6 ms·

Sun removing the C compiler from Solaris pretty much made it obligatory for my whole university department to install GCC in the early 90s.

simonh 12y ago
And if you're using a cross-platform compiler, you've no longer got any need for a particular OS to run your software on. And now there are thousands of university students and professors relying on gcc, and therefore willing to devote time and effort to improve it. And oh look - this Finnish kid has just released an open source Unix clone than runs gcc compiled software just fine, and it's free too! I can't really say that this decission killed sun. I don't knoe how much revenue they got from selling cc, and they were probably toast anyway in the long run. Their main selling point was that they were the same as all the other versions of Unix.
- ska 12y ago
  It's the hardware costs that killed the unix vendors relative to commodity beige boxes, not the software Linux (and to some degree the BSD's) just gave a smoother path. I recall seeing side by side memory quotes from Intel (i.e. an "expensive" vendor in the space, when they were shipping servers) and SGI for the same amount of memory on smallish servers - from memory the SGI was about $18k vs $500 for the intel. Staring at that difference it becomes pretty hard to justify, even if the memory bus was much better. I could buy a couple of new servers for the cost of that memory upgrade. I suspect Sun's pulling the free c compiler was just one of many "cost cutting" (which end up being revenue cutting) decisions made by a company that saw the writing on the wall but couldn't see how to avoid it.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    The other thread mentions that they provided the first unbundled C compiler back in 1989, closer to the standardization of ANSI C, which is probably no coincidence as many compilers had to be revised to support it and another reason why GCC became popular. It was not until they moved to SVR4 with Solaris that they removed the bundled one however, after gcc 2.0 was released I think.
  - bluedino 12y ago
    That's why both Sun and SGI made last-ditch efforts to run on Intel hardware towards the end of their server/workstation production. But that made it worse, they were selling x86 hardware for much higher prices than HP or Dell, without much advantage.
  - acveilleux 12y ago
    The sun C compiler was pulled in an era where the Unix workstations were (1) very clearly superior to PCs and (2) available with steep .edu discounts. By 2000, the Unix workstation were not much faster outside of 3D hardware and floating points and the discounted price was well above the "equivalent" PC costs. By 2005, the PCs had exceeded Unix workstations in every way. The line is kinda blurry in my head but basically a 2004 vintage AMD CPU could do in software (using MesaGL) roughly the same OpenGL performance as a '98 vintage O2 could do with a decent frame buffer. Once the nVidia drivers became ubiquitous, that PC ran circle around all of our SGIs except for the Octane2s (at a 10:1 price differential.) By 2006, we were down to a single Octane2 with a busted frame buffer being kept to avoid relicensing a numerical package for $$$$.
    - ska 12y ago
      I want to say my quote comparison came from '96, but I could be off a bit. At any rate, the unix vendors still all had pretty significant hardware advantages over even the beefiest PC ... but the bang/buck was already pretty painful. We had systems developed on Sun, but we couldn't afford to deploy them on Sun hardware. After briefly flirting with the idea that SunOS x86 would be a viable path, we gave up and moved to linux on commodity hardware. It was a new enough thing to do (in the market we were in) that we got a few raised eyebrows, but it turned out to be the right decision.
      - acveilleux 12y ago
        Yep, without .edu discount, by the time the P-Pro (mid/late 90s) came out the value proposition was really bad. For integer performance RISC had no benefits left by 1996-1997. 300Mhz P2 (in a Compaq workstation) was at parity with a 250Mhz R10k (SGI O2). The P2 as a fully assembled system was priced less than the R10k CPU alone. Only the huge amount of cash available to dot-coms propped up Sun then. With all the "you need sun servers for dot-coms" beliefs. My current employer made the same call (Linux on commodity PC) around the same time for the same reasons. It took ~8-10 years for competitors to stop using the fact it was Linux based for FUD. Now the only issue we get is Windows-only shop (very common in our industry) complaining that we're the only non-Windows system they use.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    If BSD and Linux hadn't happened, Windows NT line would have taken all workstations market.
    - VLM 12y ago
      Perhaps. Having been there at the time, OS/2 was killed by linux. So... you're not going to run this new windows95 thing, eh? Then why bother running OS/2 when there's linux?
      - pjmlp 12y ago
        Back then I remeber reading articles all the time about UNIX vs Windows NT. OS/2 wasn't really a thing, at least not in Portugal. PC able to run it confortably cost at least 500€ more than the ones that would fly with Windows 3.1. Sure it wasn't the same thing, but for the majority of the folks it was good enough for what they wanted a computer for. Actually I would say when Linux came to be a thing, OS/2 was already gone. I only saw OS/2 once live back in 1994 in the anual computer expo in Lisbon. GNU/Linux in 1995 still wasn't for the faint of heart. My Slackware 2.0 took quite some effort to install.
      - kjs3 12y ago
        Also having been there, my admittedly fading memory remembers OS/2 as doomed before Linux was really an function parity option. And OS/2 wasn't really put up as a alternative to Unix (certainly IBM didn't want to cannibalize AIX); rather it was the server OS and upgrade to Windows that Microsoft customers were screaming for. Microsoft effectively killed off OS/2 the day they said "forget about OS/2...what you really wan't is this nifty thing we've got cooking called NT", no matter the effort IBM continued to pour into it.
        yuhong 12y ago
        Yea, but that is only part of the story. This fiasco ended up being so bad it used to be one of my favorite topics. "Microsoft Munchkins" and DR-DOS are two of the reasons why.
      - 12y ago

simonh 12y ago

And if you're using a cross-platform compiler, you've no longer got any need for a particular OS to run your software on. And now there are thousands of university students and professors relying on gcc, and therefore willing to devote time and effort to improve it. And oh look - this Finnish kid has just released an open source Unix clone than runs gcc compiled software just fine, and it's free too! I can't really say that this decission killed sun. I don't knoe how much revenue they got from selling cc, and they were probably toast anyway in the long run. Their main selling point was that they were the same as all the other versions of Unix.

