7 ms·

As someone who worked for Sun in the 1990s, Solaris will always hold a special place in my memories. It ruled the enterprise UNIX world back then and I never wo

As someone who worked for Sun in the 1990s, Solaris will always hold a special place in my memories. It ruled the enterprise UNIX world back then and I never would have imagined back then that it would ever fade into obscurity (as it is doing now). Will I install it again? No. Like most everyone else, I've moved on to Linux and BSD. But I'll spin up Solaris 2.5.1 on my SPARCbook or Solaris 10 on my Blade 1500 whenever I need a nostalgia kick.

farmerstan 5y ago
I work in enterprise software and around 2000 the combination of Solaris and Oracle database was the most rock solid out of all the various OS/DB combinations. I vaguely remember the threading model was weird and I think limited stack size per thread but overall it was my favorite combo because of how reliable it was. The speed with which Linux killed Solaris however was astonishing.
- azinman2 5y ago
  It’s hard to beat free that runs on cheap everyday hardware.
  - Bluecobra 5y ago
    Sun actually made x86 Solaris 10 free and it ran well on commodity hardware. When Oracle bought them, they pulled the rug and demanded $1K per CPU per year for the privilege if it was non-Sun/Oracle hardware.
    - hunta2097 5y ago
      I see this as a huge mistake (quelle surprise, this is Oracle after all). If they had just copied the RedHat model they might have been onto a winner. Free unstable, paid stable.
      - pjmlp 5y ago
        They already have Oracle Linux for that.
        floren 5y ago
        I'm drinking coffee out of an Oracle Linux mug from SCaLE 9x, which would have been 2011... note how Oracle Linux has absolutely taken over the world since then :)
      - hapless 5y ago
        Sun tried every combination of free and paid and none of them made inroads in x86. Yes, that includes the Red Hat model (remember OpenSolaris?)
        rbanffy 5y ago
        It lasted for a very short time. OTOH, OpenIndiana is still reasonable if you want a Solaris.
        hapless 5y ago
        They spent twenty years experimenting with different approaches to marketing Solaris x86. It was not a lack of persistence
    - azinman2 5y ago
      Perhaps free as in money but not in source. All the big boys who deployed it absolutely wanted the source to customize in house. Also too little too late.
  - smsm42 5y ago
    It's not only that. I deployed commercial projects when the question "Solaris or Linux" didn't sound ridiculous, and there were times where Solaris had been a reasonable choice. But that was a long time ago. Since then Linux (and the ecosystem) matured a lot, and Solaris didn't have much to counter that, so its relative worth declined rapidly.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > It’s hard to beat free that runs on cheap everyday hardware. They were a hardware company that designed their own CPUs. If a company could pull an Apple and do an M1, it would be Sun. Unfortunately, their low-cost machines performed just like PCs and cost the same, without PC software to run on them. And building x86 boxes that ran with Solaris ensured they'd be no better than PCs, without any compelling software.
- jcims 5y ago
  IMHO the relative cost of Linux hardware created a brain drain that they didn't see coming and ultimately couldn't resolve. The amount of work a single well-equipped E4500 could do vs a cabinet of x86 gear was remarkable, but that E4500 might run $600K and the x86 gear 0-10% of that.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  I was at university in the late 90s. In exchange for buying us all (usually cheap) pizza, companies could come in and give an hour long pitch for why we should come work for them after graduation. A few big companies wanted more time so they'd cater higher end pizza or more elaborate catering as a bribe to get students to come to their presentation. Microsoft bough a large amount of Mellow Mushroom (the best pizza in our little college town) and did a two hour presentation on what it is like to work at Microsoft and why we should want to work there. Later in the semester Sun came to campus and catered their two hour presentation with chicken nuggets. But real issue was that the people and videos that were part of Sun's presentation didn't tell us much about Sun or why we should work there. It was a two hour long ranting whinefest about why no one should work at Microsoft. This was on the East Coast so these people were doing a tour of all of the major engineering schools and wasting it on their angst over Microsoft. I was around the time of the JVM lawsuit so I understand why Sun was mad at Microsoft but it seemed to have broken something in their corporate DNA and turned them insane. Perhaps that was just an isolated incident confined to the university recruiters but Sun at that time seemed overly focused on fighting Microsoft instead of improving their product offerings. Perhaps some of anger ended up turning potential users and employees away from Microsoft but I suspect lots of those ended up going with Linux or some other alternative rather than going with Sun.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident! But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if. The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft. It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc! And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh! https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computing-to-the-channel/4107 https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computin... Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris. To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke: Q: What do you get when you cross Sun and AT&T? A: AT&T.
