I started using M68K based Sun 3 machines in high school in 1991. In college from 1993-97 we had thousands of Suns, HP-UX, DEC Ultrix, Unix RISC workstations on campus.
I joined the semiconductor industry in 1997 and all of of chip design EDA software ran on Suns. Everyone had a Sun on their desk and some people also had a Windows PC for MS-Office. We had big 14 CPU Suns in the server room with 16GB RAM for big jobs and would remotely display to our local Sun machines via X11.
I convinced my manager to let me install Linux on a PC and we got a 21" monitor running beyond 1600x1200 (1800x1440 I think) and everyone thought was much nicer, quieter, and most importantly far cheaper than the Sun on their desk.
Then everyone decided to switch and we stacked all the Suns in the server room.
In 1999 we were trying a new chip synthesis tool from a startup called Ambit (later acquired by Cadence) I submitted a bug report with a crash dump showing "Sun4u SPARC Solaris 2.5" and got a reply back from the support showing they replicated the crash and it had "i686 Linux 2.0 GCC" or something in the log.
I was surprised to see that the developers were running it on Linux. You could only buy this software for Solaris / HP-UX / IBM AIX. I asked for the Linux version and the developer said "We don't sell the Linux version, we're a startup that doesn't have money to buy a Sun for every developer so we use Linux x86 and then compile for Sun/HP/IBM at the very end"
Around 2002 the Linux / x86 machines had gotten so fast and cheap that the EDA companies started releasing their software for Linux and we started buying Linux machines. I remember recompiling a custom Linux kernel to change the user / kernel memory split for 2GB / 2GB to 3GB user / 1GB kernel and then 3.75GB user / 250MB kernel. We had some programs that needed over 4GB RAM so we kept a few 64-bit Suns for those.
Then the AMD 64-bit Opteron came out and it was all over. We never bought a Sun after that.
I'm still in the semiconductor industry and everything still runs on Linux. We have clusters with tens of thousands of Linux machines and access them via a remote X11 desktop session (Exceed, NoMachine, X2Go)
At Sun in 1990 in the multimedia group (working on the X11/NeWS window system), everyone had a Sun workstation on their desk (typically SS1 at the time), and a Wyse terminal hooked up to the serial port to reboot it or restart the window system when it got stuck!
I often wonder what would have happened if Sun hadn't been bought by Oracle and innovation had continued. They were very far ahead. They invented things like containers in Solaris way before Kubernetes and Docker popularised them on Linux.
They were already doomed at that point. I was involved in several major purchase decisions during that period and Sun were totally out of touch. If they were quoting hardware that had an x86 equivalent, then they were overpriced. If it was something that didn't have an x86 equivalent, like they had for a while with 64 bit, the prices were atrocious. Then Lintel moved to 64 bit and it was all over. The price/performance equation was broken, but Sun, for whatever reason, kept on like nothing had happened. I, and I'm sure many others, tried to show them that they were uncompetitive, but you were dealing with reps working from a price sheet and citing the same old mantra that Sun was inherently superior. For years when I would tell peers that the Sun equipment was just throwing away money they wouldn't believe me because they hadn't done the benchmarking. Really, if people did proper benchmarking and didn't just 'buy what they know' without questioning, it all would have unwound even more quickly. They certainly had some good tech, and were not wrong about the advantages of containerization, which came full circle with linux containerization and docker, but IBM mainframes had similar virtualization capabilities in place long before Solaris zones, so it wasn't something that was a game changer. Ironically, it worked against them because even though they were right, it was seen by some as Sun touting their way of doing it because they didn't have a viable solution for the prevailing VM direction of hardware virtualization. Basically, they began by offering the best price/performance and innovation, but then died trying to be a 'premium provider' without the goods to back it up, and market forces then do what market forces do.
Sun's sales guys were killing it right up until their last breath. I can clearly remember thinking to myself "why does this Sun/Solaris node cost $32k when this equivalent Intel costs $10K?" One day it was the in-thing, the next pooof Solaris was GONE.
I agree that they were doomed by that point as well primarily due to Linux on faster and cheaper x86 hardware. My UltraSPARC-III-based Blade 1500 that was an incredibly overpriced workstation that only ran Solaris well, and wasn't on par with the performance of x86 at the time.
However, I do remember buying an Opteron-based Ultra 20 because it was cheaper from Sun than anyone else and had 100% Linux support, which everyone seemed to be migrating to from Solaris. By that time, I'm sure there was no clear market direction for Sun software- or hardware-wise, and everything was too little too late.
What would have happened is the company would have folded.
Sun's problem's happened long before they were purchased. Their number one problem is that they were a hardware company and never figured out how to be a software company. It was Linux and cheap Intel hardware combined Sun's lackluster support for x86 Solaris that doomed them.
Or someone like Motorola could have done RISC sooner. (They did eventually with the 88K but Sun, IBM, etc. had all gone with their own RISC chips by then.)
Someone did do RISC sooner; for example, MIPS shipped R2000 in 1985 and Clipper shipped C100 in 1986. SPARC and 88k were introduced within a year of each other as I recall (87/88).
Yeah, MIPS is probably the best example and did get some uptake. But the big vendors mostly went their own way. Although I was involved in that history to a degree, I'm not entirely sure why history played out the way it did.
Well...any history will attract a torrent of nitpicking, so this is my extremely reductist take. Motorola, IBM & Apple decided to join up on a common HW platform called "PReP" which was POWER/PPC based, so Motorola dumped 88k to play ball with that. PReP was a flash in the pan, but PPC briefly shone as Apples processor, and is still around in various forms (mostly embedded now, but POWER still ships in volume). Similar trajectory with MIPS. Clipper was never going to be a big player; it was a niche within a niche. SPARC, HPPA & Alpha got steamrolled by much cheaper, performance competitive x86 derived processors. In the end, most volume customers said "can it run my software fast and cheap" and by sometime in the 90s that was clearly an x86 (unless your name was "Apple", but that's a different history).
