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In the 90's and early 2000's Sun machines were pretty much the default for developing new software during the dot com boom. I was told this was due partly beca

In the 90's and early 2000's Sun machines were pretty much the default for developing new software during the dot com boom. I was told this was due partly because Sun sold a lot of hardware on credit (and then this crashed when the dot com boom crashed.) I worked at HP during this time helping software vendors port to HP-UX. I also spent some time on the side compiling open source projects for fun on HP-UX and then pushing the required patches back to the project's owner. Anyone remember Pointcast?! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_(dotcom) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_(dotcom) I was assigned to them briefly.

pvg 8y ago
the default for developing new software during the dot com boom. I was told this was due partly because Sun sold a lot of hardware on credit (and then this crashed when the dot com boom crashed. I think this might be something HP people were telling each other at the time while getting smacked around by Sun. The Sun machines were still ridiculously expensive and while common, I don't think they were the default. SGI Indies were also quite popular and the Pentium Pro quickly started eating the overpriced Unix workstation market. By 2000, I doubt there were that many SV startup developers sitting in front of a Sun box. There were piles of them in server rooms, of course.
tptacek 8y ago
In the 90's and 2000s, Sun machines might have been a kind of default for deploying new software, but they certainly weren't the default for developing it. By 1998, you'd be getting a much better machine from Intel than you could get even in the same ballpark cost as from Sun. If you did work on a Sun workstation, you probably did it grudgingly (except that they had a really good C++ compiler for the time).
- rrauenza 8y ago
  The companies I worked with primarily developed on the systems customers used. You really want to see the issues on your tier1 platform as you develop. Linux was not tier1 at that time. This meant that code written on Sun that performed well performed poorly on HP-UX occasionally -- not because HP-UX was a worse platform, but because corner cases in architecture could bite you. On your tier1 development platform you tend to weed those issues out early.

pvg 8y ago

the default for developing new software during the dot com boom. I was told this was due partly because Sun sold a lot of hardware on credit (and then this crashed when the dot com boom crashed. I think this might be something HP people were telling each other at the time while getting smacked around by Sun. The Sun machines were still ridiculously expensive and while common, I don't think they were the default. SGI Indies were also quite popular and the Pentium Pro quickly started eating the overpriced Unix workstation market. By 2000, I doubt there were that many SV startup developers sitting in front of a Sun box. There were piles of them in server rooms, of course.

tptacek 8y ago

In the 90's and 2000s, Sun machines might have been a kind of default for deploying new software, but they certainly weren't the default for developing it. By 1998, you'd be getting a much better machine from Intel than you could get even in the same ballpark cost as from Sun. If you did work on a Sun workstation, you probably did it grudgingly (except that they had a really good C++ compiler for the time).

rrauenza 8y ago
The companies I worked with primarily developed on the systems customers used. You really want to see the issues on your tier1 platform as you develop. Linux was not tier1 at that time. This meant that code written on Sun that performed well performed poorly on HP-UX occasionally -- not because HP-UX was a worse platform, but because corner cases in architecture could bite you. On your tier1 development platform you tend to weed those issues out early.