7 ms·

Sun and SGI both died not because of the dot-com bubble bursting, they died because commodity PCs became competitive with their extremely overpriced offerings,

Sun and SGI both died not because of the dot-com bubble bursting, they died because commodity PCs became competitive with their extremely overpriced offerings, then GNU/Linux enabled the PCs to do all the UNIXy things too. They should have seen the writing on the wall and done something to differentiate themselves meaningfully before the PC wave washed over them. They failed to do so, and could barely afford to keep the lights on at the scale they operated afterwards.

fargle 7y ago
Well the other thing was that the surplus market for 6 month old machines undercut their sales. It's true that PC's (amd64) became capable workstations around the same time, or shortly after. And that didn't help. But for the time, the RISC UNIX Workstation was NOT overpriced. If you compare your $1500 core-i7 machine of today to a $30,000 RISC machine of 2001, the later would seem overpriced. But not at all if compared to the $1500 Dell of 2001 running Windows NT 4.0. Remember, things changed very rapidly. And the dot-com burst before Linux and amd64 really happened. In a way, both Linux and x86/amd64 have turned the PC into the UNIX workstation of the 90's and 2000's. And with ONE dominant, excellent, kinda-sorta SVR4 OS too (Linux).
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  I was working as a sysadmin at hosting companies running thousands of 32-bit x86 Linux boxes, while the dot-com boom was still ongoing. We didn't give Sun a single penny in what would have been fertile land for their machines, if not for GNU/Linux and dirt-cheap powerful PCs. One of the places I worked shared a building with a legacy hosting provider that had nothing but racks of Sun hardware. I had applied to work there first, with nothing but self-taught GNU/Linux knowledge and they laughed me out the door for not knowing anything about "real UNIX". Then I ended up getting a job just one floor below them at younger hosting company, 100% GNU/Linux, and we ate their lunch. It was a microcosm of what was going on everywhere, Sun was doomed.
  - Annatar 7y ago
    But they were correct: if you knew UNIX®️, you automatically groked GNU/Linux (and could see all its deficiencies, as it's a toy), but the other way around does not hold: the gaps in architectural and standards specifications knowledge and concepts are gargantuan (I painfully see that every day at work and must teach to ameliorate the situation where I can, as best I can). You mistake cheap, unreliable PC hardware and too late open sourcing with technical inferiority, where there was none. The truth is that garbage PC hardware and ubiquity of Linux ISO's caused a flood of kids who overnight became "system administrators", which along the 1.95 trillion USD being wiped out caused the market to crash. It's not as trivial as you make it out to be. It also takes far, far more professional, formal education, experience and insight to really be root than just being able to install Linux from an ISO and input a few trivial commands in "bash".
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      > It also takes far, far more professional, formal education, experience and insight to really be root You sound like you're gatekeeping system administration.
      - zorked 7y ago
        Old school Unix people have been gatekeeping Unix since the 90s at least. Some still resent having a Unix that is available to anyone and runs on home computers.
        technofiend 7y ago
        >Old school Unix people have been gatekeeping Unix since the 90s at least. Well not all of us, but being a sysadmin excited about Unix/Linux on commodity hardware didn't mean much if your boss thought the OS, the hardware or both weren't ready for production workloads. I showed my boss two floppy Slackware and he dismissed it as not relevant. Years later we were having the same arguments about Solaris on Intel which weren't helped by Sun's on again off again Intel support. My point is sometimes it was the IT management gatekeeping.
- ska 7y ago
  No, they were already way overpriced. The Unix workstations were nice, and had good tools. But you could buy dual cpu intel machines of very roughly equivalent performance (excepting some specific tasks) for about 1/4 the cost (or less), and put Linux or BSD on them. The writing was on the wall you at least 97 , and the Unix vendors looked at it and just kept doing the same thing. They were already dead, but the dot.com collapse finished them a little faster I suppose.
  - taborj 7y ago
    For reference, I purchased a Micron system with a dual Pentium Pro slot W6-Li motherboard (but -- and this is crucial -- only one 180MHz PPro chip), SCSI internals, 64MB of RAM and a CD writer, for $5200. This was in 1996. If I recall correctly, adding the second PPro 180MHz chip added around $2k to the price. Call it $7-8k all in. The 200MHz PPro had a SPECInt92 value of 366[0]. You can find a list of other SPECInt92 values here[1]. So it was, indeed, faster than many systems, but not the fastest. Value for money? Yeah, it had it. There were x86 versions of SVR4 UNIX available commercially, so it's quite plausible that you could do an apples-to-apples comparison. I'm sure one is out there, but I don't have the time to find one. It's worth noting that in 1994, Eric S. Raymond discontinued his "PC-clone UNIX buyers guide" because he had switched to Linux, and didn't think that UNIX had a future. [2] I think it's still fair to say that the dedicated UNIX workstations had a certain panache that made "real" engineers want them, badly. [0] https://www.hpcwire.com/1995/11/03/200-mhz-intel-pentium-pro-benchmarks-at-366-specint92/ https://www.hpcwire.com/1995/11/03/200-mhz-intel-pentium-pro... [1] http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/new.spec.cint92.col0.html http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/new.spec.cint... [2] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt
