The Tadpole SPARCbook 6500

I bought a SPARC laptop at a garage sale. The machine is a Tadpole SPARCbook 6500 with an UltraSPARC-IIe at 650 MHz, 4GB of RAM, and a 1400x1050 panel. Tadpole built these in Carlsbad after merging with RDI, and they are the last generation of a genuinely strange idea: a laptop that runs Solaris on real SPARC silicon. It powers on. It also greets you with this: The IDPROM contents are invalid Dead NVRAM battery. The IDPROM is sixteen bytes: a format byte, a machine type, six bytes of MAC address, a host ID, and an XOR checksum. When the battery goes, it all reads back as zeros. Ethernet address 0:0:0:0:0:0. Host ID 00000040. OpenBSD does not careOpenBSD/sparc64 7.9 boots on it fine. Invalid IDPROM, dead clock, zero MACs, doesn't matter it comes up, attaches everything, and hands you a shell. Which turns out to be interesting, because the Tadpole SPARCbook 5000/6500 is currently sitting on the OpenBSD sparc64 page under Untested machines (please help us test!). Nobody in twenty years…