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We've been told that the 1988 Sun 386i was quite successful due to its ability to run MS-DOS, and that the Sun 486i was canceled in 1990 because it was faster t

by hga 11y ago

We've been told that the 1988 Sun 386i was quite successful due to its ability to run MS-DOS, and that the Sun 486i was canceled in 1990 because it was faster than the in-house SPARC equivalents. But it took some time for Intel machines to be competitive "big iron", say starting in the 486 days? Including running a serious UNIX(TM) or Linux. ADDED: and serious I/O, we needed EISA and then PCI and its descendants. So by 1997 Sun and SGI had first mover advantages, but neither being well run companies they squandered them even before counting Intel's general excellence in microarchitectures and fabrication. (Plus wasn't SPARC hard to make fast due to an architectural mistake?) One other problem SGI had, their IRIX was a notorious nightmare, which is part of their not being a well run company. Sun also lost more than a little momentum when they switched from BSD to ATT UNIX(TM), and did brain dead marketing where they boasted their UNIX(TM) was less buggy than Windows NT at a time when that simply wasn't true (and if I recall that was at a time they were too often refusing to fix some bugs). A thesis I've just developed here is that the switch to commodity Intel hardware decoupled hardware and software, they helped you avoid getting locked into a single vendor's mistakes (and AMD helped when Intel faltered in several ways). And open source software provided you many mechanisms to get your critical bugs fixed.

theoh 11y ago
About IRIX, an old but entertaining document: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassi...
aswanson 11y ago
How did the management at two successful companies that had delivered great products for a long period of time get so shitty so fast?
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  The 90s was, in retrospect and sort of at the time, one hell of a decade.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  By trying to beat MicroSoft rather than servicing customer needs.
  - hga 11y ago
    That would be Sun, right? Particularly Scott McNealy: https://www.google.com/search?q=scott+mcnealy+microsoft https://www.google.com/search?q=scott+mcnealy+microsoft (not needed SGI's special sauces, almost all my direct experience here is with Sun and DEC). In addition, the two biggest and interlocked problems with them that I know of are their ruining their reputation in enterprise space when they messed up an off-CPU chip cache design, required customers to sign NDAs before they would try to fix it, and then blamed the customers and the supplier of the SRAM chips for their non-fault tolerant design. Instead of, you know, the IBM ethos of fixing the customer's problem. Related, in terms of zapping the other channels of sales that might have saved them, was a total internal sales focus on enterprise sales. If you weren't making enterprise sized purchases, several million dollars worth, you were sent to a 3rd party like a VAR, but they typically wouldn't give you the time of day, they certainly were difficult to deal with when I worked with companies that bought one or two Sun workstations. Adding a web site that allowed direct purchases mostly added salt to the wound. What this meant was that startups that needed more Sun kit than they could charge to a credit card on that web site were forced to go with Dell, who's machines weren't as good, but had the strange property of being willing and able to sell them (HP's sales operation was too screwed up at the time to be a big player here). So a bunch of companies learned how to make do with Dell servers, and the successful ones never looked at Sun when they got big enough. So they missed out on the big post dot.com sales. A final straw when they started struggling was reducing the quality of their systems, e.g. saving one chip on a motherboard by using a chipset Marvel controller instead of the well tested and trusted Intel one. And I read that Joylent stopped buying Sun hardware when they started silently changing the lights out hardware they were shipping in their systems (IPMI or the like).
    - the_why_of_y 11y ago
      > their ruining their reputation in enterprise space when they messed up an off-CPU chip cache design Yeah, that one was a huge. Sourcing those cache chips from IBM, and just trusting them not to knowingly supply ones that emit radioactive radiation was such an amateur move. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2585216/computer-hardware/mcnealy-blames-ibm-for-sun-s-server-memory-flaws.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2585216/computer-hardwa... http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO66102,00.html http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.compute...
kjs3 11y ago
I've never heard that the 386i was successful by any metric. Most big Sun clients had a couple sitting in a storeroom because they would basically give you a couple when you renewed maintenance to generate interest. I was at a Sun reseller at the time, and I can't recall perhaps a single significant 386i deal in the whole run of the product. But that may have just been my corner of the world and somewhere else there was a huge demand for an otherwise unremarkable i386 PC that cost 4 times more than what you could get from everyone else in the market.
- hga 11y ago
  It would be your corner of the world, I think. As I recall, it was a big hit in finance, where they wanted to run existing MS-DOS stuff, including I'm sure Lotus 1-2-3, and had demands beyond what MS-DOS could (easily) do. And of course it preceded Windows 3.0 by a couple of years.

