4 ms·

A brief history of Dell Unix (2008)

139 points by fanf2 2y ago

mncsz 2y ago
[flagged]
hjfjh 2y ago
[flagged]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rwmj 2y ago
Does anyone know what happened to Jeremy Chatfield (mentioned in the article)? He disappeared off the face of the earth around 2014, and I assumed may have passed away but I've not been able to find out.
- nextos 2y ago
  Quite plausible. Dell still sells lots of Linux machines which come with a slightly customized Ubuntu, but support is not very good. My employer bought me a $20k workstation a few years back. Hardware was 100% mainstream x86_64. It was expensive simply because it had a massive amount of ECC RAM and a big Xeon CPU. Anyway, it was pretty shocking to discover that the machine bootlooped straight out of the box. Easy to fix, just boot from a live USB and install another Linux distribution, which I was planning to do anyway, but quite disappointing for an expensive product from a manufacturer that supposedly supports Linux and sells tons of servers. Hopefully, as Microsoft looses some leverage, we can get good Linux support from other manufacturers.
  - zdimension 2y ago
    I think you might have replied to the wrong comment
    - nextos 2y ago
      Yes it was a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41027805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41027805
- helf 2y ago
  Man you weren't kidding. EVERYTHING stops in 2014. And I've dug through London and UK death records etc. can't find anything. Everything is 2014 or earlier https://mightyframe.blogspot.com/p/history.html?m=1 https://mightyframe.blogspot.com/p/history.html?m=1
- gonzo 2y ago
  I didn’t know Chatfield, but I knew Ron McDowell (also mentioned). Ron passed away in 2012. The last thing he worked on was FreeBSD’s bsdconfig(8).
- runjake 2y ago
  I find people, though mostly US people, and yeah, his online activity drops off in late Nov 2014. You can easily find several of his presences, including on HN, under the handle jezchatfield. For whatever reason, he reminds me of edw519, who used to be quite well-known around these parts. I reached out to Jeremy's family members and linked to this thread. Will update if I hear back.
- shrubble 2y ago
  I know he had started an SEO business at some point, but lost track of him over the years. I worked with him at Xi Graphics in the 1990s; I credit Jeremy with helping me a great deal in learning and really understanding "the Unix way".
bluedino 2y ago
> The business rationale for Dell UNIX was to sell Dell hardware. But the majority of the copies of Dell UNIX ended up running on other vendors’ machines. I wonder if Microsoft threatened Dell with price hikes (or offered price decreases) for their software if they didn't push Dell Unix
ggm 2y ago
Dells run freebsd just fine. I've managed probably 25 years of rackmount Dell by preference. Not that I don't hate iDrac and how they wantonly reprogram the SAS hba.
- r4nd_f 2y ago
  > iDrac and how they wantonly reprogram the SAS hba. Wait, you've had the SAS HBA be reprogrammed by the iDrac? Does it happen just randomly? I've mainly got experience with the PERC controllers, not much with the standard HBAs
  - ggm 2y ago
    No, bad grammar on my part. I hate both the old idrac and it's shitty Java, and outdated pki certs, and, I hate dell's random reprogramming of the hba logic to suit their own model. They take the perc which is simply an lsi card, and do their own firmware which removes things like simple hba.
- AdamN 2y ago
  SCSI drivers on Dell servers not working with FreeBSD is why I moved to Linux in the early 2000s
jamesy0ung 2y ago
For those interested in running Dell Unix, this is a good resource https://virtuallyfun.com/2020/12/01/dell-unix-on-86box/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2020/12/01/dell-unix-on-86box/
pharaohgeek 2y ago
What ever happened to the X.Desktop GUI mentioned in the article? I'd never heard of it before, and the Wikipedia article on it never mentions what happened to it.
- pdw 2y ago
  IXI was bought by SCO, and they shipped X.Desktop with their Unix releases. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenServer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenServer
- rogerbinns 2y ago
  I worked on X.Desktop at IXI. All the Unix workstation vendors (and I mean all of them) had us port X.Desktop to their Unix systems. We had over 20 varieties of Unix systems in our office including Sony workstations, IBM, HP, Motorola, Sun, DEC etc. X.Desktop ensured a workstation had a graphical desktop in multiple languages (English, French, German, Japanese), as there was no alternative except Looking Glass briefly. SCO bought IXI to ensure continued and expanded support for their platform. Over 95% of our business was on the RISC platforms, especially Sun workstations. The standard Motif source also had many bugs we fixed so that was an important part of the business. Other than OEM deals, a lot of our customer base was all the Wall Street companies, Government agencies, Oil Companies and others that used Unix workstations and applications. CDE (Common Desktop Environment) was announced which cratered our sales for a while, but it took quite a bit before CDE shipped. In the meantime Microsoft Windows took off as an alternative to Unix workstations, and especially the release of Windows NT meant that the graphical software than ran on Unix moved to Windows, and the Unix workstation market came to an end. IXI pivoted to software making Windows and Unix work together well, and then did Tarantella - a web based environment for interacting with graphical applications. SCO sold off its Unix business to Caldera (who sued IBM ...) and renamed itself Tarantella. Tarantella was later bought by Sun, and Sun was bought by Oracle. Oracle owns the X.Desktop source code. None of the source was used in later products.
arminiusreturns 2y ago
Dell is such a mixed bag on deep expertise like this over the years. I'll never forget working with the former head of their hard-drive analysis department; he knew more about hard-drives than anybody I've ever talked to, and he said they just suddenly shuttered basically the whole team out of nowhere, and lost much of the knowledge from that group. They have awesome teams in certain time periods, and horrible ones in others. I haven't really dealt with them in a while since I've been doing ODM datacenters for a while now.