ska 12y ago
It's the hardware costs that killed the unix vendors relative to commodity beige boxes, not the software Linux (and to some degree the BSD's) just gave a smoother path. I recall seeing side by side memory quotes from Intel (i.e. an "expensive" vendor in the space, when they were shipping servers) and SGI for the same amount of memory on smallish servers - from memory the SGI was about $18k vs $500 for the intel. Staring at that difference it becomes pretty hard to justify, even if the memory bus was much better. I could buy a couple of new servers for the cost of that memory upgrade. I suspect Sun's pulling the free c compiler was just one of many "cost cutting" (which end up being revenue cutting) decisions made by a company that saw the writing on the wall but couldn't see how to avoid it.
- yuhong 12y ago
  The other thread mentions that they provided the first unbundled C compiler back in 1989, closer to the standardization of ANSI C, which is probably no coincidence as many compilers had to be revised to support it and another reason why GCC became popular. It was not until they moved to SVR4 with Solaris that they removed the bundled one however, after gcc 2.0 was released I think.
- bluedino 12y ago
  That's why both Sun and SGI made last-ditch efforts to run on Intel hardware towards the end of their server/workstation production. But that made it worse, they were selling x86 hardware for much higher prices than HP or Dell, without much advantage.
- acveilleux 12y ago
  The sun C compiler was pulled in an era where the Unix workstations were (1) very clearly superior to PCs and (2) available with steep .edu discounts. By 2000, the Unix workstation were not much faster outside of 3D hardware and floating points and the discounted price was well above the "equivalent" PC costs. By 2005, the PCs had exceeded Unix workstations in every way. The line is kinda blurry in my head but basically a 2004 vintage AMD CPU could do in software (using MesaGL) roughly the same OpenGL performance as a '98 vintage O2 could do with a decent frame buffer. Once the nVidia drivers became ubiquitous, that PC ran circle around all of our SGIs except for the Octane2s (at a 10:1 price differential.) By 2006, we were down to a single Octane2 with a busted frame buffer being kept to avoid relicensing a numerical package for $$$$.
  - ska 12y ago
    I want to say my quote comparison came from '96, but I could be off a bit. At any rate, the unix vendors still all had pretty significant hardware advantages over even the beefiest PC ... but the bang/buck was already pretty painful. We had systems developed on Sun, but we couldn't afford to deploy them on Sun hardware. After briefly flirting with the idea that SunOS x86 would be a viable path, we gave up and moved to linux on commodity hardware. It was a new enough thing to do (in the market we were in) that we got a few raised eyebrows, but it turned out to be the right decision.
    - acveilleux 12y ago
      Yep, without .edu discount, by the time the P-Pro (mid/late 90s) came out the value proposition was really bad. For integer performance RISC had no benefits left by 1996-1997. 300Mhz P2 (in a Compaq workstation) was at parity with a 250Mhz R10k (SGI O2). The P2 as a fully assembled system was priced less than the R10k CPU alone. Only the huge amount of cash available to dot-coms propped up Sun then. With all the "you need sun servers for dot-coms" beliefs. My current employer made the same call (Linux on commodity PC) around the same time for the same reasons. It took ~8-10 years for competitors to stop using the fact it was Linux based for FUD. Now the only issue we get is Windows-only shop (very common in our industry) complaining that we're the only non-Windows system they use.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  If BSD and Linux hadn't happened, Windows NT line would have taken all workstations market.
  - VLM 12y ago
    Perhaps. Having been there at the time, OS/2 was killed by linux. So... you're not going to run this new windows95 thing, eh? Then why bother running OS/2 when there's linux?
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      Back then I remeber reading articles all the time about UNIX vs Windows NT. OS/2 wasn't really a thing, at least not in Portugal. PC able to run it confortably cost at least 500€ more than the ones that would fly with Windows 3.1. Sure it wasn't the same thing, but for the majority of the folks it was good enough for what they wanted a computer for. Actually I would say when Linux came to be a thing, OS/2 was already gone. I only saw OS/2 once live back in 1994 in the anual computer expo in Lisbon. GNU/Linux in 1995 still wasn't for the faint of heart. My Slackware 2.0 took quite some effort to install.
    - kjs3 12y ago
      Also having been there, my admittedly fading memory remembers OS/2 as doomed before Linux was really an function parity option. And OS/2 wasn't really put up as a alternative to Unix (certainly IBM didn't want to cannibalize AIX); rather it was the server OS and upgrade to Windows that Microsoft customers were screaming for. Microsoft effectively killed off OS/2 the day they said "forget about OS/2...what you really wan't is this nifty thing we've got cooking called NT", no matter the effort IBM continued to pour into it.
      - yuhong 12y ago
        Yea, but that is only part of the story. This fiasco ended up being so bad it used to be one of my favorite topics. "Microsoft Munchkins" and DR-DOS are two of the reasons why.
    - 12y ago