4 ms·

SparcOS was an awesome unix. Linux was respectable as well, but the hardware story in 2007 was much more shitty. Hardware vendors pretty much ignored linux, g

by bb88 2y ago

SparcOS was an awesome unix. Linux was respectable as well, but the hardware story in 2007 was much more shitty. Hardware vendors pretty much ignored linux, going for windows as I recall. So if you just wanted a good Unix environment, SparcOS was it. Java/ZFS were both Sun products, and we're still using them today. Just not SparcOS. Sun tried with Project Indiana, but they were getting outpaced by Linux and the open source movement.

wmf 2y ago
No, if you just wanted a good Unix environment in 2007 you would buy an x86 workstation with Linux preinstalled which existed from multiple vendors/VARs. Or Mac.
- Bluecobra 2y ago
  Solaris 10 worked pretty good on x86 and was free back then. Once Oracle acquired Sun, they eventually started to demand $1K per year per CPU core on hardware that wasn't made by Sun/Oracle.
rincebrain 2y ago
SunOS/Solaris, I believe you mean. OpenSolaris was an interesting experiment.
- robin_reala 2y ago
  It’s still going, in the form of Illumos: https://illumos.org/ https://illumos.org/
  - rincebrain 2y ago
    Kind of. I was specifically talking about the corporate experiment of deciding to go that hard for open sourcing your crown jewels, and Oracle has notably discontinued their participation in that experiment.
    - devchix 2y ago
      Sun had few paths forward, with Linux + commodity hardware, what were they going to do, keep selling the OS and support contract at a price fewer and fewer were willing to pay? Sun had a suite of IDE and compilers that at one time sold for thousands of dollars per seat, the compiler was optimized for the architecture, but gdb was free and can get you code that runs just as well, unless you're under a benchmark. They were also under pressure from the OpenSource dev tools that were getting richer for GNU + Linux. Now that Solaris is practically dead, and RHEL is a subsidiary of IBM, given the dev and support state of CentOS and RockyLinux, I wonder if the community ever regret the loss of what could have flourished as another branch of the *nix ecosystem.
      - rincebrain 2y ago
        I mean, I regret it to this day. Solaris had (and illumos has) truly unmatched tooling around a number of things.
jerrysievert 2y ago
sunos was the bsd-based sun operating system for 68k and sparc. solaris was the at&t based sun operating system for sparc and x86.
- neilv 2y ago
  Small addition: there were also the x86-based Sun 386i models, running up to SunOS 4.0.2. (The Sun 386i didn't get SunOS 4.1 nor Solaris 2, at least not at our site, where we had a few sitting around in empty cubicles, and occasionally used for random things.)
  - jerrysievert 2y ago
    > x86-based Sun 386i models, running up to SunOS 4.0.2 oh gosh, I always forget about those, thanks! around here, it was mostly the 68k suns, followed by sparc. the 386 unix variants were mostly sequent. I remember one fun job interview in the 90's, where before we went to grab beer the interviewer (my future boss) stopped in the office and said "and this will be your sparc" - to be quite honest, that was such a huge perk!
    - neilv 2y ago
      I think Sun was trying to be more friendly for customers who needed to run a little PC software in addition to real workstation software. Incidentally, we were a Sun ISV and customer out in the Silicon Forest, where Sequent was located (and Intel, Tektronix...). I initially learned C++ and Smalltalk from an adjunct professor from Sequent. Also where Cray Research Superservers (nee FPS) was, who developed a multiprocessing SPARC system before Sun. Which is how, as a teen, I got sent by a marketing guy to onsite at Cray, to "port" some of our software to the Cray S-MP. It was a nice time and place, with a little like a mini version of being in Silicon Valley, but with more rain.
      - jerrysievert 2y ago
        yup - the job interview I was talking about was for EasyStreet, one of the big local IPSs in the Portland area. we were located in beaverton off of Allen. I also spent a lot of time in the old sequent campus, at the OSDL, and a bunch of time at OGI before it got subsumed. I still remember the day when Microsoft visited the office, saw I had a Microsoft keyboard connected to my sparc, and asked if I ran internet explorer (they had a solaris version). I laughed and said, "no, I only have 96mb of ram, you can't run internet explorer in only 96mb of ram".

by bb88 2y ago

wmf 2y ago

No, if you just wanted a good Unix environment in 2007 you would buy an x86 workstation with Linux preinstalled which existed from multiple vendors/VARs. Or Mac.