by hga 11y ago

theoh 11y ago

About IRIX, an old but entertaining document: http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassing-memo.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/tirix/embarrassi...

aswanson 11y ago

How did the management at two successful companies that had delivered great products for a long period of time get so shitty so fast?

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
The 90s was, in retrospect and sort of at the time, one hell of a decade.
SixSigma 11y ago
By trying to beat MicroSoft rather than servicing customer needs.
- hga 11y ago
  That would be Sun, right? Particularly Scott McNealy: https://www.google.com/search?q=scott+mcnealy+microsoft https://www.google.com/search?q=scott+mcnealy+microsoft (not needed SGI's special sauces, almost all my direct experience here is with Sun and DEC). In addition, the two biggest and interlocked problems with them that I know of are their ruining their reputation in enterprise space when they messed up an off-CPU chip cache design, required customers to sign NDAs before they would try to fix it, and then blamed the customers and the supplier of the SRAM chips for their non-fault tolerant design. Instead of, you know, the IBM ethos of fixing the customer's problem. Related, in terms of zapping the other channels of sales that might have saved them, was a total internal sales focus on enterprise sales. If you weren't making enterprise sized purchases, several million dollars worth, you were sent to a 3rd party like a VAR, but they typically wouldn't give you the time of day, they certainly were difficult to deal with when I worked with companies that bought one or two Sun workstations. Adding a web site that allowed direct purchases mostly added salt to the wound. What this meant was that startups that needed more Sun kit than they could charge to a credit card on that web site were forced to go with Dell, who's machines weren't as good, but had the strange property of being willing and able to sell them (HP's sales operation was too screwed up at the time to be a big player here). So a bunch of companies learned how to make do with Dell servers, and the successful ones never looked at Sun when they got big enough. So they missed out on the big post dot.com sales. A final straw when they started struggling was reducing the quality of their systems, e.g. saving one chip on a motherboard by using a chipset Marvel controller instead of the well tested and trusted Intel one. And I read that Joylent stopped buying Sun hardware when they started silently changing the lights out hardware they were shipping in their systems (IPMI or the like).
  - the_why_of_y 11y ago
    > their ruining their reputation in enterprise space when they messed up an off-CPU chip cache design Yeah, that one was a huge. Sourcing those cache chips from IBM, and just trusting them not to knowingly supply ones that emit radioactive radiation was such an amateur move. http://www.computerworld.com/article/2585216/computer-hardware/mcnealy-blames-ibm-for-sun-s-server-memory-flaws.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2585216/computer-hardwa... http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.computerworld.com/storyba/0,4125,NAV47_STO66102,00.html http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.compute...

kjs3 11y ago

I've never heard that the 386i was successful by any metric. Most big Sun clients had a couple sitting in a storeroom because they would basically give you a couple when you renewed maintenance to generate interest. I was at a Sun reseller at the time, and I can't recall perhaps a single significant 386i deal in the whole run of the product. But that may have just been my corner of the world and somewhere else there was a huge demand for an otherwise unremarkable i386 PC that cost 4 times more than what you could get from everyone else in the market.

hga 11y ago
It would be your corner of the world, I think. As I recall, it was a big hit in finance, where they wanted to run existing MS-DOS stuff, including I'm sure Lotus 1-2-3, and had demands beyond what MS-DOS could (easily) do. And of course it preceded Windows 3.0 by a couple of years.