139 points by fanf2 2y ago

mncsz 2y ago

[flagged]

hjfjh 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rwmj 2y ago

Does anyone know what happened to Jeremy Chatfield (mentioned in the article)? He disappeared off the face of the earth around 2014, and I assumed may have passed away but I've not been able to find out.

nextos 2y ago
Quite plausible. Dell still sells lots of Linux machines which come with a slightly customized Ubuntu, but support is not very good. My employer bought me a $20k workstation a few years back. Hardware was 100% mainstream x86_64. It was expensive simply because it had a massive amount of ECC RAM and a big Xeon CPU. Anyway, it was pretty shocking to discover that the machine bootlooped straight out of the box. Easy to fix, just boot from a live USB and install another Linux distribution, which I was planning to do anyway, but quite disappointing for an expensive product from a manufacturer that supposedly supports Linux and sells tons of servers. Hopefully, as Microsoft looses some leverage, we can get good Linux support from other manufacturers.
- zdimension 2y ago
  I think you might have replied to the wrong comment
  - nextos 2y ago
    Yes it was a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41027805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41027805
helf 2y ago
Man you weren't kidding. EVERYTHING stops in 2014. And I've dug through London and UK death records etc. can't find anything. Everything is 2014 or earlier https://mightyframe.blogspot.com/p/history.html?m=1 https://mightyframe.blogspot.com/p/history.html?m=1
gonzo 2y ago
I didn’t know Chatfield, but I knew Ron McDowell (also mentioned). Ron passed away in 2012. The last thing he worked on was FreeBSD’s bsdconfig(8).
runjake 2y ago
I find people, though mostly US people, and yeah, his online activity drops off in late Nov 2014. You can easily find several of his presences, including on HN, under the handle jezchatfield. For whatever reason, he reminds me of edw519, who used to be quite well-known around these parts. I reached out to Jeremy's family members and linked to this thread. Will update if I hear back.
shrubble 2y ago
I know he had started an SEO business at some point, but lost track of him over the years. I worked with him at Xi Graphics in the 1990s; I credit Jeremy with helping me a great deal in learning and really understanding "the Unix way".

bluedino 2y ago

> The business rationale for Dell UNIX was to sell Dell hardware. But the majority of the copies of Dell UNIX ended up running on other vendors’ machines. I wonder if Microsoft threatened Dell with price hikes (or offered price decreases) for their software if they didn't push Dell Unix

ggm 2y ago

Dells run freebsd just fine. I've managed probably 25 years of rackmount Dell by preference. Not that I don't hate iDrac and how they wantonly reprogram the SAS hba.

r4nd_f 2y ago
> iDrac and how they wantonly reprogram the SAS hba. Wait, you've had the SAS HBA be reprogrammed by the iDrac? Does it happen just randomly? I've mainly got experience with the PERC controllers, not much with the standard HBAs
- ggm 2y ago
  No, bad grammar on my part. I hate both the old idrac and it's shitty Java, and outdated pki certs, and, I hate dell's random reprogramming of the hba logic to suit their own model. They take the perc which is simply an lsi card, and do their own firmware which removes things like simple hba.
AdamN 2y ago
SCSI drivers on Dell servers not working with FreeBSD is why I moved to Linux in the early 2000s

jamesy0ung 2y ago

For those interested in running Dell Unix, this is a good resource https://virtuallyfun.com/2020/12/01/dell-unix-on-86box/ https://virtuallyfun.com/2020/12/01/dell-unix-on-86box/

pharaohgeek 2y ago

What ever happened to the X.Desktop GUI mentioned in the article? I'd never heard of it before, and the Wikipedia article on it never mentions what happened to it.

pdw 2y ago
IXI was bought by SCO, and they shipped X.Desktop with their Unix releases. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenServer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenServer
rogerbinns 2y ago
I worked on X.Desktop at IXI. All the Unix workstation vendors (and I mean all of them) had us port X.Desktop to their Unix systems. We had over 20 varieties of Unix systems in our office including Sony workstations, IBM, HP, Motorola, Sun, DEC etc. X.Desktop ensured a workstation had a graphical desktop in multiple languages (English, French, German, Japanese), as there was no alternative except Looking Glass briefly. SCO bought IXI to ensure continued and expanded support for their platform. Over 95% of our business was on the RISC platforms, especially Sun workstations. The standard Motif source also had many bugs we fixed so that was an important part of the business. Other than OEM deals, a lot of our customer base was all the Wall Street companies, Government agencies, Oil Companies and others that used Unix workstations and applications. CDE (Common Desktop Environment) was announced which cratered our sales for a while, but it took quite a bit before CDE shipped. In the meantime Microsoft Windows took off as an alternative to Unix workstations, and especially the release of Windows NT meant that the graphical software than ran on Unix moved to Windows, and the Unix workstation market came to an end. IXI pivoted to software making Windows and Unix work together well, and then did Tarantella - a web based environment for interacting with graphical applications. SCO sold off its Unix business to Caldera (who sued IBM ...) and renamed itself Tarantella. Tarantella was later bought by Sun, and Sun was bought by Oracle. Oracle owns the X.Desktop source code. None of the source was used in later products.

arminiusreturns 2y ago

Dell is such a mixed bag on deep expertise like this over the years. I'll never forget working with the former head of their hard-drive analysis department; he knew more about hard-drives than anybody I've ever talked to, and he said they just suddenly shuttered basically the whole team out of nowhere, and lost much of the knowledge from that group. They have awesome teams in certain time periods, and horrible ones in others. I haven't really dealt with them in a while since I've been doing ODM datacenters for a while now.