They were one of the few companies in the 2000s that could have utterly owned both the browser space and the cloud space if they had worked at it and persisted.
They weren't, though, not really. The tech industry just moves too fast for that kind of pronouncement. It's absolutely true that a Sun-3/75 in 1986 was a revelation[1], but every one of those features was cloned as free software and running on sub-$1000 hardware by 1994. They likewise had a brief moment with SPARC in the early 90's where their machines were the fastest you could buy, but Intel demolished those hopes too[4]. Their swan song was the early dot com boom, where they still held onto the reputation as "The Best Unix" and sold a ton of web server hardware to the more conservative outfits. But we could all see the writing on the wall even then.
I mean, it's true they had some great stuff toward the end. But not that great, and generally not marketed in a way that would help them. Containers are actually a good example. Solaris Zones were... just a weird circus act[2]. I don't know any major players who made bets on the technology. And, again, within 2-3 years Linux had cgroups and LXC running[3] in a more performant (and much cheaper to deploy) environment and that's what Docker picked.
[1] Faster than a VAX, which was still the reference Unix box. Megapixel framebuffer with windowing and competent terminal emulation. Every box was on the Internet. Every box could see the rest of its network over NFS (and most were deployed diskless). FWIW: anyone know where I can get one? Would love one for the collection, but most seem to have disappeared (government and university equipment tends not to end up on eBay...)
[2] Edit because this was misunderstood: I'm saying it was an oddity with minimal uptake, not that it was chaotic or bad as a matter of design.
[3] This too got misunderstood, though I don't see how. I'm really not interested in a flame war about whose container technology is better. I'm just saying that to Sun in the early/mid 00's, it wasn't much of a competetive advantage (as evidenced by the fact that it lost to Docker).
[4] Ooph, this one too. I'm saying that in the early 90's SPARC was dancing with MIPS for the fastest CPUs on the planet, but by the release of the P6 core that was over and Intel had essentially won (though DEC kept the dance going a while longer with Alpha). I'm just amazed at the propensity for folks here to jump in to argue stuff that in my mind was settled decades ago.
Solaris Zones are still far superior to LXC. It's hardly a circus act and SmartOS is being heavily used in many places.
Solaris 10 vs contemporary Linux 2.6-era kernels handled memory-pressure situations so much better, that you essentially needed more RAM on the Linux system just to avoid low-memory situations to begin with. Been there, done that :)
Linux won because it was a) free and b) aligned (simply because so many had and were using Linux) with Intel x86, and Intel's fabrication technology is/was world-leading. SPARC CPUs on the same fabrication node would still be amazing - but it isn't on the same node...
> every one of those features was cloned as free software and running on sub-$100k hardware by 1994
?
Zones weren’t released until nearly 10 years after 1994. Same for dtrace and zfs. Solaris was embryonic in 1994. Linux existed but wouldn’t take over servers until c2000-1 (as evidenced by Sun’s massive profits through the end of 1999).
> Solaris Zones were... just a weird circus act. I don't know any major players who made bets on the technology.
Joyent [1] readily comes to mind. IIRC, that kind of isolation was one of the selling points of their hosting service before they eventually shut it down.
(Of course I'm fully aware that one of Joyent's founders was ex-Sun and comments around here too :) )
Presuming that you are referring to me, I am definitely not a founder of Joyent! That said, my rationale for coming to Joyent was not at all unrelated to some of the parallels I saw in Sun[0] -- and it is probably worth reading my own farewell to Sun as well[1]. (Also, because I can't resist completing the arc into the present, see becoming an ex-Joyeur[2] and starting Oxide[3].)
Ha, no worries! You're not the first to make the assumption, so I wanted to be sure to clarify. ;) And thank you for pointing out Joyent's use of zones in production. Indeed, it was Joyent's use of zones that attracted me to the company, and not the other way around...
I think conceptually they were really good and innovative. They just had a hard time making money off it.
By the way what are you looking for? A VAX or a SPARCstation? VAXes are indeed very hard to come by, and I didn't realise they were ever the "reference unix box" - weren't they more common for VMS? But somehow I never came across them back in the day. I think part of the reason is that they mainly sold servers, they weren't that big on the workstation market.
Sun, SGI and HP-UX I used a lot, HP-UX the most. I still have two HP-UX workstations at home.
I have a few SPARCs, actually. Those are fairly easy to find. I want a Sun-3, because to my mind that's the truly transformative device. In principle I could sit at a 38-year-old Sun 3 today and do my actual job productively, with pretty minimal workflow changes. It's one of just a handful of Devices That Changed Computing Forever, and in principle one that should be accessible to a collector. But they're rarer than I'd have expected, especially given how many I saw sitting around at school in the 90's.
And yeah, the desktop VAXen were almost exclusively for VMS. But the standard Unix box in the early-mid 80's that everyone talked about when they discussed/benchmarked/whatever the platform was a 11/780 running 4.2BSD. Those aren't meaningfully collectible for an individual, obviously.
I love collecting old machines also <3 I have a PDP-8 and 11 replica (from obsolescence guaranteed), some of my first computers, a G3 iMac of which I just love the design, HP-UX boxes because they were really formative for me with Unix. I also owned some Sun hardware (a SPARCstation 5 and an X-Terminal) but sold it when I moved to a small apartment. I still regret this.
But indeed the servers are really hard for collectors because of the size. Similarly with the real PDP's of the day. We had a real PDP-11 at the computer museum where we volunteered though we never turned it on. Too afraid of a cap blowing and damaging more.
