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What I find fascinating about Sun is how fast its ride was. They launched their MVP in 1982 which was really just a bare 68000 board with a kluged together sof
by ajross 2y ago
What I find fascinating about Sun is how fast its ride was. They launched their MVP in 1982 which was really just a bare 68000 board with a kluged together software suite. The second generation Sun 2's were like a year and a half later, running virtual memory on 4BSD, the 68020 made the Sun 3's in 1985 faster than a VAX, and suddenly Sun was The Premier Unix that everyone targetted.
The next few years (up through 1991 or so) would see the launch of SPARC[1] and all the Unix goodness we all still work on: shared libraries, NFS, RPC, pervasive IPv4 networking, basically everything about the modern datacenter software environment dates from these few years at Sun.
And then, sort of out of nowhere in the mid 90's, Linux distros running on P6 boards had essentially cloned it all on hardware 1/10th the price and the end had begun. Sun would continue to make a lot of money through the doc com boom, but their status as the thought and innovation center of Unix hit a brick wall.
The story of the end was all about Java and Oracle and datacenter markets. And IMHO it's not that interesting. What the hell happened to Unix?
[1] In hindsight it was just a flash in the pan, but the RISC arrival in the Unix world was shocking at the time. Even though in hindsight the workstation vendors had at most a 3-4 year lead on Intel at the peak and would rapidly fall behind.
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoWhat happened to Unix? It became part of the background. Sun (and then Linux) succeeded so well that Sun didn't matter any more.
- cmrdporcupine 2y agoYeah in retrospect, it feels somewhat inevitable to me that Linux (or something similar if that hadn't happen) would displace it all and demolish the business model of "Unix as commodity", given Unix itself was clearly initially aimed at trying to popularize/democratize a set of technologies/techniques/concepts that had been previously locked up inside larger corporations and projects. The motive force of "getting this out there" was there, and was bound to escape the workstation maker's clutches. I didn't live through the minicomputer era, but definitely grew up in the "Unix [and then Linux] ascendant" era and was an early adopter (as a user) of Linux on my 486. We just wanted what all the cool kids [err, adults] had. I spent many hours fine tuning my X11 environment to look like the screenshots I saw in UnixWorld of real Unix workstations, etc. ... without doing any actual "real work" with it... Looking back, it was inevitable that Unix would become less and less a sale-able commodity and more and more a free standard that hackers would just ... assume. I'm not sure how Sun could have saved itself without just turning itself into a services company, just too hard to win on economies of scale making actual hardware. They made hay while the Sun(tm) shone, I guess.
- TMWNN 2y ago> Looking back, it was inevitable that Unix would become less and less a sale-able commodity and more and more a free standard that hackers would just ... assume. I wonder if the operating system[1] has turned out to be the ultimate expression of Steve Jobs's quote about Dropbox: "feature, not a product". A means to an end, with the end being where all the value is. Everyone talks about Microsoft retaining the rights to market DOS independent of the IBM license being the most important business deal of all time, but Microsoft producing its own applications may be even more important in retrospect. [1] I wrote "Unix", but of course Windows has been de facto free, even when not purchased with a computer, for some time
- kjellsbells 2y ago> Microsoft producing its own applications may be even more important in retrospect. I remain convinced that Microsoft Excel is the most important thing they ever built. You could replace Windows for Linux or vice versa and the world would hum along more or less the same. But entire economies are essentially running on what people do with Excel.
- ghaff 2y agoI did a podcast with ex-Sun Bryan Cantrill and sjvn a few years back about the inevitability of open source as part of a series. Bryan’s take was basically, if not Linux, BSD. Of course, there’s also the school that Microsoft basically wins which many assumed at the time.
- rdc12 2y agoDo you have a link to that podcast?
- ghaff 2y agohttps://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/05/podcast-was-open-source-inevitable-part_26.html https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/05/podcast-was-open-sourc... There's also a link to a transcript of the whole series at that link. https://grhpodcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/Opensourceinevitabilityfinal.html https://grhpodcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/Opensourceinevitability... I did the series early in the pandemic as an activity until things blew over in a couple months. :-(
- chasil 2y agoI never used it, but the first UNIX port for ARM was called RISC iX and it was introduced in 1988. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX In retrospect, if Sun had acquired Acorn, they might still be around.
- ajross 2y agoThis is revisionist. ARM didn't break out as an embedded architecture until a full decade later. At the time it was entirely forgettable, with no competitive parts in the workstation market and no software worth running (again, the center of the universe at the time was SunOS). It's popular now to imagine that ARM had some magic ISA back in the 80's, but it was very much an also-ran through most of its life. The magic is inside Apple Computer, and quite frankly they could have made anything fast. They simply happened to have an ARM OS core running already, so they picked the architecture that wouldn't force people to recompile their iPhone apps.
