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Sun first big mistake was doing the deal with AT&T to do Solaris. Sun should have continued to champion BSD derived software. This hurt them in a few ways, lit

Sun first big mistake was doing the deal with AT&T to do Solaris. Sun should have continued to champion BSD derived software. This hurt them in a few ways, literally every other player in the ecosystem was unified against Sun/AT&T and where there could have been a lot more cooperation, now there was the opposite. It also massively hurt them in that Solaris was basically shit for a very long time. Many costumers held on to SunOS 4.x for a very long time. Solaris was not popular but that where all the semantic multiprocessor stuff was done. There were people inside of Sun that even in the early 90s still wanted to switch back to SunOS. Had Sun simply continued to improve SunOS, added multi-processor stuff there, open-sourced things like NEWS (something literally everybody in the company expect a few lawyers wanted) and continued to distribute their compiler for free, it would have become the standard and preferred Unix. They also should have continued with the i386 series of machines. They put themselves on the path of incredibly proprietary OS and incredibly proprietary CPU that were very high priced as PC compatibles got cheaper and cheaper and x86 got faster and faster.

icedchai 4y ago
Yes, I worked at an early ISP and SunOS was popular for "shell" servers. The users did not want Solaris 2.x, mainly because open source software was tough to compile on it. SunOS 4.x was basically the standard open source target at that point (early to mid 90's.) Solaris was pretty bad up until the >2.5 days. 2.5.1 and above were pretty solid releases. I ran 2.5.1 and 2.6 on my personal desktop (Sparc 10) for a while.
linksnapzz 4y ago
>and incredibly proprietary CPU This is the opposite of true. sparcv8 is an IEEE standard. You might have to pay a license fee to Sparc International for certification and logo compliance, but that's it. Sun couldn't and didn't stop you from making them.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  That only true for SPARCv8 and the first SPARCv9 was interceded in 1995. The IEEE standard was from 1994. So practically speaking, Sun did move to proprietary CPUs. First when they interceded SPARC and then again when they switched to SPARCv9. Granted a few years in between when there was a slight amount of competition but that was over by the mid-90s before x86 ever took off fully.
  - linksnapzz 4y ago
    Please look up what "interceded" means. Even if v9 isn't an IEEE standard, you can still pay Sparc Intn'l for a license. Try going to intel with a request to make x86 chips.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      > Please look up what "interceded" means. That was an Autocorrect issue ... One can say that 'incredibly proprietary' was wrong, it was less proprietary then many other CPU at the time. It doesn't really change the analysis. Practically speaking that gave most Sun costumers very few option, and increasingly less as the 90s went on. There were just to many RISC ISAs competing for to little market. Sun tried to play the vertical integration walled garden game and in that game its really, really damn hard to win.

icedchai 4y ago

Yes, I worked at an early ISP and SunOS was popular for "shell" servers. The users did not want Solaris 2.x, mainly because open source software was tough to compile on it. SunOS 4.x was basically the standard open source target at that point (early to mid 90's.) Solaris was pretty bad up until the >2.5 days. 2.5.1 and above were pretty solid releases. I ran 2.5.1 and 2.6 on my personal desktop (Sparc 10) for a while.

linksnapzz 4y ago

>and incredibly proprietary CPU This is the opposite of true. sparcv8 is an IEEE standard. You might have to pay a license fee to Sparc International for certification and logo compliance, but that's it. Sun couldn't and didn't stop you from making them.

panick21_ 4y ago
That only true for SPARCv8 and the first SPARCv9 was interceded in 1995. The IEEE standard was from 1994. So practically speaking, Sun did move to proprietary CPUs. First when they interceded SPARC and then again when they switched to SPARCv9. Granted a few years in between when there was a slight amount of competition but that was over by the mid-90s before x86 ever took off fully.
- linksnapzz 4y ago
  Please look up what "interceded" means. Even if v9 isn't an IEEE standard, you can still pay Sparc Intn'l for a license. Try going to intel with a request to make x86 chips.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    > Please look up what "interceded" means. That was an Autocorrect issue ... One can say that 'incredibly proprietary' was wrong, it was less proprietary then many other CPU at the time. It doesn't really change the analysis. Practically speaking that gave most Sun costumers very few option, and increasingly less as the 90s went on. There were just to many RISC ISAs competing for to little market. Sun tried to play the vertical integration walled garden game and in that game its really, really damn hard to win.