- Annatar 7y ago
  Everything is correct but the excellent part: Linux is badly architecturally broken and hacked together under the hood. Backwards-compatibility guarantees (as one would get in writing with Solaris) are non-existent, hit or miss. Solaris features like zones are very poorly partially implemented as resource controls (cgroups), but not really; lots of GNU/Linux distributions are still on filesystems like ext or XFS which are built on obsolete data management concepts from 35 years ago; there are many competing provisioning technologies (Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, ...) but none of them fully cooked. Fault Management Architecture is something which doesn't exist in GNU/Linux; NFS implementation still isn't finished after 20 years and it's still broken and non-standards compliant; fiberchannel and TCP/IP stacks in Linux are buggy as hell. The list could go on and on; I could literally write and publish a book on it, were that not such a waste of my life.
jdkee 7y ago
This is exactly correct. Low priced commodity hardware spelled the end of high-end ($10k plus) workstations and servers. See Google.
emmelaich 7y ago
Yep, Solaris was on life support when they * dropped x86 * dropped the free C compiler * and Linux became sufficiently stable in other words, around 2000-2002 From 1998 or so, my home 486dx2 with Linux was faster and a hell of a lot cheaper than my Sun workstation at work.
- Annatar 7y ago
  Well, illumos is faster than Linux on the same hardware now, as starting in 2004, every situation where Linux was faster was treated as a priority 1 bug. Yes, a bug.
  - Tester0x1 7y ago
    Not at all... Definitely not for the last decade or so. Linux beats illumos in speed in every category. Some of these categories are not even close. Linux even outperformed illumos in ZFS!
    - Annatar 7y ago
      No sorry, but that's incorrect. I saw the bug requests myself when the database was still accessible, and I read multiple accounts from engineers working on performance improvements at Sun Microsystems, who I trust far more than anecdotal, arbitrary claim from you here in "Hacker" "News" of all places, which has meanwhile become notorious. And considering I know how fast illumos is because I ran Solaris and Linux on the same hardware, I'll just stick with running SmartOS, thank you very much: for example, Solaris would regularly peak to 85 MB/s while Linux could barely muster 55 MB/s on the same hardware... HTTP response times are up to 10x faster on Solaris; and so on, and so forth. I've never seen Linux max out 40 Gbps per second and saturate the switch, but I sure as hell did do that with Solaris 10 on a DELL server, of all the shitty hardware out there. I've also never been able to get Linux to deliver anywhere close to 100 MB/s with NFS, while SmartOS regularly delivered over 433 MB/s, while peaking multiple times at 533 MB/s; that's faster than our EMC SAN was at work! So yeah, I'll stick with what doesn't break backwards compatibility and is blazingly fast... Solaris and SmartOS for the win. Good luck with GNU and Linux. You'll need it.
tinus_hn 7y ago
In a way, Linux embrace and extended the Unix standards. New third party software required new versions of the GNU tools, not the ancient tools and libraries shipped with SunOS. To make anything work you’d have to install the whole GNU ecosystem in a build root which became old pretty quickly.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  Once GNU/Linux started gaining traction I encountered a few sites starting to mix it with their established Sun fleet, and they had been putting GNU userspace on all their Sun boxes just to normalize the UX. Solaris from what I recall was opinionated in the BSD vs. SysV department, in terms of what commands were provided on the shell and what their usage syntax was. GNU was more user-oriented and tried to make things familiar to everyone regardless of which camp you were from. So the GNU userspace made more people happy, and the license combined with source distribution didn't prohibit installation everywhere. My memory is fuzzy from that era, but I clearly recall working for a software company writing control panel software to manage apache installs across both Solaris and GNU/Linux, whenever a new Sun box was spun up GNU was immediately installed so everyone could login to any machine and find it behaved more or less the same as they worked at the shell. bash, coreutils, gcc, all the goodies, you couldn't make your x86 GNU/Linux boxes look like Solaris for everyone, but you could go the other direction trivially. Sun was basically user-hostile, GNU makes it very apparent, especially in the transition period.