HP had some nice small servers later on, but they were not very influential so like you I don't really see a benefit in collecting them.
There is also the MicroVAX. We got one (a MicroVAX II) at my place of work shortly before I left in 1986. It ran Ultrix, a BSD derivative. As I recall it, the box would not have been too big for personal use, though the price tag probably was on the steep side.
From before, we had a VAX 11/750. It, too, was a freestanding box in the computer room, possibly close to a cubic meter in volume. Not something I would want at home! It ran VMS, which I found clunky and difficult to work with. But we got a Unix emulation layer called Eunice installed on it, which made it more bearable.
I'm curious; I know the Sun workstations were generally well-regarded, but what was it about the Sun-3 specifically, that made it such an important quantum jump?1
> They likewise had a brief moment with SPARC in the early 90's where their machines were the fastest you could buy, but Intel demolished those hopes too.
Intel was slow in the early 90s. Intel (or more specifically amd64) started to become competitive on the lower end in the early 2000s when the Itanium hype reached its maximum. If you look at SpecInt 2000 an 1.4 GHz Intel is equivalent with a 500 MHz PA-RISC.
HP-UX containers came out in 1998, if I still recall it correctly, and Tru64 already had some stuff into that sense with its microkernel and secure processes design.
Originally, jails didn't virtualise the network stack. That was added later, in FreeBSD 8.0 with VNETs, which were buggy for a long time, but went through extensive testing and are enabled by default since FreeBSD 12.0 (quite recently). Solaris Zones went a step further than the original design, and run a separate network stack for each zone from the start, years before FreeBSD did.
They were bought by Oracle for salvage as an imploding shambles. If not Oracle, they would have ended up as SGI - merely a name for some white box vendor.
The problem here is the confusion between the wonder of late 80s workstation computing and the harsh realities after the Internet Boom.
Sun was a innovator throughout the 90's. Many colleges, universities, and startups used Sun hardware. By the mid 2000's, they were on the way out. The market was flooded with barely used Sun hardware after the dot-com collapse. At the same time, Linux was now "good enough" that less-and-less people needed Solaris. Of course, some enterprises still needed it. The only thing Sun was hanging on to - Java - was freely available.
They would have gone under, Java would have been fossilized at version 6, GraalVM would never have happened, CLR would be left as the only high end polyglot runtime with top GC and JIT compilation algorithms.
Before Docker came along though, containers were mostly just a more lightweight partitioning techniques than VMs which they had largely lost out to. See also Virtuozzo, BSD jails, and some of the early container work on Linux. But Docker followed by Kubernetes really made containers into a different cloud-native development and deployment model rather than just a lighter form of VM..
I was at Sun in the early 1990s working on Sun OS 4 and 5, and the slogan "the network is the computer" was still the slogan everywhere, and everyone in the company seemed to be on board with it. Of course, back then most associated it with Yellow Pages (NIS), NFS, and distributed computing using SPARC, but Sun was always actively looking for ways to push everything to the network.
Not the only slogan actually, "The Dot In Dot Com" ran with several important campaigns at the beginning of the nineties and was a crucial security public service announcement that's explained here :
The trailing dot then means the name is to be used actually exactly only like that, it is specified in full, while the name without a trailing dot can be tried with a domain name appended to it. Or even a list of domain names, until one resolves. This makes people want to use a trailing dot at times, to avoid that domain test."
Back in the nineties I stumbled over the dot, when a friend of mine claimed his mail address was `something@aol.com.` insisting on the dot. I proved him wrong, claiming it didn't matter. Only a few years later, when dealing with DNS config I learned the truth... now it's knowledge I can use to be alone in a bar.
But more recently that knowledge got some relevance in Kubernetes clusters to me: By default they use the `cluster.local.` domain. As that is configurable, now many people leave that out and rely on the search domain config. In consequence in some situations a broken service may try to connect to the outside and with bad choice of i.e. namespace names might leak as valid host names on the public DNS ... which in worst names can lead to a connection attempt from cluster to some foreign system.
You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident!
But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if.
The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft.
It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!
And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh!
Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris.
To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke:
Agreed. In my mind, the M1 Mac I'm typing this on is a direct descendent of the NeXT workstation that launched while I was still a student with no hope of ever owning. As much as I love the progress, it does make me wonder where/how the next true breakthrough will come from, or will we just continue to evolve what we have for another few decades?
The 40 columns limit derives ultimately from most video output in home computers being low-quality RF to a TV screen. You can try to output 80-column text to a TV, but you'll get tons of arfifacts that make it barely usable. Especially if you also insist on color output.
You both forgot the Apple II, which did all that stuff much earlier. Any history that writes out Woz is missing the point. Fundamentally the Atari 800 was an attempt to make a better Apple and target it at the home market. The C64 was a better Atari and won the fight. But the paradigm for how both those systems work was settled in the summer of 1978 when the Disk II shipped. That was four and a half years before the Commodore reached market. (Four and a half years after the C64 release we could buy 32 bit PCs and Macs. It's a long, long time in this context.)
Plus the Apple //e (January 1993) had 80 columns and lower case, which coupled with the disk drive made it useful for business. But I guess the IBM PC (August, 1991) already had all that by then (and the Apple ///, November 1990).
Actually 80 column cards[1] were a pretty routine thing in II+ machines from early 1980 on. Those and the Microsoft Z80 CP/M card were more or less the standard "business computer" until the IBM arrived. These got you full ASCII and lower case support, and ran things like WordStar and VisiCalc as well as anything on the market.
It wasn't until 83 or 84 that the XT/AT "lots of memory and hard drive as standard" configuration drove DOS software (c.f. Wordperfect, Lotus, Turbo Pascal) farther than the IIe could reach. The Apple spent an absolutely shocking amount of time as "the best computer to buy" for a working professional. It really was way ahead of its time.
