3 ms·
I'm reminded of a story Hugh Daniel told me about Xenix. Hugh and John Gilmore visited Microsoft around the time of Sun 1, to see if there was anything they co
by adekok 10y ago
I'm reminded of a story Hugh Daniel told me about Xenix.
Hugh and John Gilmore visited Microsoft around the time of Sun 1, to see if there was anything they could learn / exchange. The Microsoft guys asked excitedly how they made SunOS so fast on the limited hardware.
Hugh and John looked at each other, shrugged, and said "Caching?".
The response was "Oh no, we tried that. It didn't work."
Hugh and John concluded there was nothing to learn here.
- nolok 10y agoThe follow up is that sun ended up having trouble making money and sold to Oracle, while Microsoft ended up being a juggernaut who even in its bad time stayed one of the most stable and lucrative company in the world.
- HillRat 10y agoTo be fair, Sun outlasted its market; the problem was that *nix desktop companies were targeting $10K "3M" workstations and ignoring the PC market (which offered a tenth of the capability at a tenth of the price). When consumer machines caught up and replaced technical and academic workstations, Microsoft was able to grow with the market, while Sun, SGI, etc. didn't have the same opportunity to "grow down." That left Sun dependent on the server market, and exposed to the first dot-com collapse and subsequent glut of used mid- and high-end systems on the aftermarket.
- outside1234 10y agoThere are some good reasons why caching might not have worked for Microsoft you know... The much smaller memory size of a typical PC being a bit potential reason.
- thesimpsons1022 10y agoeasier to just be condescending instead of thinking that out.
- icedchai 10y agoThe original Sun-1 only had 256K of memory, not the multi-megabytes you wound find in late 80's workstations.