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What would have happened is the company would have folded. Sun's problem's happened long before they were purchased. Their number one problem is that they were
by matt_heimer 4y ago
What would have happened is the company would have folded.
Sun's problem's happened long before they were purchased. Their number one problem is that they were a hardware company and never figured out how to be a software company. It was Linux and cheap Intel hardware combined Sun's lackluster support for x86 Solaris that doomed them.
- jabl 4y agoYeah. Sometimes I wonder how everything would have turned out had they gone all-in on x86 starting with the Sun386i in 1988 and never developed SPARC.
- ghaff 4y agoOr someone like Motorola could have done RISC sooner. (They did eventually with the 88K but Sun, IBM, etc. had all gone with their own RISC chips by then.)
- kjs3 4y agoSomeone did do RISC sooner; for example, MIPS shipped R2000 in 1985 and Clipper shipped C100 in 1986. SPARC and 88k were introduced within a year of each other as I recall (87/88).
- ghaff 4y agoYeah, MIPS is probably the best example and did get some uptake. But the big vendors mostly went their own way. Although I was involved in that history to a degree, I'm not entirely sure why history played out the way it did.
- kjs3 4y agoWell...any history will attract a torrent of nitpicking, so this is my extremely reductist take. Motorola, IBM & Apple decided to join up on a common HW platform called "PReP" which was POWER/PPC based, so Motorola dumped 88k to play ball with that. PReP was a flash in the pan, but PPC briefly shone as Apples processor, and is still around in various forms (mostly embedded now, but POWER still ships in volume). Similar trajectory with MIPS. Clipper was never going to be a big player; it was a niche within a niche. SPARC, HPPA & Alpha got steamrolled by much cheaper, performance competitive x86 derived processors. In the end, most volume customers said "can it run my software fast and cheap" and by sometime in the 90s that was clearly an x86 (unless your name was "Apple", but that's a different history).
- sgerenser 4y agoSGI was on MIPS, and if anything they fared worse than Sun.
- lenkite 4y agoThey were one of the few companies in the 2000s that could have utterly owned both the browser space and the cloud space if they had worked at it and persisted.