[1] The Videx Videoterm was most popular, but there were many clones. These were all based on the MC6845 controller with their own framebuffer RAM. In essence they were mostly identical to the IBM MDA card, though without the special character attributes and high-bit graphics characters.
The post is very good but has a huge glaring hole in it.
They say Sun died because of AMD64 but that’s incorrect. It was Linux. I know this because I was in enterprise software during this era and the demise of Sun due to Linux was stunning.
Intel and Windows killed SGI, which was a huge coup. However Sun was killed because during that time, Linux went from a toy OS into a fully supported enterprise OS that was “good enough”.
I remember how at one point in time, Oracle on Solaris was just about as rock solid as you could get. But slowly and surely more enterprise software moved over to Linux, especially Oracle. And within 10 years Sun went from one of the “4 horsemen of the Internet” to being sold to Oracle. It was sad because I loved Solaris as a technology, I even had a Sun workstation at home.
That said, how quickly Linux killed Solaris/Sun is a great reminder of how quickly things change in tech.
But Intel didnt kill SGI, or MIPS for that matter.
SGI killed themselves for a too-expensive-walled garden.
I dont know who the industrial design team was at SGI for all their cases, but their cases are still legendary beautiful artifacts of computing (like CRAY)
It sucks that FB now operates out of SUNs HQ...
Fun fact ; when we designed the Lucas' Presidio Complex and moved ILM and other Lucas entities in there, they had a boatload of old SGI full rack machines (SGI machines that were the same size as a 42u cabinet) and several were turned into keggerators.
Sadly I could have taken some of these amazing SGIs, but I was in an apartment in SF at the time and didnt have space for them.... it would have been worth it for me to rent a storage space and grab those machines... sadly many ~$500,000 SGI cabinets just went to the dump. (2004)
No it absolutely was Intel/windows. If you remember correctly, once of their last ditch efforts to save the company was to ditch irix and sell windows machines on Intel.
They used to own the high performance market. I remember because my dad was a researcher that bought a 250k SGI workstation to run simulations on in the late 1980s and that was the first time I had seen a laser mouse and I played with the flight simulator.
But as high performance computing because more ubiquitous and cheaper they couldn’t compete and had to lower their prices until they went bankrupt.
SGI managed to hang on for quite many years after their 3D graphics workstation market tanked by pivoting from Irix/MIPS to Linux/Itanium (later x86-64)(saving a lot of SW and HW development cost) and selling those big shared memory supercomputers. Sure, those were expensive boutique products, but they sat in their own niche that commodity HW couldn't easily touch.
I think what ultimately doomed this was that with increasing core count CPU's the market that really needed much bigger shared memory systems became smaller and smaller.
They were finally bought out by HPE, and while HPE still sells their Altix brand I hear the development of the shared memory supercomputer line has ended and now the Altix memory fabric has been utilized in the enterprise Superdome line.
Coco Conn and Paul Rother wrote this up about what they did with FORTH at HOMER & Assoc, who made some really classic music videos including Atomic Dog, and hired Charles Moore himself! Here's what Coco Conn posted about it, and some discussion and links about it that I'm including with her permission:
[...]
Flying Logos for 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater:
>First shown at the 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater to a rave response, this 3 minute humourous film went on to win several top computer graphic awards that same year including Niccograph of Japan.
>Coco: This was a show favorite at the SIGGRAPH film show that year. The year before the conference committee decided that showing demos wasn't the way to go anymore. Peter wrote Flying Logos as a way to sneak our demo reel into the show by turning it into a story. It worked and we made it into the film show.
>Don: I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension, there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic theme music. It would make a great screen saver, at least! Somewhere the Sun Logo and the SGI Logo are still dancing together.
[...]
From the discussion of The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems:
About the film logos at start of movies, where I always questioned just why film studios/production companies always need some animated logo....
I recall when I was studying Animation in Seattle in the 90s - I was learning Softimage, but I regret not taking the Alias|Wavefront (which became MAYA, and the primary UX seed to Blender)...
The paramount logo was redone with Alias on SGI machines and at the time was touted at how complex the render was due to the number of layers used in the making of it, I cant recall exactly (1996 or so) but I think they had 27 different cloud layers in that animation (cloud the environmental entity, not AWS)
I was Head of IT for a company that manufactured the physical media for all SUN OS products. (meaning if you bought any SUN software, and it came on a CD and in a box- we manufactured all of that, and shipped it as if we were SUN)
We would receive updates to the releases via FTP.
We had several FTP servers which SUN would PUT their files on and we had a nightly batch job grab the files and transfer to the machines that burned the CDs...
I implemented Linux on those machines with the help of hiriing a few Linux consultants I knew...
Dave Sifry, Chris DiBona and a few others.
I called Dave in and told him "If I were you, I'd start a Linux support company/consulting company"
A few weeks later he came to me and stated that they had founded a company "LINUXCARE"
At one point he was worth $100 million off that...
Chris was/is huge at google...
but yeah, another annecdote was that this is also when XML became a thing, and we were one of the first companies to adopt XML out of SUN because they wanted to PUT XML docs on our FTP server for their releases... and LINUXCARE was tasked with creating our CRON job scripts for watching the directories for updates and batch jobs....
It was not merely Linux, but it was also PC commodity hardware that rapidly caught up to workstation-quality. Toward the end, you had Suns with PCI buses and stuff. The UEFI frameworks, and high-quality peripherals that could make it to the mass market, were poised to beat the pants off all the bespoke stuff coming out of workstation manufacturers like Sun, HP, Digital, SGI, and IBM.