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  I'm still staggered by it, and I watched it happen, too. Several times in my computing career -- say, from 1990 on -- I've seen something start to happen that was clearly going to be huge, only to be told over and over that the obviously-inevitable development was Impossible. The first example was the ascendancy of the microcomputer. "OH, there will ALWAYS be a space for mainframes! Corporations aren't going to do their accounting on some crappy PC! You're just young and don't see how these things really work." The second was the way Linux completely destroyed the commercial Unix market (and, with it, the "fancy Unix workstation" market). The power of FOSS is, in my view, very very often overstated by idealists, but it's hard not to see the wholesale corporate/academic/research shift from Solaris, et. al., to Linux on commodity hardware as anything but a HUGE win in terms of computing power.
sixothree 5y ago
We had SparcStation 1 pizza boxes at my school. Huge black and white monitors. Core dumps as large as your disk quota. So much fun times.
icedchai 5y ago
Yes! People today may not realize how huge Sun was in the 90's. Almost all startups ran on Sun gear. Almost all ISPs had a Sun system for their "shell account" servers. Also, I had a SparcStation 10 at home in 1996 or so (which was kind of unheard of!)
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I only really cared about GNU/Linux in production around 2006, until then it was a means to have a cheap UNIX clone at home, while we were deploying Solaris, HP-UX and Aix into production. Most of the deployments were naturally Solaris based.
  - icedchai 5y ago
    About 2002 here. Some companies were more conservative than others. One was okay with Linux for dev systems, but not production. Another had a "low end" product ported from AIX, which ran on Linux.
- pklausler 5y ago
  It wasn't just startups, of course; we used Sun gear at good ol' Cray Research in that era and it was our first upgrade from dumb terminals on mainframes (& vaxen). Good times. (I still remember when Sun introduced color systems, and they were such status symbols that they went mostly to managers, including one who was color-blind. A warning sign in retrospect, I suppose.)
- endymi0n 5y ago
  Totally honest question: WHY does everyone think it was cool? I can still remember running it in Uni on some of the prized workstations with everyone raving about it but never got the point about it. Back then I was on Windows and everything I saw on Sun systems looked weird, laggy and just super obscure to me. The whole UI felt like a mix of enterprise and neckbeard charme despite being non-open. It did not seem to run none any of the things I cared about back then. Later on I remembered Sun mainly in context of their stewardship of Java which also didn't help connecting any good feelings to it. So maybe in 2022 someone could enlighten me about what exactly was so cool about Sun?
shadowgovt 5y ago
It was good, but a lot of people didn't get to find that out because it cost money to play. Good enough and free will beat out better and expensive almost every time (the key part being "good enough", which, granted, makes that rule someone circular ;) ).
- msla 5y ago
  And the good enough gets better. It makes the snobs look a bit ridiculous: "Oh, it only took you five years to get to where we were... but we were on expensive hardware you couldn't buy without a major contract, running fewer applications, and invested in a system that would be eaten by the low end so comprehensively now only snobs know how good it was."
gotaquestion 5y ago
I worked at Intel from 1988-1998 and when I started we had either AIX or SunOS terminals (a few folks had giant HPUX boxes). By 1996, everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, switched to Linux and VNC. It happened quickly. First we started hearing about Linux, then a quarter later all the remote machines were Linux, then the quarter after that they took away our workstations. There were a few HPUX boxes in the larger pools for extremely compute-heavy layout tasks, but everything else was RedHat. Point is: I remember writing scripts for then main environment and every script had to work on all terminals. The three variations meant constantly armor-plating things with HPUX/AIX/SUNOS variable checks. I hated that. I was glad when RedHat came along and we stopped doing that. (Also, back then it was a sign of being cool to have an 8514/A monitor, and not the B&W sun terminals.)
StayTrue 5y ago
Solaris is good memories for me too but only nostalgia in 2022. First job out of school was writing device drivers for Solaris.
rbanffy 5y ago
> Will I install it again? No. I'd give it a chance if it came with CDE or OpenWindows.

