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> They were very far ahead. They weren't, though, not really. The tech industry just moves too fast for that kind of pronouncement. It's absolutely true that
by ajross 4y ago
> They were very far ahead.
They weren't, though, not really. The tech industry just moves too fast for that kind of pronouncement. It's absolutely true that a Sun-3/75 in 1986 was a revelation[1], but every one of those features was cloned as free software and running on sub-$1000 hardware by 1994. They likewise had a brief moment with SPARC in the early 90's where their machines were the fastest you could buy, but Intel demolished those hopes too[4]. Their swan song was the early dot com boom, where they still held onto the reputation as "The Best Unix" and sold a ton of web server hardware to the more conservative outfits. But we could all see the writing on the wall even then.
I mean, it's true they had some great stuff toward the end. But not that great, and generally not marketed in a way that would help them. Containers are actually a good example. Solaris Zones were... just a weird circus act[2]. I don't know any major players who made bets on the technology. And, again, within 2-3 years Linux had cgroups and LXC running[3] in a more performant (and much cheaper to deploy) environment and that's what Docker picked.
[1] Faster than a VAX, which was still the reference Unix box. Megapixel framebuffer with windowing and competent terminal emulation. Every box was on the Internet. Every box could see the rest of its network over NFS (and most were deployed diskless). FWIW: anyone know where I can get one? Would love one for the collection, but most seem to have disappeared (government and university equipment tends not to end up on eBay...)
[2] Edit because this was misunderstood: I'm saying it was an oddity with minimal uptake, not that it was chaotic or bad as a matter of design.
[3] This too got misunderstood, though I don't see how. I'm really not interested in a flame war about whose container technology is better. I'm just saying that to Sun in the early/mid 00's, it wasn't much of a competetive advantage (as evidenced by the fact that it lost to Docker).
[4] Ooph, this one too. I'm saying that in the early 90's SPARC was dancing with MIPS for the fastest CPUs on the planet, but by the release of the P6 core that was over and Intel had essentially won (though DEC kept the dance going a while longer with Alpha). I'm just amazed at the propensity for folks here to jump in to argue stuff that in my mind was settled decades ago.
- eduction 4y ago> every one of those features was cloned as free software and running on sub-$100k hardware by 1994 ? Zones weren’t released until nearly 10 years after 1994. Same for dtrace and zfs. Solaris was embryonic in 1994. Linux existed but wouldn’t take over servers until c2000-1 (as evidenced by Sun’s massive profits through the end of 1999). What features are you referring to?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shrubble 4y agoSolaris Zones are still far superior to LXC. It's hardly a circus act and SmartOS is being heavily used in many places. Solaris 10 vs contemporary Linux 2.6-era kernels handled memory-pressure situations so much better, that you essentially needed more RAM on the Linux system just to avoid low-memory situations to begin with. Been there, done that :) Linux won because it was a) free and b) aligned (simply because so many had and were using Linux) with Intel x86, and Intel's fabrication technology is/was world-leading. SPARC CPUs on the same fabrication node would still be amazing - but it isn't on the same node...
- ayewo 4y agoWhen you say: > Solaris Zones were... just a weird circus act. I don't know any major players who made bets on the technology. Joyent [1] readily comes to mind. IIRC, that kind of isolation was one of the selling points of their hosting service before they eventually shut it down. (Of course I'm fully aware that one of Joyent's founders was ex-Sun and comments around here too :) ) 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyent
- bcantrill 4y agoPresuming that you are referring to me, I am definitely not a founder of Joyent! That said, my rationale for coming to Joyent was not at all unrelated to some of the parallels I saw in Sun[0] -- and it is probably worth reading my own farewell to Sun as well[1]. (Also, because I can't resist completing the arc into the present, see becoming an ex-Joyeur[2] and starting Oxide[3].) [0] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/30/hello-joyent/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/30/hello-joyent/ [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/ [2] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/07/31/ex-joyeur/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/07/31/ex-joyeur/ [3] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-computer-company/ http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-com...
- ayewo 4y agoMy bad! I must have equated your high profile association with Joyent with being a co-founder. Thanks for swinging by to make the correction!