Sun was very much a hardware VAR, and they made great software because people would purchase premium hardware to run that great software on. The dual prongs of Linux plus commodity PC hardware damaged both of those selling points simultaneously, as it were, and no Unix workstation vendor could survive. The more adaptable ones embraced Linux and they embraced that commodity hardware (IBM, RHEL...) but even with their Java initiative, Sun could not survive the onslaught.
The x86 hardware and the Linux OS both had to make the jump to 64 bit. Sun was still able to make hay in the period where Linux was well established because 32 bit memory restrictions kept if from being a viable option for a lot of higher end computing needs. It was inevitable that Linux would eventually make the migration to 64 bit once the hardware was there, but Sun got there first on both the hardware and software fronts. Why Sun didn't react more radically when 64 bit Lintel was able to go head to head with Sun's precious 'enterprise' solutions is unknown to me. Maybe they were just in mass denial? Maybe they thought the technical hight priests within their organization would manifest new technical advantages? Maybe they just knew that if they dropped their pricing to address the new price/performance reality that their company was no longer economically viable? There was a lot of denial about Linux at the time, and there were plenty of legitimate reasons to question whether or not Linux could really make the leap to compete head to head with the leading commercial Unix offerings. Meanwhile, major efforts were being made by the likes of IBM and, ironically, Oracle, to contribute to efforts to make Linux a 'no compromise' commercial offering. Remember that companies like IBM had watched their own Unix offerings suffer from Solaris on the high end and Linux on the low end. The smart ones realized that Linux could be the answer to the hard sell they were running into with their own Unix and put engineering efforts towards making that happen. I'm not saying Linux wouldn't have gotten there without them, but there was a strategic shift that happened to accelerate the technical ascension of Linux, and that also caught Sun off guard. I suspect they had looked at the historical trajectory of Linux and over estimated how long it would take Linux to 'catch up' to Solaris. Linux went 'hockey stick' on Sun.
No. AMD64 wasn’t as popular especially in enterprise environments until just before Intel started to support it. Intel had the failed Itanium but that wasn’t the reason for Linux’s success. Linux on 32bit was still dominant at that point and the cause.
I was supporting a cross-platform enterprise environment and was deep into this at the time. I saw it from the front line’s and I even implemented my company’s port to Linux. Everyone was skeptical about Itanium. Enterprises companies in most part didn’t have the luxury to experiment.
I was a sysadmin in a windows desktops + sun/windows server env for about 10 years from 1999
I loved our sun boxes, hated that we could only ever afford their "midrange" models, and then only from grey market resellers, or outright second hand.
Everything being said here is pretty much true.. but the additional factors I'd call out were vmware and to a lesser extent "componentised" infrastructure systems.. I'm thinking blade servers and sans.
If I bought a sun box, it was only a sun box. If I bought an intel/amd, then it could be linux or windows or both. Yes we could, and did, hook the sun boxes to SAN's, but I don't remember sun ever having a particularly strong blade offering.. or maybe it was just priced and like sun hw, either way..
Dell Blades let me do incremental upgrades at price points within individual projects sign off budgets, and dell delivery times + San boot + esx meant I could usually have new systems up and available in a couple of weeks.
That sounds bad in the cloud era, but before that I'd probably still be trying to get quotes or negotiate discounts, so it was fantastic.
Linux and the other bits above let me say "yes" to user requests more often, with lower friction and shorter deliver times.
I can't tell you just how nice that was.
Then I started work at an aix/linux/windows shop and the whole cycle repeated...
> SPARC didn’t keep its edge. The x86 platform became extremely competitive with the arrival of AMD64. The 64 bit x86 machines were cheaper than SPARC machines, and when coupled with Linux they could run all of the UNIX software any web company needed. This fact was proven by the likes of Google and Facebook. The core of Sun’s business was destroyed.
Yes. Linux came before AMD64, but that’s irrelevant. Corporate UNIX was more popular than Linux in the 1990s. AMD64 launched with the Opteron in 2003. In 2004, it was making AMD hundreds of millions per quarter and it was beating both Sun and Intel in server sales. Intel and HP were trying to push Itanium at this point, and Itanium was performing quite poorly. By 2004, AMD Opteron was also doing better than IBM Power. AMD was was crushing it.
EDIT:
To give an idea of AMD at this point, a few customers of AMD buying Opteron were The Weather Channel, Siemens, Boeing, Lockheed, Ferrari, Racksaver, Volkswagon, Rackspace, University of Kentucky (these are the ones to have publicly stated they adopted Opteron whose news articles to the effect I could find). Revenue of Q3 2003 was $1.2 billion (about $2 billion today), and that was the first quarter to include AMD64.
Linux was most of it but it needed hardware to run on.
I wrote in another comment in this thread that our semiconductor design software was all on Solaris. We started shifting to Linux around 2002. We still needed some Suns for the large jobs that required over 4GB RAM. When AMD64 came out that was the end of Sun for us. The chip design software vendors quickly ported to it.
While I use Linux distributions since 1995, starting with Slackware 2.0, I only used it in production after 2006.
Until then it was Xenix, DG/UX, Solaris, HP-UX, Aix.
Ironically, when we at Nokia Networks were considering HP-UX to Linux migration for some of our software, a parallel effort for Solaris was in motion as plan B.
"The Sun-1 workstation used a Motorola 68000 CPU at 10MHz. This was paired with an in-house designed MMU. It had 256K zero wait state memory with parity, and 32K EPROM memory."
I like how these specs are described as if it was a computer in a Fast and Furious action flic
Sun microsystem disappearing was/is a saddest case of a business failing for me. I wish they have done the correct marketing and partnership back in the time.
It wasn't marketing. Their products were just bad. Late model SPARC devices were trying to compete with Intel Coppermines that were literally twice as fast and three times cheaper. There was a brief moment where it looked like a pivot to software (via Java) might save them, but Microsoft killed that. Then very late they tried moving to x86 hardware themselves, but by then Linux had reached feature parity and passed Solaris in performance.
