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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just to add some nuance: SunOS up to version 4 was strictly BSD-based with vendor enhancement. "SunOS 5" became Solaris 2, and conversely, SunOS 4 was retroactively dubbed "Solaris 1".
Solaris 2 and up were derived from System V release 4, which had actually merged the best of System V with both Xenix and BSD, so rather than being purely AT&T Unix, SVR4 was promised as the best of all worlds, with some ability to pick and choose which variety was in play, based somewhat on provision of both types of utilities in separate directories, and appropriate libraries and APIs.
SVR4, IMHO, was the best and most stable Unix, and the right choice for vendors to adopt in those days.
funnily enough, solaris 2 was also identifying as sunos 5 depending on what tool you used to query.
sun's pivot from bsd to at&t was a very nice and clean change (I was the one who ended up upgrading our sunos servers to solaris when the time came in the 90's), sequent's switch was a nightmare.
I still miss my e4500, though, but not the noise or electric bill.
Not the first time for Windows, Windows 7 is v6.1 internally, then Windows 8 and 8.1 get 6.2 and 6.3[1]. Main explanation is basically "programmers suck at checking version numbers" so Microsoft tried to avoid bumping the major version. I guess they risked pushing the version number to 10 for the "last" version of Windows, but have fallen back to just not touching it now that a new generation of management have decided that it isn't the last version of Windows.
[1] Windows 95 also tells 16 bit apps that it's v3.95, but 32 bit apps get the correct 4.0.
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.)
> 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!
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.
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".
Neat. We were actually in the OGI science park. (We were the "CADRE" sign people would see, as they turned left into the park off Walker Rd., IIRC, with the wildflower field on the other side of the Walker. Earlier, the sign might've been "MicroCASE" or "NWIS". And originally a Tektronix spinoff, to build high-end in-circuit emulator hardware with workstation frontends, which evolved to include integrated full-lifecycle CASE.)
Also in the OGI science park was Verdix (makers of Ada development tools, and some kind of multilevel-secure workstation software).
I don't know what all the other companies were. But amenities included private showers for biking to work, a small forest jogging trail, and a restaurant that made nice turkey sandwiches and huge blueberry muffins to replenish those calories.
'As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months.'
@18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and did pretty good, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.
Yes I know. But this person came to sun after doing the Rainbow 100. DEC did better once they went away from that approach and went towards actual PC compatible. Neither DEC Rainbow nor Sun i386 were PC compatible. For DEC this is understandable as PC wasn't really a standard (their problem was that they pushed 3 different incompatible products into virtually the same market). For Sun to do this didn't make much sense.
I can't find the link anymore, but there is the hacker song 'Bye Bye SunOS 4.3'. Its quite funny. If somebody has the link.
It really is an incredibly important part of Unix history, not just Sun. It basically really started the outright Unix wars. Had Sun just gone with BSD and tried to create that as a standard, they could have taken most of the world with them without creating a massive blowback counter-reaction that their alliance with AT&T provoked.
And AT&T would have been dead in the water, they might have tried with somebody else, but that would have just cast Sun as the good guys and AT&T and whoever as the bad guys and with Sun already being the market leader, that standard would have been pretty dominant I would think.
my boss at the time refused to move to solaris from sunos (on his personal sparc, we moved to solaris at the company), it was my responsibility to deal with the solaris hosts from that point forward. we were definitely a sparc shop (though at the time we only had sun clones, no real sun sparc boxes).
I think it was mostly that he liked the bsd tooling over the at&t tooling, but it instilled so much in me that I still have a hard time remembering the gnu command line options: I tend to default to svr4, then to bsd, and finally to gnu. probably one of the reasons I still feel at home on macOS.
Does anyone actually want to go to the movie theater anymore? I don't. Not since covid anyway. Oppenheimer was the first and only movie I've seen on the big screen since covid. And still it was almost like sitting in coach class on an airplane for two hours.
I can make tastier popcorn at home than what I get at the theatre, the sodas are cheaper, and I don't have to share an armrest with some stranger sitting next to me.
I would really like a 90-100" 8k screen for my living room, but I'm not gonna pay $10k for that.
I do, but only for very specific movies. And _only_ if I can get the perfect spot in the theatre, I'm not paying 25€ for a ticket and sit in a sub-optimal spot just to fight the FOMO of not seeing something on opening week.
I also mostly go alone.
Family movies in the movies are dead though, they all come out on streaming so fast that there's no point in dropping 100€ for the whole family to go see Inside Out 2, we can just wait for a few months and either buy it in 4k from Apple for under 20€ or stream it for "free" from Disney+.
Either way we can pause it as we like, have any snacks or food we like and other people's kids aren't running around and making a racket.
To go to the cinema, you have to find the right time slot, find the right seat position, sit in the chair where thousands other people (with questionable hygiene) have sat, watch 20 minutes of ads (or be intentionally late) and also suffer the borderline painful sound levels.
I have been to the cinemas in the past and will probably go there a few more times as some kind of social activity, but it's not, and never will be, in the list of the best ways to entertain yourself.
I don't. Accessibility is often an issue, and my anxiety gets worse in crowds. People are loud, rude and noisy.
I have a 55" at home that I sit about 6 ft away from for the cinematic experience. Ditto on food. It's better than anything I can get at the movie theater.
I don't mind creators asking people to support them on patreon, etc. But paying $X per month and still seeing sponsored content, is kind of annoying.
At least mark the sponsored content and allow premium members to skip the video when it comes on.
Worse is when the video is targeted to the hobbyist, but is sponsored by some large customer that charges thousands of dollars for a product or service. So e.g. Altium Designer costs thousands per year. But you can only get a free 90 day subscription, at which point the license cost kicks in.
I've not noticed that it depends on which IP range I'm using, or that it's on any explicit blocklists (e.g. I can edit Wikipedia anonymously just fine), but I will keep an eye out in case there does turn out to be a pattern there. Thanks for the pointer
Suzuki is the best example I can find. They were famous for looms well before motorcycles. I'm betting the best examples will also come from Japan after WWII.
Netflix might be a close second because it went from managing warehouses full of DVD's to streaming and producing original content.
Microsoft and Amazon all belong in same camp as Apple. AWS and Azure are big profit centers.
I realize this isn't the HN popular opinion, but nuclear power will be great once:
1. People are educated about true risk AND forget about Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl. Or the need to have iodine pills if you live near one. ("If it's so safe, why do I need the iodine pills?")
2. Bad actors face actual prison time, not just corporate fines. Meanwhile, today, the bad actors still get bonuses.
3. We grow a lot of crops in the desert in the US. We need a lot of water to do that. There's gigawatts of solar potential there. And the cost of one reactor is $35B US for 1GW. For solar/wind you could have 10GW for around $10B US and then there's $25B US for batteries.
Just put up with it for a while -- then leave when a better opportunity shows itself.
I flew more than half the country to work for a financial institution in NY, and enjoyed it for 2 years. I got to see a different part of the country, and racked up a bunch of frequent flyer miles. Another contracted me, wanted to keep me as a FTE, I told them I wasn't moving. They hired me as a remote worker.
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.
reply