farmerstan 5y ago

I work in enterprise software and around 2000 the combination of Solaris and Oracle database was the most rock solid out of all the various OS/DB combinations. I vaguely remember the threading model was weird and I think limited stack size per thread but overall it was my favorite combo because of how reliable it was. The speed with which Linux killed Solaris however was astonishing.

azinman2 5y ago
It’s hard to beat free that runs on cheap everyday hardware.
- Bluecobra 5y ago
  Sun actually made x86 Solaris 10 free and it ran well on commodity hardware. When Oracle bought them, they pulled the rug and demanded $1K per CPU per year for the privilege if it was non-Sun/Oracle hardware.
  - hunta2097 5y ago
    I see this as a huge mistake (quelle surprise, this is Oracle after all). If they had just copied the RedHat model they might have been onto a winner. Free unstable, paid stable.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      They already have Oracle Linux for that.
      - floren 5y ago
        I'm drinking coffee out of an Oracle Linux mug from SCaLE 9x, which would have been 2011... note how Oracle Linux has absolutely taken over the world since then :)
    - hapless 5y ago
      Sun tried every combination of free and paid and none of them made inroads in x86. Yes, that includes the Red Hat model (remember OpenSolaris?)
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        It lasted for a very short time. OTOH, OpenIndiana is still reasonable if you want a Solaris.
        hapless 5y ago
        They spent twenty years experimenting with different approaches to marketing Solaris x86. It was not a lack of persistence
  - azinman2 5y ago
    Perhaps free as in money but not in source. All the big boys who deployed it absolutely wanted the source to customize in house. Also too little too late.
- smsm42 5y ago
  It's not only that. I deployed commercial projects when the question "Solaris or Linux" didn't sound ridiculous, and there were times where Solaris had been a reasonable choice. But that was a long time ago. Since then Linux (and the ecosystem) matured a lot, and Solaris didn't have much to counter that, so its relative worth declined rapidly.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > It’s hard to beat free that runs on cheap everyday hardware. They were a hardware company that designed their own CPUs. If a company could pull an Apple and do an M1, it would be Sun. Unfortunately, their low-cost machines performed just like PCs and cost the same, without PC software to run on them. And building x86 boxes that ran with Solaris ensured they'd be no better than PCs, without any compelling software.
jcims 5y ago
IMHO the relative cost of Linux hardware created a brain drain that they didn't see coming and ultimately couldn't resolve. The amount of work a single well-equipped E4500 could do vs a cabinet of x86 gear was remarkable, but that E4500 might run $600K and the x86 gear 0-10% of that.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
I was at university in the late 90s. In exchange for buying us all (usually cheap) pizza, companies could come in and give an hour long pitch for why we should come work for them after graduation. A few big companies wanted more time so they'd cater higher end pizza or more elaborate catering as a bribe to get students to come to their presentation. Microsoft bough a large amount of Mellow Mushroom (the best pizza in our little college town) and did a two hour presentation on what it is like to work at Microsoft and why we should want to work there. Later in the semester Sun came to campus and catered their two hour presentation with chicken nuggets. But real issue was that the people and videos that were part of Sun's presentation didn't tell us much about Sun or why we should work there. It was a two hour long ranting whinefest about why no one should work at Microsoft. This was on the East Coast so these people were doing a tour of all of the major engineering schools and wasting it on their angst over Microsoft. I was around the time of the JVM lawsuit so I understand why Sun was mad at Microsoft but it seemed to have broken something in their corporate DNA and turned them insane. Perhaps that was just an isolated incident confined to the university recruiters but Sun at that time seemed overly focused on fighting Microsoft instead of improving their product offerings. Perhaps some of anger ended up turning potential users and employees away from Microsoft but I suspect lots of those ended up going with Linux or some other alternative rather than going with Sun.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident! But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if. The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft. It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc! And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh! https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computing-to-the-channel/4107 https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computin... Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris. To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke: Q: What do you get when you cross Sun and AT&T? A: AT&T.
ubermonkey 5y ago
I'm still staggered by it, and I watched it happen, too. Several times in my computing career -- say, from 1990 on -- I've seen something start to happen that was clearly going to be huge, only to be told over and over that the obviously-inevitable development was Impossible. The first example was the ascendancy of the microcomputer. "OH, there will ALWAYS be a space for mainframes! Corporations aren't going to do their accounting on some crappy PC! You're just young and don't see how these things really work." The second was the way Linux completely destroyed the commercial Unix market (and, with it, the "fancy Unix workstation" market). The power of FOSS is, in my view, very very often overstated by idealists, but it's hard not to see the wholesale corporate/academic/research shift from Solaris, et. al., to Linux on commodity hardware as anything but a HUGE win in terms of computing power.

