4 ms·

Making workstations even in the dominant market position that Sun had, was a cottage industry compared to technology today, and it was managed that way. I would

by Zigurd 5d ago

Making workstations even in the dominant market position that Sun had, was a cottage industry compared to technology today, and it was managed that way. I wouldn't blame management for Sun being irrelevant now. What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough. Not even Xerox. I've used aa Xerox Alto, a Sun workstation, an LMI CADR, and a Symbolics 3600, and none of them were as carefully crafted as a Macintosh with a tiny memory and a floppy disk. Next inherited this ethic. Jobs valued the person using the machine more than anything else about the machine.

arethuza 5d ago
My personal favourite UI was HyperNeWS built on Sun's NeWS. Edit: Writing PostScript and having no discernible security probably didn't make NeWS a great fit for the world of the Internet - but it was a lot of fun.
TacticalCoder 5d ago
> What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough. But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times. Sun, just like SGI, got attacked by cheap beige PCs running either Windows or Linux. I don't think their UI had much to do with their downfall and, arguably, SGI's UIs were better than the competition and they still disappeared too. Also weren't most machines sold by Sun servers anyway? Their famous "We the dot in .com" tagline.
- AceJohnny2 5d ago
  Linux was free, and people will put up with a lot of shit for that.
  - SoftTalker 5d ago
    Exactly. Free vs. $8k (in 1990 dollars) for a NeXT computer was a pretty easy choice for most people.
    - ch_sm 5d ago
      to be fair, nobody in 1990 decided between NeXT and Linux, because (A) Linux didn’t exist yet and (B) they were / would have been completely different markets and totally different capabilities.
      - SoftTalker 5d ago
        True. I think linux maybe had just been released but there was nothing like a "distro" that was easy to install. Minix existed at the time too, I know because I ran it on an 8088 PC. But within a few years, linux started gaining mindshare and was starting to replace proprietary unix especially on individual PCs.
        saltcured 5d ago
        You're off by a year or two at best. Linus announced his kernel project on the Minix usenet group in Aug 1991. It wasn't until mid 1992 that distros started to exist, and I'd say it took a bit of time for those to be complete enough to be usable for someone with a goal other than smoke-testing the kernel on their PC. I can say for certain that I, a complete newbie, was able to boot SLS Linux floppies in early 1993, and within a couple months I was installing Slackware to HDD.
        BirAdam 5d ago
        Yeah, 1993 is when things really took off. First SLS, then Slackware, and using Slackware as the build environment: Debian. You also had SuSE, which really started as German-localized Slackware.
    - _trampeltier 5d ago
      "Free", until mid 90s I guess most people bought Linux distros on CDs, later DVD (no downloads). For me the big, big plus on Linux (vs. Dos / Windows), had been all the free compilers.
  - saltcured 5d ago
    I also recall that Linux on a PC often beat the performance of Unix equipment I could access in contemporary times. There was a lore around those machines, but my actual experience doing basic FOSS-adjacent dev work (bash, make, gcc, autoconf) was that the Linux PC was faster as well as inexpensive. The exceptions were mostly hardware graphics accelerators in some labs, when my Linux PC had to do it in software. And I got myself a surplus DEC Multia (alpha) that was really fast with Linux for natively compiled code, beating my contemporary 486DX3-100. But, the PC was still faster for web browsing, because running Netscape on alpha meant doing x86 emulation! Likewise, my ~90 MHz Pentium MMX laptop with Linux was faster at regular dev work on my work-supplied Sun Ultra workstation in the late 90s. (Edit: Hmm, I am not sure about this laptop anymore, it might have been 166 MHz??) Due to my positive experiences, I was an aggressive early adopter (and frequent beta tester) of nearly every Linux ecosystem frontier for decades. E.g. 2D accelerators, 3D accelerators, SMP, large file support, gigabit ethernet, wireless ethernet, power management, virtualization, 64 bit architectures, SCSI/SATA/Firewire/e-SATA/NVME, hardware and MD-RAID, ext2/ext3/xfs/btrfs, ...