fargle 7y ago

Well the other thing was that the surplus market for 6 month old machines undercut their sales. It's true that PC's (amd64) became capable workstations around the same time, or shortly after. And that didn't help. But for the time, the RISC UNIX Workstation was NOT overpriced. If you compare your $1500 core-i7 machine of today to a $30,000 RISC machine of 2001, the later would seem overpriced. But not at all if compared to the $1500 Dell of 2001 running Windows NT 4.0. Remember, things changed very rapidly. And the dot-com burst before Linux and amd64 really happened. In a way, both Linux and x86/amd64 have turned the PC into the UNIX workstation of the 90's and 2000's. And with ONE dominant, excellent, kinda-sorta SVR4 OS too (Linux).

newnewpdro 7y ago
I was working as a sysadmin at hosting companies running thousands of 32-bit x86 Linux boxes, while the dot-com boom was still ongoing. We didn't give Sun a single penny in what would have been fertile land for their machines, if not for GNU/Linux and dirt-cheap powerful PCs. One of the places I worked shared a building with a legacy hosting provider that had nothing but racks of Sun hardware. I had applied to work there first, with nothing but self-taught GNU/Linux knowledge and they laughed me out the door for not knowing anything about "real UNIX". Then I ended up getting a job just one floor below them at younger hosting company, 100% GNU/Linux, and we ate their lunch. It was a microcosm of what was going on everywhere, Sun was doomed.
- Annatar 7y ago
  But they were correct: if you knew UNIX®️, you automatically groked GNU/Linux (and could see all its deficiencies, as it's a toy), but the other way around does not hold: the gaps in architectural and standards specifications knowledge and concepts are gargantuan (I painfully see that every day at work and must teach to ameliorate the situation where I can, as best I can). You mistake cheap, unreliable PC hardware and too late open sourcing with technical inferiority, where there was none. The truth is that garbage PC hardware and ubiquity of Linux ISO's caused a flood of kids who overnight became "system administrators", which along the 1.95 trillion USD being wiped out caused the market to crash. It's not as trivial as you make it out to be. It also takes far, far more professional, formal education, experience and insight to really be root than just being able to install Linux from an ISO and input a few trivial commands in "bash".
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    > It also takes far, far more professional, formal education, experience and insight to really be root You sound like you're gatekeeping system administration.
    - zorked 7y ago
      Old school Unix people have been gatekeeping Unix since the 90s at least. Some still resent having a Unix that is available to anyone and runs on home computers.
      - technofiend 7y ago
        >Old school Unix people have been gatekeeping Unix since the 90s at least. Well not all of us, but being a sysadmin excited about Unix/Linux on commodity hardware didn't mean much if your boss thought the OS, the hardware or both weren't ready for production workloads. I showed my boss two floppy Slackware and he dismissed it as not relevant. Years later we were having the same arguments about Solaris on Intel which weren't helped by Sun's on again off again Intel support. My point is sometimes it was the IT management gatekeeping.
ska 7y ago
No, they were already way overpriced. The Unix workstations were nice, and had good tools. But you could buy dual cpu intel machines of very roughly equivalent performance (excepting some specific tasks) for about 1/4 the cost (or less), and put Linux or BSD on them. The writing was on the wall you at least 97 , and the Unix vendors looked at it and just kept doing the same thing. They were already dead, but the dot.com collapse finished them a little faster I suppose.
- taborj 7y ago
  For reference, I purchased a Micron system with a dual Pentium Pro slot W6-Li motherboard (but -- and this is crucial -- only one 180MHz PPro chip), SCSI internals, 64MB of RAM and a CD writer, for $5200. This was in 1996. If I recall correctly, adding the second PPro 180MHz chip added around $2k to the price. Call it $7-8k all in. The 200MHz PPro had a SPECInt92 value of 366[0]. You can find a list of other SPECInt92 values here[1]. So it was, indeed, faster than many systems, but not the fastest. Value for money? Yeah, it had it. There were x86 versions of SVR4 UNIX available commercially, so it's quite plausible that you could do an apples-to-apples comparison. I'm sure one is out there, but I don't have the time to find one. It's worth noting that in 1994, Eric S. Raymond discontinued his "PC-clone UNIX buyers guide" because he had switched to Linux, and didn't think that UNIX had a future. [2] I think it's still fair to say that the dedicated UNIX workstations had a certain panache that made "real" engineers want them, badly. [0] https://www.hpcwire.com/1995/11/03/200-mhz-intel-pentium-pro-benchmarks-at-366-specint92/ https://www.hpcwire.com/1995/11/03/200-mhz-intel-pentium-pro... [1] http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/new.spec.cint92.col0.html http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/new.spec.cint... [2] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt
Annatar 7y ago
Everything is correct but the excellent part: Linux is badly architecturally broken and hacked together under the hood. Backwards-compatibility guarantees (as one would get in writing with Solaris) are non-existent, hit or miss. Solaris features like zones are very poorly partially implemented as resource controls (cgroups), but not really; lots of GNU/Linux distributions are still on filesystems like ext or XFS which are built on obsolete data management concepts from 35 years ago; there are many competing provisioning technologies (Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, ...) but none of them fully cooked. Fault Management Architecture is something which doesn't exist in GNU/Linux; NFS implementation still isn't finished after 20 years and it's still broken and non-standards compliant; fiberchannel and TCP/IP stacks in Linux are buggy as hell. The list could go on and on; I could literally write and publish a book on it, were that not such a waste of my life.