Bluecobra 2y ago
Solaris 10 worked pretty good on x86 and was free back then. Once Oracle acquired Sun, they eventually started to demand $1K per year per CPU core on hardware that wasn't made by Sun/Oracle.

rincebrain 2y ago

SunOS/Solaris, I believe you mean. OpenSolaris was an interesting experiment.

robin_reala 2y ago
It’s still going, in the form of Illumos: https://illumos.org/ https://illumos.org/
- rincebrain 2y ago
  Kind of. I was specifically talking about the corporate experiment of deciding to go that hard for open sourcing your crown jewels, and Oracle has notably discontinued their participation in that experiment.
  - devchix 2y ago
    Sun had few paths forward, with Linux + commodity hardware, what were they going to do, keep selling the OS and support contract at a price fewer and fewer were willing to pay? Sun had a suite of IDE and compilers that at one time sold for thousands of dollars per seat, the compiler was optimized for the architecture, but gdb was free and can get you code that runs just as well, unless you're under a benchmark. They were also under pressure from the OpenSource dev tools that were getting richer for GNU + Linux. Now that Solaris is practically dead, and RHEL is a subsidiary of IBM, given the dev and support state of CentOS and RockyLinux, I wonder if the community ever regret the loss of what could have flourished as another branch of the *nix ecosystem.
    - rincebrain 2y ago
      I mean, I regret it to this day. Solaris had (and illumos has) truly unmatched tooling around a number of things.

jerrysievert 2y ago

sunos was the bsd-based sun operating system for 68k and sparc. solaris was the at&t based sun operating system for sparc and x86.

neilv 2y ago
Small addition: there were also the x86-based Sun 386i models, running up to SunOS 4.0.2. (The Sun 386i didn't get SunOS 4.1 nor Solaris 2, at least not at our site, where we had a few sitting around in empty cubicles, and occasionally used for random things.)
- jerrysievert 2y ago
  > x86-based Sun 386i models, running up to SunOS 4.0.2 oh gosh, I always forget about those, thanks! around here, it was mostly the 68k suns, followed by sparc. the 386 unix variants were mostly sequent. I remember one fun job interview in the 90's, where before we went to grab beer the interviewer (my future boss) stopped in the office and said "and this will be your sparc" - to be quite honest, that was such a huge perk!
  - neilv 2y ago
    I think Sun was trying to be more friendly for customers who needed to run a little PC software in addition to real workstation software. Incidentally, we were a Sun ISV and customer out in the Silicon Forest, where Sequent was located (and Intel, Tektronix...). I initially learned C++ and Smalltalk from an adjunct professor from Sequent. Also where Cray Research Superservers (nee FPS) was, who developed a multiprocessing SPARC system before Sun. Which is how, as a teen, I got sent by a marketing guy to onsite at Cray, to "port" some of our software to the Cray S-MP. It was a nice time and place, with a little like a mini version of being in Silicon Valley, but with more rain.
    - jerrysievert 2y ago
      yup - the job interview I was talking about was for EasyStreet, one of the big local IPSs in the Portland area. we were located in beaverton off of Allen. I also spent a lot of time in the old sequent campus, at the OSDL, and a bunch of time at OGI before it got subsumed. I still remember the day when Microsoft visited the office, saw I had a Microsoft keyboard connected to my sparc, and asked if I ran internet explorer (they had a solaris version). I laughed and said, "no, I only have 96mb of ram, you can't run internet explorer in only 96mb of ram".