASSWORD" by George Adkins in comp.sys.sun.hardware on 1999-03-18.