- orev 5d ago
  The vast majority of Linux installations don’t have a UI, they’re headless, and it was the same with Sun. I.E. the UI is irrelevant to the success or failure of Linux and Sun. Linux took over the world because any licensing model that requires a per CPU license simply can’t work in a massively scalable situation like server farms and cloud.
- giantrobot 5d ago
  > But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. Linux took over in all the places where a good GUI didn't matter. In ran most of the Unix server software on hardware orders of magnitude cheaper than what was needed to run a commercial Unix. Windows ran on that same cheap hardware but was much more expensive for the same capability. Despite Sun's marketing push Linux was really the dot in most of the dotcom darlings.
  - prmoustache 5d ago
    > Linux took over in all the places where a good GUI didn't matter. like smartphones ;-)
- ninkendo 5d ago
  > But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times. My first exposure to Solaris was in 2003 when Linux had Gnome 2.6 and Solaris had CDE. The UI on my Debian box seemed decades ahead of the Solaris machines I managed, which looked like Windows 3.1 and performed about as well. Combined with Linux package managers being infinitely better, the GNU core utilities having so many more conveniences and options than the Solaris equivalents, I felt like Sun was this dinosaur that couldn’t die fast enough. I’ll still never understand why so many people praise Sun for its engineering culture when free software seemed so superior to me at the time. My favorite anecdote exemplifying my opinion about Solaris at the time: you log into the console of your Sun workstation, running SunOS, with your Sun keyboard plugged in, and press backspace. It echoes ^H back to you. They couldn’t even figure out how to configure their own keyboards correctly out of the box. Maybe in the 90s the standards were different. Maybe their tech was better. But by the time I ever used their software is was the butt of jokes.
- AnimalMuppet 5d ago
  I remember a web page put up by an SGI employee, saying that x86 wasn't going to destroy the Unix workstation business. The title was "Pecked To Death By Ducks". Then Intel came out with dual-core processors, which was the new hotness. So he wrote a followup page, literally titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills". At the time, I thought they were funny, and made reasonable arguments. But in retrospect, they were just trying to distract the customers from the fact that Intel was overtaking them.
- mhsred5 5d ago
  At the end of the day, the UI on a Unix server was always shell based. That was just the best way to configure a server. (And, in some way Infrastructure as Code is an evolution of the shell scripts a unix admin would use.) Linux won on the server side because they got just as right as Unix. The crappy UI (windows) was the one that didn't work with shell scripting, didn't work with ssh, etc.
  - BirAdam 5d ago
    IaC is really just declarative shell scripts. It's a different language, but it's often just kicked off by some bash in a git action. Once you have git and actions, I don't think that the language really matters all that much.
- prmoustache 5d ago
  > and it had a crappy UI. That wasn't even true back then.