The final knife was the cloud. AWS was a huge paradigm shift for how one provisions hardware to Unixy software, and Amazon was a Linux shop and Solaris had nowhere to fit.
Ironically, Sun had Utility Computing for a buck a CPU hour way before anybody grasped the concept in the mid-2000s. When Oracle took over then they immediately killed this (became known as Sun Cloud) and had to start way late with Oracle Cloud. If Sun had kept going then they could have been where AWS eventually ended up. Oh well.
General Magic never really accomplished anything. Sun did. GM was more famous for people who worked there than anything else. Did they work on things early? Yeah, so did Ted Nelson. But did they ship product real people used? Not really. I don't think anyone outside Silicon Valley remembers them.
"Magic Link PIC-2000 was released in 1996." [1], 11 years before the iPhone. Sure, they didn't have the success of Sun, some could say that would make General Magic's case sadder: wasted potential hurts more than the inability to follow the future.
I have never been in Silicon Valley and I remember General Magic.
One of the most innovative companies absorbed by the company whose only innovation is finding new legal loopholes to screw more money out of their customers. Some fates are worse than disappearance.
At least they began iterating more quickly on Java, I remember as years went by and Sun's OOP purists were still saying that they were considering anonymous functions but just couldn't decide on the syntax.
That's not entirely fair to Oracle. Their original database had a big impact. It was only later that their business model switched to screwing their own customers as hard as possible.
Sun was very much enterprise, nice reliability and support but commodity hardware completely blew them away for most purposes. They were still selling $10k workstations when a cheap consumer PC running Linux would run laps around it.
Linux didn't even dent it in my universe back then. Between 1996 and 1999 we switched our internal systems from Solaris to NT. Even our Oracle on HP/UX estate got eaten by SQL Server 7.
Our 1999 capex and opex was 25% of what it was in 1996 and we delivered more benefits to our users.
It was nigh impossible to find on their website a place where you could pay them to sell you things, it was sad but not surprising that they were going under.
I worked at Sun for a period on Sun Grid. There were two offerings - one aimed at B2B and one that was public-facing. The latter was launched as network.com, and essentially offered the ability to submit a job and only pay for the processing power used, hence Scott McNealy's "$1 per CPU per hour!" utility computing promotion.
The B2B side (which is the implementation I worked on) was quite a bit different, with customers uploading a 'golden image' into a node which would then be used to pre-provision a pod of servers (i.e 512 x v20z) on demand.
There's certainly an argument that Sun were first to tout cloud IaaS, but what was missing was a decent API to all this.
I worked in the same building where Bechtolsheim's company Granite Systems was located (3450 Hillview Ave in Palo Alto). My company was on the 2nd floor and Granite was on the 1st floor. We didn't even know he was there until they were sold to Cisco in 1996.
3450 Hillview was in horrible shape when we first moved in. But the owners refurbished it a floor at a time. When we moved to the second floor, there were four big corner offices. There was so much fighting as to who would get the 4th corner office that the CEO got pissed off and gave it to me and another engineer (we worked together as a team and designed all the products).
I worked at an semiconductor foundry that was doing chips with Cisco's Gigabit Switching Group which was the former Granite Systems team. I was 23 and all the guys there were millionaires and all under 30.
All of our chip design software ran on Sun workstations which I had been using since high school in 1991. I wanted a Sun so badly in 1993 when I started college. Then I learned about Linux and got a PC just for Linux.
Andy Bechtolsheim's office was just around the corner from the guys I was working with. I walked by a bunch of times just to see him inside his office talking on the phone.
The first time I went on a business trip to Silicon Valley I literally searched for all the company's headquarters and drove around to see them and the signs out front on the weekend.
I still have fond memories working at Bear Stearns in the early 90s in Fixed Income, every developer had a Sun workstation on their desk instead of a PC, initially running SunOS and eventually transitioning to this weird thing called Solaris.
I remember in the late 90's working as an enterprise systems management architect (Tivoli) for a large financial services firm, and we were deploying the entire project on Solaris and Sun Boxes that were crazy expensive.
Because of this, I was given a Sun Workstation at my desk alongside my Windows machine, and I thought it made me look like the baddest mfr on the floor with that big monitor, the sun workstation with the logo, and that antiquated x windows environment. It was like voodoo level stuff for your regular Netware lan admins etc that were my neighbors.
Correction on my above post though, only the IT side of Fixed Income used Sun boxes. The analytics guys in the FAST department were all on HP-UX. A definite Sun vs HP rivalry going on there, and very eye opening to me seeing HP-UX and Sun were both “Unix” but very different in so many details.
T-shirt wars. Sun had a t-shirt with their slogan, The Network Is The Computer. So DEC had another t-shirt, The Network Is The Network and The Computer Is The Computer. We regret the confusion.
> We wanted computers to go away, to instead become an everyday thing. We thought the third wave of computing would be driven by consumer electronics. The hardware would come from Circuit City, and the software would come from Tower Records.
Interesting. He was half right: hardware did commoditize, but software got so cheap that it completely vanished: consumers just use whatever’s bundled with their phone/laptop, occasionally buying games on Steam or the PlayStation store. (Itself commoditized: they’re not really buying de-novo “software” but more a basket of content that plugs into Unity engine)
Saw the name Kim Polese and remembered Marimba and Bongo. I actually liked Bongo a lot - it was great for quickly prototyping an idea. I haven’t had any luck finding it.