sixothree 5y ago

We had SparcStation 1 pizza boxes at my school. Huge black and white monitors. Core dumps as large as your disk quota. So much fun times.

icedchai 5y ago

Yes! People today may not realize how huge Sun was in the 90's. Almost all startups ran on Sun gear. Almost all ISPs had a Sun system for their "shell account" servers. Also, I had a SparcStation 10 at home in 1996 or so (which was kind of unheard of!)

pjmlp 5y ago
I only really cared about GNU/Linux in production around 2006, until then it was a means to have a cheap UNIX clone at home, while we were deploying Solaris, HP-UX and Aix into production. Most of the deployments were naturally Solaris based.
- icedchai 5y ago
  About 2002 here. Some companies were more conservative than others. One was okay with Linux for dev systems, but not production. Another had a "low end" product ported from AIX, which ran on Linux.
pklausler 5y ago
It wasn't just startups, of course; we used Sun gear at good ol' Cray Research in that era and it was our first upgrade from dumb terminals on mainframes (& vaxen). Good times. (I still remember when Sun introduced color systems, and they were such status symbols that they went mostly to managers, including one who was color-blind. A warning sign in retrospect, I suppose.)
endymi0n 5y ago
Totally honest question: WHY does everyone think it was cool? I can still remember running it in Uni on some of the prized workstations with everyone raving about it but never got the point about it. Back then I was on Windows and everything I saw on Sun systems looked weird, laggy and just super obscure to me. The whole UI felt like a mix of enterprise and neckbeard charme despite being non-open. It did not seem to run none any of the things I cared about back then. Later on I remembered Sun mainly in context of their stewardship of Java which also didn't help connecting any good feelings to it. So maybe in 2022 someone could enlighten me about what exactly was so cool about Sun?

shadowgovt 5y ago

It was good, but a lot of people didn't get to find that out because it cost money to play. Good enough and free will beat out better and expensive almost every time (the key part being "good enough", which, granted, makes that rule someone circular ;) ).

msla 5y ago
And the good enough gets better. It makes the snobs look a bit ridiculous: "Oh, it only took you five years to get to where we were... but we were on expensive hardware you couldn't buy without a major contract, running fewer applications, and invested in a system that would be eaten by the low end so comprehensively now only snobs know how good it was."

gotaquestion 5y ago

I worked at Intel from 1988-1998 and when I started we had either AIX or SunOS terminals (a few folks had giant HPUX boxes). By 1996, everything, and I mean EVERYTHING, switched to Linux and VNC. It happened quickly. First we started hearing about Linux, then a quarter later all the remote machines were Linux, then the quarter after that they took away our workstations. There were a few HPUX boxes in the larger pools for extremely compute-heavy layout tasks, but everything else was RedHat. Point is: I remember writing scripts for then main environment and every script had to work on all terminals. The three variations meant constantly armor-plating things with HPUX/AIX/SUNOS variable checks. I hated that. I was glad when RedHat came along and we stopped doing that. (Also, back then it was a sign of being cool to have an 8514/A monitor, and not the B&W sun terminals.)

StayTrue 5y ago

Solaris is good memories for me too but only nostalgia in 2022. First job out of school was writing device drivers for Solaris.

rbanffy 5y ago

> Will I install it again? No. I'd give it a chance if it came with CDE or OpenWindows.