Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Solbournes in space

Did a few updates to the Solbourne Solace thanks to new stuff people have sent in, Solbourne of course being one of Sun's most notable competitors in SPARC-based workstations and servers. The most interesting new entry is the space-faring PILOT ("Portable In-flight Landing Operations Trainer") laptop, reported by Scott Manley who noted it in Space Shuttle mission photographs. While the SPARC Solbourne S3000 portable workstation is well-known, this was the only known Solbourne laptop and its only colour portable, although it carried both Solbourne and Panasonic badges (Matsushita, owner of the Panasonic brand, had a majority stake in Solbourne), and was most likely designed and manufactured by Matsushita's Federal Systems division under contract instead of Solbourne in Longmont, Colorado. NASA commissioned it as a portable simulator to ensure that the Space Shuttle commander and pilot could maintain their skills in orbit, and it flew at least from October 1993 to March 1995 (the pictures above are from STS-62 and STS-63; it was documented on STS-58, -61, -62, -63, -65 and -67).

The machine had 32MB of RAM, a 15" colour LCD and a dedicated "Rotational Hand Controller." The software was NASA's own Shuttle Engineering Simulator (SES), ported to SPARC from the Control Data Corporation Cyber 180 Model 962 (an upgraded version of the RISC Cyber 180-960) at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and ran on OS/MP 4.1A, Solbourne's equivalent of SunOS 4.1.1. Its motherboard was most likely a Solbourne "pizzabox" IDT logic board, the same one used in the S3000, S4000 and S4100 which directly competed with O.G. SPARCstations, making the reported speed of 40MHz suspect since the Panasonic MN10501 KAP (short for "Kick-Ass Processor" — yes, really) was notoriously unstable above 36MHz. A suspiciously similar laptop called the Matsushita P2100 was announced in 1992 but by then Sun was making moves to freeze SPARC clone makers out of the market, particularly Solbourne who had cornerned the more profitable upper tiers, and refused to license Solaris to anyone like they did SunOS. (Apple later pulled this same stunt with the Mac clones and Mac OS 8.) The P2100 doesn't seem to have been ever released, and while a few PILOT examples were likely fabricated, no one so far has found one. PILOT was eventually replaced by various IBM ThinkPads which went on to have a well-known and illustrious career in space.

A big thanks to Warner Losh and Dieter Dworkin Müller for the probable scoop on PILOT, as well as Scott's own research and his initial report, and this unofficial NASA description from 1994.

2 comments:

  1. Wow - this was a blast from the past. I was a HW engineer at Solbourne and remember this machine. We only saw it once in Longmont. It was designed and built by Matsushita (in Japan I think). We had nothing to do with its design. It didn't use KAP. By then it was clear KAP was a failure and we were in trouble. I think this was MBus-based and may used one of the Cypress CPU modules (but am not 100% sure of my memory). I remember feeling a bit depressed looking at it because it showed we were no longer as relevant to Matsushita as we had been.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. MBus? Wow, then this sounds like it was a custom board, not the IDT board? Cypress sounds plausible.

      Delete

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