Marimba (iirc!) was a Java startup by a Java insider set. It was definitely promoted/hyped along with Java. Bongo was this cool fun silly thing that I can only describe as a kind of REPL for UI :) You basically started out with a blank canvas for your app, and could switch between design mode and run mode. In design mode you would layout widgets (box layout with springs and stuff iirc) and you could script its actions with Java (fill in the callback blank, etc.) Components were named and one could invoke e.g. disable a sibling component, etc. Then you went to runtime mode and voila, you had a working GUI. I also vaguely recall a 'bongo' sound that it actually made when you switched to run mode.
It was designed by Arthur van Hoff (who also designed Castanet). (Not sure why refs. to this company and its products are so obscure now. It's almost memory holed.)
Old brain. I actually prototyped a SPA with Bongo in late 90s for a telco company. I was pushing them to have their apps -- think network cabinets, field engineer control panels, etc. -- ported to the browser. They thought it was a very strange idea..
p.s. this is fairly representative of the coverage they were getting back then:
Edit: So I just had a look at the contents of the CD 9. I had to convert the bin and cue file to iso in order to mount it. Did so using a cli tool called "bchunk".
When you mount the CD, there is an "index.htm" file that you can open in your web browser.
This page is a little confusing because it has no other navigation than a link to the license agreement.
On the bottom of the license page, you see:
> Enter the Catalog
> Select a catalog option below to explore the variety of content available from the Developer Connection. Select the appropriate Java catalog based on the Java level supported by your browser. For Java 1.1, be sure to obtain the latest browser updates.
> Java catalog (Java 1.0)
> Java catalog (Java 1.1)
> Pure HTML catalog
Click that link for the Pure HTML catalog.
From there, click the link "Bongo, Castanet Tuner & Transmitter (Marimba) (M9)"
> Bongo is a visual interface builder for Java. Bongo includes a wide variety of interface "widgets" to enable rapid development of rich user interfaces. Widgets are pre-written visual controls, ready to immediately insert into Bongo. Simply drag and drop Bongo widgets to create a stunning visual interface, then use Bongo to add intelligence behind the interface via scripts written in Java.
> Unlike widgets in most builders, Bongo widgets can be transparent or opaque, offering developers a great deal of flexibility and ease of use. Features such as these make Bongo an extremely powerful development tool. Bongo can produce visual interfaces for stand-alone Java applications as well as applets.
> Best of all, Bongo's output can be directly published as a Marimba Castanet channel, and the presentation is then automatically distributed and maintained by Castanet within a company or across the Internet. Bongo is not required for developing Castanet channels, but if you're looking for a great tool that makes it easy to create Castanet channels, Bongo is for you.
> Castanet automatically distributes and maintains software applications and content within a company or across the Internet. The Castanet Transmitter (server) and Castanet Tuner (client) work together to keep software and content always up-to-date. Create a "channel" and place it on a Castanet Transmitter. Castanet automatically distributes, installs, maintains, and updates the channel, all via the internet. Castanet can support any type of channel: internal corporate applications, multimedia consumer channels, and more.
And the install instructions:
> Installation Instructions:
> To install from the CD:
> 1. Change to the \marimba\bongo directory on the CD and type bongo1_0.
> 2. Change to the \marimba\tuner directory on the CD and type tuner1_0.
> 3. Change to the \marimba\transmit directory on the CD and type trans1_0.
These files are all Windows exe files.
I tried to run bongo1_0.exe in Wine, but nothing happened.
I don't usually use Windows anymore, not since many years. But I do have a laptop that I recently installed an old copy of Windows 7 on because I needed to use another piece of software that was also Windows only.
Some comment claims is from 1997.
My experience, with using Windows for work, is that will not survive a couple of days without reboot. And all this on enterprise class HW (HP). Even win 10 has random bugs which cause GUI elements dissapearing or even blue screen.
Hopefully these types of interventions will happen sooner rather than in the far future. Levin's methods use tools that are almost 'conventional' now in biotech and neuroscience. If they will work for organ regeneration etc, then it should be a matter of engineering to put them to use.
John Gilmore gnu at toad.com, Mon Feb 13 21:34:53 PST 2023
Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history@elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>Networking and computing vendors were a little slower to realize TCP had won.
My perspective on this history comes from being a young "Tourist" on the
ARPAnet (via Telenet and MIT-AI), and then being employee #5 of Sun in
1982, working there for five or six years.
It was incredibly refreshing to be on the ARPAnet and have mailing lists
where standards were discussed openly, for free, among anyone who wanted
to participate. And with drafts and standards easily available on FTP
sites, in plain ASCII text, for me to read, understand, and if I wanted
to, implement. I had come from the IBM mainframe (APL and OS/MVT)
world. There we had had two mainframes IN THE SAME ROOM and designed an
email system that would move messages back and forth between them with
timed transfers several times per day on manually moved 9-TRACK
MAGTAPES! Because you really couldn't get an interface any better than
a serial port that would talk between two mainframes, and IBM's software
tended to suck. And non-ARPAnet standards documents were obtuse,
obviously not designed to be easily understood. Jon Postel as the RFC
author and editor completely shattered the mold there.
By the time I joined Sun in 1982, everything we did was based on
Ethernet and TCP/IP. Our original prototypes had 3-meg Experimental
Ethernet multibus boards created by our founder, grad student Andy
Bechtolsheim. These had been created at Stanford along with the first
8-MHz 68000 Sun CPU boards. There might have been a tiny bit of XNS or
something around, inherited from Stanford, but everything we built and
used was IP. Our software started with a UNIX V7 clone from Unisoft as
a stopgap. After hiring Bill Shannon, Tom Lyon, and Bill Joy among the
first 10 employees, we rapidly moved to 4.1[abc]BSD and 4.2BSD systems
that included TCP/IP networking as a standard feature. This took our
standalone UNIX systems and made them part of a tight network of
cooperating systems by 1983. We adopted 3Com Multibus 10-megabit
Ethernet boards -- with separate transceivers -- as soon as they were
available. We adopted (and I maintained) sendmail as our networked
email software. Tons of universities adopted our hardware and software,
because we were cheaper than Vaxes, ran solid portable UNIX software,
and came with high-resolution graphics displays and high speed
networking.