- bcantrill 4y agoHa, no worries! You're not the first to make the assumption, so I wanted to be sure to clarify. ;) And thank you for pointing out Joyent's use of zones in production. Indeed, it was Joyent's use of zones that attracted me to the company, and not the other way around...
- pjmlp 4y agoI really would like to know which Linux or BSD distribution did containers before Tru64, HP-UX and Solaris.
- wkat4242 4y agoFreeBSD had jails way before Linux had containers, but they did come after Solaris Zones.
- pjmlp 4y agoThe point discussed here is how FOSS did it first.
- yakubin 4y agoFreeBSD jails were released in 2000 in FreeBSD 4.0. Solaris Zones in 2004/2005. In fact, the original Solaris Zones paper cites jails as inspiration. Jails: Confining the omnipotent root (2000): <https://people.freebsd.org/~bapt/pdfdocs/papers/jail.pdf https://people.freebsd.org/~bapt/pdfdocs/papers/jail.pdf> Solaris Zones: Operating System Support for Consolidating Commercial Workloads (2004): <https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa04/tech/full_papers/price/price.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa04/tech/full_papers/...> Originally, jails didn't virtualise the network stack. That was added later, in FreeBSD 8.0 with VNETs, which were buggy for a long time, but went through extensive testing and are enabled by default since FreeBSD 12.0 (quite recently). Solaris Zones went a step further than the original design, and run a separate network stack for each zone from the start, years before FreeBSD did. BTW, recommended talk about those topics: Papers We Love: Jails and Zones: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U>
- pjmlp 4y agoMeanwhile in 1996 with HP-UX 10.24 update. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX https://community.hpe.com/t5/security/hp-virtual-vault/td-p/3865588#.Y-nb2K3MIQ8 https://community.hpe.com/t5/security/hp-virtual-vault/td-p/...
- 4y ago
- hulitu 4y ago> They likewise had a brief moment with SPARC in the early 90's where their machines were the fastest you could buy, but Intel demolished those hopes too. Intel was slow in the early 90s. Intel (or more specifically amd64) started to become competitive on the lower end in the early 2000s when the Itanium hype reached its maximum. If you look at SpecInt 2000 an 1.4 GHz Intel is equivalent with a 500 MHz PA-RISC.
- wkat4242 4y agoI think conceptually they were really good and innovative. They just had a hard time making money off it. By the way what are you looking for? A VAX or a SPARCstation? VAXes are indeed very hard to come by, and I didn't realise they were ever the "reference unix box" - weren't they more common for VMS? But somehow I never came across them back in the day. I think part of the reason is that they mainly sold servers, they weren't that big on the workstation market. Sun, SGI and HP-UX I used a lot, HP-UX the most. I still have two HP-UX workstations at home.
- ajross 4y agoI have a few SPARCs, actually. Those are fairly easy to find. I want a Sun-3, because to my mind that's the truly transformative device. In principle I could sit at a 38-year-old Sun 3 today and do my actual job productively, with pretty minimal workflow changes. It's one of just a handful of Devices That Changed Computing Forever, and in principle one that should be accessible to a collector. But they're rarer than I'd have expected, especially given how many I saw sitting around at school in the 90's. And yeah, the desktop VAXen were almost exclusively for VMS. But the standard Unix box in the early-mid 80's that everyone talked about when they discussed/benchmarked/whatever the platform was a 11/780 running 4.2BSD. Those aren't meaningfully collectible for an individual, obviously.
- wkat4242 4y agoI love collecting old machines also <3 I have a PDP-8 and 11 replica (from obsolescence guaranteed), some of my first computers, a G3 iMac of which I just love the design, HP-UX boxes because they were really formative for me with Unix. I also owned some Sun hardware (a SPARCstation 5 and an X-Terminal) but sold it when I moved to a small apartment. I still regret this. But indeed the servers are really hard for collectors because of the size. Similarly with the real PDP's of the day. We had a real PDP-11 at the computer museum where we volunteered though we never turned it on. Too afraid of a cap blowing and damaging more. HP had some nice small servers later on, but they were not very influential so like you I don't really see a benefit in collecting them.
- hanche 4y ago