6 ms·

The end of an era and one of the worst technology bets / choices. Every time I hear Itanium I think of SGI going under.

tyingq 8y ago
The original RISC/Unix players were most of my career. Pyramid MIPS/OSX, then Sparc/SunOS, AIX, PA-RISC/HPUX, Dec Ultrix followed by Alpha, etc. I remember trying to tell my co-workers that Linux would wipe it all out, shortly after AMD rolled out Opteron. Most of them chuckled.
- neverartful 8y ago
  Which of those proprietary systems were your favorite (or hated least) and why? Which did you dislike the most?
  - tyingq 8y ago
    I liked pretty much anything in the early days because it felt something like a small exclusive club, and a global discussion network like Usenet was just so unique. That experience of helping someone across the globe while sitting at home was just really cool. The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it much easier to find help from other people, Makefiles that just worked, SSL accelerator boards, etc. Ask anyone that worked with zones, for example, and we find all the buzz about docker and linux containers quite funny. I probably hated AIX the most. It was tantalizingly close to other Unix implementations, but with enough differences that things would sort-of work, but not really. To be fair, there was a "right" way to do things that worked, but I was naturally trying to use knowledge I already had. It was also the platform most likely to bomb out when trying to compile open source software. Lots of tweaking makefiles, environment variables, compiler flags, etc, to get things to work. They had a sysadmin tool called "smitty" that I particularly hated.
    - classichasclass 8y ago
      Interesting. I've been an AIX dweeb since 3.2.5 and it's actually my favourite proprietary Unix mostly because it's so ornery. I still have a POWER6 running it that handles most of my web and mail tasks. In fact, I tend to develop on it since if it works on AIX it will be portable enough to work other places. That said, I like xlc performance but I despise its weird command line options. I mostly just use gcc on AIX also. I do prefer smit to things like HP-UX sam, but I'm accustomed to IBM overengineering. ;)
      - kjs3 8y ago
        Yeah...AIX is industrial strength. Unfortunately, lots of people really want 'run in my parents basement strength'.
    - peatmoss 8y ago
      My early career involved compiling a lot of software that would have been better run on Linux or some BSD variant for AIX. I can confirm that building stuff like a custom Apache stack on AIX (don’t ask) was like pulling teeth using XLC. I’m not really old enough to be an actual grey beard, but I got just enough hands-on experience with late-period Big Commercial Unix to feel like I at least swept floors and fetched coffee in the exclusive club. Cool, even if it was frustrating at times. I guess that is the thing: we’ve settled into a monoculture that makes me deeply uncomfortable. NeXT won the desktop, but there’s only implementation. And Linux won the server. But in the meantime, I feel like only OpenBSD is credibly providing public infrastructure that everyone uses. I kind of worry that we’re heading toward a world in which nobody really understands the guts of the systems that sit underneath modern cloud / containerized services. Furthermore, because that stuff isn’t as exciting as the Javascript framework de jure, the amount of innovation happening in the lower layers is nonexistent.
      - tyingq 8y ago
        The monoculture is a good observation. Aside from the dangers you mention, the death of commercial Unix also killed off a lot of healthy competition. There used to be, for example, lots of incentive for HP, IBM, Sun, and others to tweak hardware and software to keep at the top of TPC-C benchmarks. Edit: Well, also the security implications of the Linux/x86 monoculture.
- classichasclass 8y ago
  The first machine I ever had root on was a PA-RISC K250 running HP/UX 10.20. Good times. I particularly miss PA-RISC: it was a pretty clean instruction set with good performance, and HP never got their money's worth out of Itanic. There's a C8000 in my collection with dual PA-8900s in it.
  - anarazel 8y ago
    PA-RISCs lacking support for any meaningful support for any atomics except TAS (one with weird alignment reqs) forced me to add an atomics emulation layer to postgres. So I somewhat hate it now ;)
    - tyingq 8y ago
      I wasn't aware of this before. Looks like the Linux kernel had to solve for that as well: https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FutexImplementation https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FutexImplementation
- Theodores 8y ago
  I chuckled. Which was silly as I missed the boat with Linux until Ubuntu came along. The versions of Linux I first saw were mere toys compared to the SGI awesomeness I knew at the time.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    Oh, yeah. I did not see it with early Linux, and like you, thought it was a fun toy. It was specifically the 64 bit x86 thing that caught my attention. The memory ceiling for 32 bit x86 made it easy to ignore Linux. If I remember right, Linux was also still crashing pretty regularly under load just before that time frame too.
    - burfog 8y ago
      Before that time frame, PC hardware vendors had little incentive to make stable hardware. It was easy to blame crashes on Windows. If the hardware itself made a few crashes per week, that wasn't going to be enough to be noticed. The early 64-bit PC hardware was server grade, intended for NT and Linux. That set a standard, and then gradually people moved away from junk like Windows 98SE and Windows ME. Hardware bugs no longer had such an easy time hiding in a flood of software crashes.
  - icelancer 8y ago
    I figured it out right around Slackware becoming a big distro; that would be in the late 90s / early 2000s. It was pretty clear to me, but I was young and a new entrant to the industry.
classichasclass 8y ago
SGI's Itanic workstations were pretty anaemic, too. They only looked good compared to the phone-it-in R10K derivatives they were pooting out around that time. I'd rather have had a Tezro than a Virtu any day.

