5 ms·

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

by 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.
  - hyperman1 7y ago
    This comment demonstrates why solaris lost: If you can buy multiple cheap, unreliable PCs for the price of 1 sun server, you still win. If you can employ a bunch of cheap kids, why would you want to get the far more professional guy? The theoretical answer is better quality. But in practice, the speed of adaptation of the new kids fixes that mostly, especially when you are competing against big arrogant, slow moving enterprice stuff. Worst case, you get 99% uptime instead of 99.5, and you pay a lot less.v Well, the market had spoken.
    - Annatar 7y ago
      Because in the long term, a bunch of cheap kids who aren't doing system engineering, hacking away on cheap unreliable consumer-grade architecture cost far more than two or three system engineers writing specifications and designing software architecture for hardware designed to protect the integrity of one's data...
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.

by fargle 7y ago

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.
- hyperman1 7y ago
  This comment demonstrates why solaris lost: If you can buy multiple cheap, unreliable PCs for the price of 1 sun server, you still win. If you can employ a bunch of cheap kids, why would you want to get the far more professional guy? The theoretical answer is better quality. But in practice, the speed of adaptation of the new kids fixes that mostly, especially when you are competing against big arrogant, slow moving enterprice stuff. Worst case, you get 99% uptime instead of 99.5, and you pay a lot less.v Well, the market had spoken.
  - Annatar 7y ago
    Because in the long term, a bunch of cheap kids who aren't doing system engineering, hacking away on cheap unreliable consumer-grade architecture cost far more than two or three system engineers writing specifications and designing software architecture for hardware designed to protect the integrity of one's data...

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.