- chasil 2y agoThen how do you explain StrongARM? Why would DEC indulge in an also-ran? Ken Olsen's folly? Or is 1996 far too late? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
- Apocryphon 2y ago1996 was far too early for what they were trying to make it for: > The StrongARM was designed to address the upper end of the low-power embedded market, where users needed more performance than the ARM could deliver while being able to accept more external support. Targets were devices such as newer personal digital assistants and set-top boxes. They'd be able to power a faster PalmPilot or proto-TiVo with it but this was years before the mobile design advances, let alone battery and screen improvements, that led to the iPhone.
- ajross 2y ago> Then how do you explain StrongARM? Do I need to? StrongARM is pretty much the definition of an "also-ran" product, no? It had no particularly notable design wins, and while it sold in reasonable volume was a distant second to MIPS in the "consumer junk" segment[1]. DEC unloaded it to Intel, where it becamse Xscale, and Intel dumped it on Marvell. At no point did anyone really care much about it. Even within the ARM world itself, it was ARM Ltd's CPU cores (also Qualcomm had some decent designs) that powered the architecture's way back to relevance on phones, out of which Apple would grow to dominate. [1] Set top boxes, cable modems, stuff like that.
- UncleOxidant 2y agoI recall that in about '92 Intel had launched a project called Eclipse which was an x86-based workstation they were developing to compete against Sun. As with many Intel projects, it didn't get anywhere.
- ajross 2y agoNever heard of that particular product, but in point of fact Sun's original core workstation market had been essentially destroyed by the late 90's by x86 boxes running Windows NT. Intel didn't have the product in the channel in 1992, but by 1996 it was clear SPARC's days were numbered.
- hapless 2y agoWrecking the workstation market was easy, because workstations had small numbers of CPUs, and small pools of RAM. Intel started fucking up that market in the late 1980s. x86 wasn't competitive on the server side until K8 (AMD) and Nehalem (Intel). So you have a real long stretch -- 1987-ish to 2008-ish -- where proprietary UNIX on proprietary architectures owns the server side, even though the workstation market is eroding the whole time.
- ajross 2y ago> x86 wasn't competitive on the server side until K8 (AMD) and Nehalem (Intel). Google and Amazon launched world-beating datacenters before 2000 on P6's, that's just silly.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nostrademons 2y agoI think the root issue here is Joy’s Law [1]: “No matter who you are, the majority of smart people do not work for you.” Sun had a whole lot of very talented engineers working for them, but ultimately they were building a proprietary, vertically integrated system. When compared with the best memory makers in Japan and the best CPU makers at Intel and AMD and the loosely knit coalition of OS engineers working on Linux and all the Linux desktop engineers, they eventually found that the best engineers did not work for them. [1] Ironically coined and named after Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy.
- cryptonector 2y ago26 years. Not much shorter than Microsoft's ride so far, but much much shorter than IBM's.
- ajross 2y agoAgain though, after 1995-ish Sun just stopped "doing Unix", abandoned the community they created (who all trotted off happily to Red Hat et. al.), failed in their core workstation market, and basically spent their time milking server sales to conservative[1] IT departments who wanted to do "internet". Their swan song ended up being Java, an interesting (but again poorly exploited) technology that had next to nothing to do with the environment on which it was incubated. Frankly Sun ran away from it so hard that Java ended up running best (!) on Microsoft Windows. So basically it was 13 years, as I see it, from kids-with-soldering-irons-and-a-dream to world-changing-behemoth to company-your-grandparents-buy-from. That's fast even in Silicon Valley. [1] The cool kids, obviously, were all running Linux in their datacenters already. Only the S&P 500 dinosaurs were buying Sparcservers, but there were a lot of dinosaurs.
- cryptonector 2y agoSun greatly revitalized "Unix" in the 00s! Need I refer you to Bryan Cantrill's screed about how OS research was not boring? The list of features that shipped in the 00s is amazing: - DTrace - FMA/FMD - SMF - ZFS - the unified process model - NFSv4 - CIFS - and more and this was while being hamstrung by a crappy SVR4 networking architecture that the networking team was able to kill off (thank goodness). Some of these are things not yet re-invented elsewhere, others re-invented poorly: - systemd is a bad SMF - SystemTap is a bad DTrace - eBPF is pretty cool but in some key ways not as good as DTrace - ZFS remains unparalleled
- ajross 2y agoYeah, this turns into senseless flaming very quickly. But to be blunt, the fact that puts the lie to your point that all those technologies are "revitalizing" or whatever is that basically no one uses them[1]. They're interesting ways to win an argument on the internet (with which I won't engage), but not evidence that you're doing something actually important. [1] Obviously people use them! But not at scale and not in such a way that it provides meaningful advantage over the people who don't use them. Again, they're fun things to argue about but not transformative in the way that early SunOS was.