The original RISC/Unix players were most of my career. Pyramid MIPS/OSX, then Sparc/SunOS, AIX, PA-RISC/HPUX, Dec Ultrix followed by Alpha, etc. I remember trying to tell my co-workers that Linux would wipe it all out, shortly after AMD rolled out Opteron. Most of them chuckled.

neverartful 8y ago
Which of those proprietary systems were your favorite (or hated least) and why? Which did you dislike the most?
- tyingq 8y ago
  I liked pretty much anything in the early days because it felt something like a small exclusive club, and a global discussion network like Usenet was just so unique. That experience of helping someone across the globe while sitting at home was just really cool. The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it much easier to find help from other people, Makefiles that just worked, SSL accelerator boards, etc. Ask anyone that worked with zones, for example, and we find all the buzz about docker and linux containers quite funny. I probably hated AIX the most. It was tantalizingly close to other Unix implementations, but with enough differences that things would sort-of work, but not really. To be fair, there was a "right" way to do things that worked, but I was naturally trying to use knowledge I already had. It was also the platform most likely to bomb out when trying to compile open source software. Lots of tweaking makefiles, environment variables, compiler flags, etc, to get things to work. They had a sysadmin tool called "smitty" that I particularly hated.
  - classichasclass 8y ago
    Interesting. I've been an AIX dweeb since 3.2.5 and it's actually my favourite proprietary Unix mostly because it's so ornery. I still have a POWER6 running it that handles most of my web and mail tasks. In fact, I tend to develop on it since if it works on AIX it will be portable enough to work other places. That said, I like xlc performance but I despise its weird command line options. I mostly just use gcc on AIX also. I do prefer smit to things like HP-UX sam, but I'm accustomed to IBM overengineering. ;)
    - kjs3 8y ago
      Yeah...AIX is industrial strength. Unfortunately, lots of people really want 'run in my parents basement strength'.
  - peatmoss 8y ago
    My early career involved compiling a lot of software that would have been better run on Linux or some BSD variant for AIX. I can confirm that building stuff like a custom Apache stack on AIX (don’t ask) was like pulling teeth using XLC. I’m not really old enough to be an actual grey beard, but I got just enough hands-on experience with late-period Big Commercial Unix to feel like I at least swept floors and fetched coffee in the exclusive club. Cool, even if it was frustrating at times. I guess that is the thing: we’ve settled into a monoculture that makes me deeply uncomfortable. NeXT won the desktop, but there’s only implementation. And Linux won the server. But in the meantime, I feel like only OpenBSD is credibly providing public infrastructure that everyone uses. I kind of worry that we’re heading toward a world in which nobody really understands the guts of the systems that sit underneath modern cloud / containerized services. Furthermore, because that stuff isn’t as exciting as the Javascript framework de jure, the amount of innovation happening in the lower layers is nonexistent.
    - tyingq 8y ago
      The monoculture is a good observation. Aside from the dangers you mention, the death of commercial Unix also killed off a lot of healthy competition. There used to be, for example, lots of incentive for HP, IBM, Sun, and others to tweak hardware and software to keep at the top of TPC-C benchmarks. Edit: Well, also the security implications of the Linux/x86 monoculture.
classichasclass 8y ago
The first machine I ever had root on was a PA-RISC K250 running HP/UX 10.20. Good times. I particularly miss PA-RISC: it was a pretty clean instruction set with good performance, and HP never got their money's worth out of Itanic. There's a C8000 in my collection with dual PA-8900s in it.
- anarazel 8y ago
  PA-RISCs lacking support for any meaningful support for any atomics except TAS (one with weird alignment reqs) forced me to add an atomics emulation layer to postgres. So I somewhat hate it now ;)
  - tyingq 8y ago
    I wasn't aware of this before. Looks like the Linux kernel had to solve for that as well: https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FutexImplementation https://parisc.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FutexImplementation
Theodores 8y ago
I chuckled. Which was silly as I missed the boat with Linux until Ubuntu came along. The versions of Linux I first saw were mere toys compared to the SGI awesomeness I knew at the time.
- tyingq 8y ago
  Oh, yeah. I did not see it with early Linux, and like you, thought it was a fun toy. It was specifically the 64 bit x86 thing that caught my attention. The memory ceiling for 32 bit x86 made it easy to ignore Linux. If I remember right, Linux was also still crashing pretty regularly under load just before that time frame too.
  - burfog 8y ago
    Before that time frame, PC hardware vendors had little incentive to make stable hardware. It was easy to blame crashes on Windows. If the hardware itself made a few crashes per week, that wasn't going to be enough to be noticed. The early 64-bit PC hardware was server grade, intended for NT and Linux. That set a standard, and then gradually people moved away from junk like Windows 98SE and Windows ME. Hardware bugs no longer had such an easy time hiding in a flood of software crashes.
- icelancer 8y ago
  I figured it out right around Slackware becoming a big distro; that would be in the late 90s / early 2000s. It was pretty clear to me, but I was young and a new entrant to the industry.

classichasclass 8y ago

SGI's Itanic workstations were pretty anaemic, too. They only looked good compared to the phone-it-in R10K derivatives they were pooting out around that time. I'd rather have had a Tezro than a Virtu any day.