by Zigurd 5d ago

arethuza 5d ago

My personal favourite UI was HyperNeWS built on Sun's NeWS. Edit: Writing PostScript and having no discernible security probably didn't make NeWS a great fit for the world of the Internet - but it was a lot of fun.

TacticalCoder 5d ago

> What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough. But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times. Sun, just like SGI, got attacked by cheap beige PCs running either Windows or Linux. I don't think their UI had much to do with their downfall and, arguably, SGI's UIs were better than the competition and they still disappeared too. Also weren't most machines sold by Sun servers anyway? Their famous "We the dot in .com" tagline.

AceJohnny2 5d ago
Linux was free, and people will put up with a lot of shit for that.
- SoftTalker 5d ago
  Exactly. Free vs. $8k (in 1990 dollars) for a NeXT computer was a pretty easy choice for most people.
  - ch_sm 5d ago
    to be fair, nobody in 1990 decided between NeXT and Linux, because (A) Linux didn’t exist yet and (B) they were / would have been completely different markets and totally different capabilities.
    - SoftTalker 5d ago
      True. I think linux maybe had just been released but there was nothing like a "distro" that was easy to install. Minix existed at the time too, I know because I ran it on an 8088 PC. But within a few years, linux started gaining mindshare and was starting to replace proprietary unix especially on individual PCs.
      - saltcured 5d ago
        You're off by a year or two at best. Linus announced his kernel project on the Minix usenet group in Aug 1991. It wasn't until mid 1992 that distros started to exist, and I'd say it took a bit of time for those to be complete enough to be usable for someone with a goal other than smoke-testing the kernel on their PC. I can say for certain that I, a complete newbie, was able to boot SLS Linux floppies in early 1993, and within a couple months I was installing Slackware to HDD.
        BirAdam 5d ago
        Yeah, 1993 is when things really took off. First SLS, then Slackware, and using Slackware as the build environment: Debian. You also had SuSE, which really started as German-localized Slackware.
  - _trampeltier 5d ago
    "Free", until mid 90s I guess most people bought Linux distros on CDs, later DVD (no downloads). For me the big, big plus on Linux (vs. Dos / Windows), had been all the free compilers.
- saltcured 5d ago
  I also recall that Linux on a PC often beat the performance of Unix equipment I could access in contemporary times. There was a lore around those machines, but my actual experience doing basic FOSS-adjacent dev work (bash, make, gcc, autoconf) was that the Linux PC was faster as well as inexpensive. The exceptions were mostly hardware graphics accelerators in some labs, when my Linux PC had to do it in software. And I got myself a surplus DEC Multia (alpha) that was really fast with Linux for natively compiled code, beating my contemporary 486DX3-100. But, the PC was still faster for web browsing, because running Netscape on alpha meant doing x86 emulation! Likewise, my ~90 MHz Pentium MMX laptop with Linux was faster at regular dev work on my work-supplied Sun Ultra workstation in the late 90s. (Edit: Hmm, I am not sure about this laptop anymore, it might have been 166 MHz??) Due to my positive experiences, I was an aggressive early adopter (and frequent beta tester) of nearly every Linux ecosystem frontier for decades. E.g. 2D accelerators, 3D accelerators, SMP, large file support, gigabit ethernet, wireless ethernet, power management, virtualization, 64 bit architectures, SCSI/SATA/Firewire/e-SATA/NVME, hardware and MD-RAID, ext2/ext3/xfs/btrfs, ...
orev 5d ago
The vast majority of Linux installations don’t have a UI, they’re headless, and it was the same with Sun. I.E. the UI is irrelevant to the success or failure of Linux and Sun. Linux took over the world because any licensing model that requires a per CPU license simply can’t work in a massively scalable situation like server farms and cloud.
giantrobot 5d ago
> But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. Linux took over in all the places where a good GUI didn't matter. In ran most of the Unix server software on hardware orders of magnitude cheaper than what was needed to run a commercial Unix. Windows ran on that same cheap hardware but was much more expensive for the same capability. Despite Sun's marketing push Linux was really the dot in most of the dotcom darlings.
- prmoustache 5d ago
  > Linux took over in all the places where a good GUI didn't matter. like smartphones ;-)
ninkendo 5d ago
> But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times. My first exposure to Solaris was in 2003 when Linux had Gnome 2.6 and Solaris had CDE. The UI on my Debian box seemed decades ahead of the Solaris machines I managed, which looked like Windows 3.1 and performed about as well. Combined with Linux package managers being infinitely better, the GNU core utilities having so many more conveniences and options than the Solaris equivalents, I felt like Sun was this dinosaur that couldn’t die fast enough. I’ll still never understand why so many people praise Sun for its engineering culture when free software seemed so superior to me at the time. My favorite anecdote exemplifying my opinion about Solaris at the time: you log into the console of your Sun workstation, running SunOS, with your Sun keyboard plugged in, and press backspace. It echoes ^H back to you. They couldn’t even figure out how to configure their own keyboards correctly out of the box. Maybe in the 90s the standards were different. Maybe their tech was better. But by the time I ever used their software is was the butt of jokes.
AnimalMuppet 5d ago
I remember a web page put up by an SGI employee, saying that x86 wasn't going to destroy the Unix workstation business. The title was "Pecked To Death By Ducks". Then Intel came out with dual-core processors, which was the new hotness. So he wrote a followup page, literally titled "Pecked To Death By Ducks With Two Bills". At the time, I thought they were funny, and made reasonable arguments. But in retrospect, they were just trying to distract the customers from the fact that Intel was overtaking them.
mhsred5 5d ago
At the end of the day, the UI on a Unix server was always shell based. That was just the best way to configure a server. (And, in some way Infrastructure as Code is an evolution of the shell scripts a unix admin would use.) Linux won on the server side because they got just as right as Unix. The crappy UI (windows) was the one that didn't work with shell scripting, didn't work with ssh, etc.
- BirAdam 5d ago
  IaC is really just declarative shell scripts. It's a different language, but it's often just kicked off by some bash in a git action. Once you have git and actions, I don't think that the language really matters all that much.
prmoustache 5d ago
> and it had a crappy UI. That wasn't even true back then.