
It's sinking in that Sun is gone - fogus
http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/solaris/SunDown
======
bonsaitree
Ahhh, I still have fond memories of the Sun Ultra Enterprise server we ran
back in the late 90s.

The computer so fast (for its day) that it came with it's own spoiler (e.g. a
separate bit of snap-on plastic for its top fan ducting). It was
affectionately known around the lab as the "Purple Monster".

I won't miss Solaris's "pkg-add" installer though--what a kludge.

<voice actor="Phil Hartman" role="Bill McNeil" show="News Radio"> Good
times...good times. </voice>

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ryanelkins
Yeah I find myself wincing a little every time I go to a page on Sun's website
and that Oracle logo pops up in the corner where the Sun logo was.

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hapless
Sun actually discontinued their UNIX workstations a couple of years ago.
Ironically, I believe IBM was the very last vendor of real UNIX workstations.

IBM has since discontinued its last workstations. You can still buy a tower
server and stick a Matrox card in it, but that's as close as it gets.

~~~
tesseract
> I believe IBM was the very last vendor of real UNIX workstations.

How about Apple?

~~~
nailer
I guess it depends on how you define Unix. While Apple provides both software
and hardware, and is a certified Unix (I still haven't met anyone who actually
cares about this), there are a lot of older Unix admins who think CDE and X
constitutes a Unix workstation, for right or wrong.

A pity Sun was so acquisition happy as Apple might have been interested in
buying the server part of the company - older versions of OS X had partial ZFS
support, and there's still pretty good support for dtrace. Buying the server-
only part could have been a good play if Apple decided to re-enter the server
market (ask Apple staff about OS X server - the company doesn't want to pursue
the server market right now).

~~~
glhaynes
Yeah, the lack of CDE and X (and the addition of Quartz and Aqua) definitely
make a Mac feel like a different sort of thing than "a UNIX workstation".

Though on the other hand, were I the "Spirit of UNIX", I'd prefer CDE (and to
some degree, X) _not_ to be thought of as my defining characteristics... :)

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bensummers
The Five Stages of Oracle buying Sun (with apologies to the Joy of Tech):

<http://bens.me.uk/oracle-buys-sun>

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arethuza
After almost 20 years, I still miss the happy ritual of inserting all of the
documentation for your new Sun workstation into the zillion folders.

Hell, I still have "borrowed" copies of the PostScript Blue and Red books from
my NeWS/HyperNeWS days.

<sob>

~~~
rbanffy
Missing NeWS... That one is a really bad sign ;-)

On the other hand, it would be a beautiful idea were it not built upon
PostScript.

~~~
arethuza
Well, I still remember the demo I used to do for people - draw a "broken"
window in the graphical editor and copy this shape and paste it to be the
shape of an existing terminal window and have everything work.

OK not very practical but very very cool.

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vital101
I read the title as "It's sinking in that THE Sun is gone." Oops.

On a related note, in college we programmed SPARC Assembly on some Sun
workstations. Those days will be missed. Sort of.

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javajones
I hugged my sparc box after reading this. _sniff_

~~~
rbanffy
I can't wait until I get home to hug mine...

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spudlyo
I was a huge fan of SunOS, I loved my Sun 3/60s and my 4/110. Even though I
hate Solaris with a burning passion, I am sad for Sun.

~~~
rbanffy
OpenSolaris is actually good. You should try it.

~~~
spudlyo
Yeah, the lack of GNU tools is what really annoys me most about Solaris. The
Solaris kernel (and assorted kickass technologies like dtrace and ZFS) with a
GNU userland sounds pretty great, but there is some FUD surrounding its future
and roadmap.