jdkee 7y ago

This is exactly correct. Low priced commodity hardware spelled the end of high-end ($10k plus) workstations and servers. See Google.

emmelaich 7y ago

Yep, Solaris was on life support when they * dropped x86 * dropped the free C compiler * and Linux became sufficiently stable in other words, around 2000-2002 From 1998 or so, my home 486dx2 with Linux was faster and a hell of a lot cheaper than my Sun workstation at work.

Annatar 7y ago
Well, illumos is faster than Linux on the same hardware now, as starting in 2004, every situation where Linux was faster was treated as a priority 1 bug. Yes, a bug.
- Tester0x1 7y ago
  Not at all... Definitely not for the last decade or so. Linux beats illumos in speed in every category. Some of these categories are not even close. Linux even outperformed illumos in ZFS!
  - Annatar 7y ago
    No sorry, but that's incorrect. I saw the bug requests myself when the database was still accessible, and I read multiple accounts from engineers working on performance improvements at Sun Microsystems, who I trust far more than anecdotal, arbitrary claim from you here in "Hacker" "News" of all places, which has meanwhile become notorious. And considering I know how fast illumos is because I ran Solaris and Linux on the same hardware, I'll just stick with running SmartOS, thank you very much: for example, Solaris would regularly peak to 85 MB/s while Linux could barely muster 55 MB/s on the same hardware... HTTP response times are up to 10x faster on Solaris; and so on, and so forth. I've never seen Linux max out 40 Gbps per second and saturate the switch, but I sure as hell did do that with Solaris 10 on a DELL server, of all the shitty hardware out there. I've also never been able to get Linux to deliver anywhere close to 100 MB/s with NFS, while SmartOS regularly delivered over 433 MB/s, while peaking multiple times at 533 MB/s; that's faster than our EMC SAN was at work! So yeah, I'll stick with what doesn't break backwards compatibility and is blazingly fast... Solaris and SmartOS for the win. Good luck with GNU and Linux. You'll need it.

tinus_hn 7y ago

In a way, Linux embrace and extended the Unix standards. New third party software required new versions of the GNU tools, not the ancient tools and libraries shipped with SunOS. To make anything work you’d have to install the whole GNU ecosystem in a build root which became old pretty quickly.

newnewpdro 7y ago
Once GNU/Linux started gaining traction I encountered a few sites starting to mix it with their established Sun fleet, and they had been putting GNU userspace on all their Sun boxes just to normalize the UX. Solaris from what I recall was opinionated in the BSD vs. SysV department, in terms of what commands were provided on the shell and what their usage syntax was. GNU was more user-oriented and tried to make things familiar to everyone regardless of which camp you were from. So the GNU userspace made more people happy, and the license combined with source distribution didn't prohibit installation everywhere. My memory is fuzzy from that era, but I clearly recall working for a software company writing control panel software to manage apache installs across both Solaris and GNU/Linux, whenever a new Sun box was spun up GNU was immediately installed so everyone could login to any machine and find it behaved more or less the same as they worked at the shell. bash, coreutils, gcc, all the goodies, you couldn't make your x86 GNU/Linux boxes look like Solaris for everyone, but you could go the other direction trivially. Sun was basically user-hostile, GNU makes it very apparent, especially in the transition period.