The high single-unit prices of disk drives and tape drives meant that
you got much more storage per user dollar if you bought big drives and
split them among multiple workstations. Bill Croft built a simple
block-level storage sharing protocol (nd, network disk) that ran over
UDP. The tape access commands like dump were hacked to work simply over
TCP. Bill and I wrote the bootstrap code that enabled diskless
workstations to boot across the Ethernet (again using UDP) from a local
server. In parallel, Sun designed and eventually shipped and
standardized the Network File System for object-level sharing of files
and directories. Again, it ran over IP and UDP with some TCP, on 10-meg
Ethernet. (Bill and I also invented and published BOOTP at the time, to
automate getting your new machine's IP address. Sun didn't ship it
then, because the NFS kernel people had picked Reverse ARP as their
bootstrap method. BOOTP later became DHCP.) Eventually, Sun migrated
the Ethernet interface right onto the motherboard, once we started
building larger circuit boards.
Sun had a healthy third-party catalog of applications that included OSI
and SNA and Netware and X.25 and other networking protocols. Sun may
have even adopted some of those products under its own brand. But they
all were licensed at something like $1000 per workstation -- real money
in 1983. TCP/IP came free and well debugged in the basic OS. And you
couldn't boot the machine over SNA, or share drives that way, so you had
to understand TCP/IP anyway and run it in parallel if you wanted any of
those features.
As most of this list knows, Berkeley Unix had TCP/IP because DARPA had
funded UC Berkeley in 1978 to make it a standard feature in evolving
4.1BSD into 4.2BSD for the research community. I don't know how few or
many dollars that investment cost them, but it got incredible bang for
the buck! The result was that every UNIX system (except the lame
microprocessor ones like Xenix) came standard with TCP/IP. Every
research lab that was buying minicomputers like Pyramids, DEC Vaxes,
Sequents, or workstations like Suns or SGIs, therefore had every reason
to make their whole advanced-computing network use TCP/IP. Their email
would interoperate locally over the LAN and be gatewayed by a server
onto UUCP or BITNET or CSNET for global connectivity. And whenever they
could beg, borrow, or steal a realtime IP connection to the wider
Internet, then poof, their local machines just popped onto the worldwide
network. This multi-vendor consortium rapidly pushing Ethernet and
TCP/IP forward contrasted with every other wide-area networking
technology, which was either owned by one company (like DECNET or SNA)
or was managed by a slothful postal bureacracy like X.25.
The impact of that UC Berkeley funding was akin to (and prerequisite to)
the impact that came from the later research funding given to the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which allowed them to
create the Mosaic graphical web browser that jumpstarted public use of
the WWW (over TCP/IP).
Don't ignore the impact of Ethernet on the acceptance of TCP/IP.
Ethernet provided the first solid standardized multi-megabit-per-second
cable interface at reasonable prices. It would support any networking
protocol, and was supported and evolved forward by hundreds of hardware
and software companies. Ethernet was the "on-ramp" for TCP/IP, which
would have gone nowhere if it had been limited to serial port or modem
speeds (under 100 kbits/sec). I worked where Ethernet was adopted
early, so it shortly became unremarkable to me. Later, I suddenly knew
it had taken over the universe when I started seeing 8-pin modular jacks
and Ethernet cables on cash registers in small ordinary shops.
(Ethernet's evolution into back-end full duplex, fiber, higher speeds,
and long haul networks only cemented its position as the standard
network front end faster than modems.) TCP/IP went to most places that
Ethernet went, in some ways riding on its coattails.
I started using M68K based Sun 3 machines in high school in 1991. In college from 1993-97 we had thousands of Suns, HP-UX, DEC Ultrix, Unix RISC workstations on campus.
I joined the semiconductor industry in 1997 and all of of chip design EDA software ran on Suns. Everyone had a Sun on their desk and some people also had a Windows PC for MS-Office. We had big 14 CPU Suns in the server room with 16GB RAM for big jobs and would remotely display to our local Sun machines via X11.
I convinced my manager to let me install Linux on a PC and we got a 21" monitor running beyond 1600x1200 (1800x1440 I think) and everyone thought was much nicer, quieter, and most importantly far cheaper than the Sun on their desk.
Then everyone decided to switch and we stacked all the Suns in the server room.
In 1999 we were trying a new chip synthesis tool from a startup called Ambit (later acquired by Cadence) I submitted a bug report with a crash dump showing "Sun4u SPARC Solaris 2.5" and got a reply back from the support showing they replicated the crash and it had "i686 Linux 2.0 GCC" or something in the log.
I was surprised to see that the developers were running it on Linux. You could only buy this software for Solaris / HP-UX / IBM AIX. I asked for the Linux version and the developer said "We don't sell the Linux version, we're a startup that doesn't have money to buy a Sun for every developer so we use Linux x86 and then compile for Sun/HP/IBM at the very end"
Around 2002 the Linux / x86 machines had gotten so fast and cheap that the EDA companies started releasing their software for Linux and we started buying Linux machines. I remember recompiling a custom Linux kernel to change the user / kernel memory split for 2GB / 2GB to 3GB user / 1GB kernel and then 3.75GB user / 250MB kernel. We had some programs that needed over 4GB RAM so we kept a few 64-bit Suns for those.
Then the AMD 64-bit Opteron came out and it was all over. We never bought a Sun after that.
I'm still in the semiconductor industry and everything still runs on Linux. We have clusters with tens of thousands of Linux machines and access them via a remote X11 desktop session (Exceed, NoMachine, X2Go)