As someone who was buying hardware in the late 1990s, it is hard to overstate the difference in buying experience between Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell. The former forced you into a live sales meeting, endless quote revisions, it was a nightmare. I remember calculating the server rails and power cords for a new Alpha server were going to cost more than a shipped/delivered Dell server that I could get the next day.
For us dell has become that. Rep changes all the time, what appears to be random pricing and long unclear delivery dates. Instead I can for example go to Thomas Kren and configure my serves online for a fraction of the cost. They have what they list in stock, delivered a few weeks later. Everything is clear and hasle free.
At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.
I think this is a case of AI ruining the hardware market. We used to almost exclusively use Dell, but now we've been forced to look elsewhere and go through validating new vendors. The lead-times are ridiculous, and these guys now only pay attention to the really big guys. Not sure I can blame them though, you've gotta do what's best for your business.
Periodic component shortages have been a fact of life in the server business forever. Like a key supplier's factory burns down or something.
The key thing is being transparent with customers on price, availability, and delivery schedules. In the short term server vendors can use tricks and personal relationships to extract higher profit margins but eventually the senior executives at major customers figure out what's happening and start looking for other options.
> The lead-times are ridiculous, and these guys now only pay attention to the really big guys. Not sure I can blame them though, you've gotta do what's best for your business.
I don't blame them in the sense that I wish for them to be imprisoned or anything. But I wouldn't do business with them, either. I want business partners whom I can count on, not ones who will stop returning my calls as soon as a more lucrative opportunity arises.
> At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.
This is precisely the role of the sales person for something like a service, but for a physical product it is pretty egregious. There is no greater sin than leaving money on the table. There's an old story about someone offering a quote that was apparently pretty low based on reaction, so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher.
> so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher
I don’t understand what this means? I understand that they bumped the price. But I du not understand what is meant by it being for the assistant? Care to explain?
Pretty much, except the assistant is never going to handle things and the updated fees go up to include you and the assistant. If you only ever send out your assistant, you never make money
If you play poker, it is the equivalent of pushing 'portions' of your bet out at a time. You push the portion, observe their face and body language, and maybe push the rest.
The 'that was for my assistant' is just something they say to explain away the earlier quoted price. They are pretending that what they said wasn't the quote for this conversation, it was for another, different conversation, between the salesman and their assistant. This only works when the assistant is not in the call.
I like this version: The optician quotes the price of new glasses by saying "$100", waits to see if the customer flinches, "... for the lenses", waits again, "... each.".
I mean this is the point of having salespeople, to maximize the amount of money you get from each customer.
This is why when I go to the price page for a product and seeing "contact our sales team for a quote" I look for an alternative.
Dell does a soft version of this by setting uncompetitive prices on the website and making you call to get the real price, although ironically that usually just means we go with a different company that simply posts a competitive price.
The iron law is that vendors want to become like the old Sun. The only reason they don't is if they are trying to compete their way up the hill. Take away the old Sun and SGI and IBM and now Dell is Sun.
Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps. All that Dell does is assembling standard, commoditized parts and putting a free OS on it. Dell's business is incredibly easy to replicate, while Sun's business is extremely hard to replicate. Of course, Sun's competitive advantage turned into a curse when the components of that vertical integration become uncompetitive both features and price wise vs. the GNU/Linux-on-Intel stack. But regardless, Dell could never replicate the vertical integration Sun had.
Really? When I first met Sun machines they were selling 68k-based Sun machines that were better specced than Apple and Amiga and such but left them dependent on Motorola’s architecture that had indirect address and thus no future.
Sure they had an in house chip development ARM team right at the time when RISC economics looked good but CPU architecture had to work harder and harder to beat the memory wall and SPARC was not competitive by 2005 and “Hail Mary” projects like CoolThreads were difficult and expensive but did not deliver for customers.
Hypothetically customers could benefit from that proprietary stuff but they benefit even more from rapid progress is competitive, commodity markets.
"When I was working at the library circa 2005 we were thinking about replacing all the Windows computers that patrons used to access the online catalog (and other services)"
why were you thinking of going Sun, as late as 2005? just easier to lock down, like kiosks?
We already had a big investment with Sun for back end systems like the library catalog. We perceived managing a big fleet of desktops as a hassle, it was worse then it is now.
You must be misremembering something. Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox had always tier one support on Solaris. You had nothing to build, just download and run, with perfect compatibility.
I only ever ran Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox browser (and still today in 2026). My desktops and servers were all Solaris from mid-90s to 2012 or so. Never a hiccup running the Netscape family browsers (and servers too).
There was Netscape support, but then there was that crisis when it seemed that IE would be the only viable web browser, the realization that the Netscape was too FUBAR to build on, and then Mozilla got rebranded as Firefox.
They probably had an official Solaris build of Mozilla later on but if one had been available at that point in time I would have installed it on the SPARC machine I had under my desk. The ship had sailed in terms of the organization's capital planning.
If you were happy running Netscape later than I was you might have felt supported.
This sounds right. There was a "dark ages" in the early 2000's, where Unix/Linux browser support was terrible. You were either stuck with old Netscape 4.x, which crashed every half hour, or you had to work with half baked, almost unusable beta builds of Mozilla (pre-Firefox). Because of this, I actually ran Windows on my desktop for a while!
There was never a time when Netscape Navigator, Mozilla or Firefox were not fully supported on Solaris (earlier, also SunOS).
When Netscape Navigator first came out eary/mid-90s I ran it on SunOS while working at a Sun shop, it always worked perfectly.
By the time the Netscape browser was open sourced in 1998 I was working at Sun and running it on Solaris, always worked perfectly. I attended the open sourcing party Netscape held in San Francisco, still have the autographed CD with the very first open source release source code. Netscape paid for buses from Silicon Valley to SF for people to attend the party. Fun times!!
In 1999 the Sun|Netscape alliance happened, AOL took the consumer software part including the browser and Sun continued the server product development under iPlanet brand. For a while I worked in the Netscape campus that year, and I continued working on iPlanet servers for years after that. Since the browser code had been open sourced, development continued outside AOL becoming Mozilla and later Firefox. Always first class on Solaris.
Firefox branding happened much later (wikipedia says 2004). Still working perfectly on Solaris. Only browser I ever ran, always on Solaris, until the bitter end (oracle lawnmower in 2010).
So yes I can confidently say it always ran perfectly on Solaris (SunOS in early years), having been there through all this and have fond memories of it all.
Dell puts a fair amount of engineering into their servers (as do other main brands like HPE and Lenovo) so it's unfortunate they've lost their roots from the old mail order sales company.
If someone else is paying I'd prefer one of these big OEMs for established firmware lifecycle, shock (shipping) and thermodynamics engineering. If I'm paying, Asus or MiTAC (Tyan) are good enough.
I was fortunate enough to work with a fair bit of sun gear (3/260, 4/670, enterprise 250/450 and even some big iron 6500s) back in the day.
These days, I've got several Dell 5820 style workstations and I'm pretty sure someone who interned at sun in the 1990s is now running dell's workstation division. The medium sized dell deskside towers have nearly identical vibes as those old workstations, and are a pleasure to work with.
Your sentence is a tacit admission that you don't have a very deep understanding of logistics and integration and what it has taken for Dell to build the deep supply chain they have. Yes, it's a commodity system; that's the point; but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right? Think about the difference there and why people still shell out for a Dell instead of a Supermicro or Exxact or plain whitebox hardware. There's a lot to a solid Dell server that you might not realize, from disk controllers to iDRAC....
>but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right?
We didn't think so.
I mean, if you have no knowledgable people, maybe, but for about 10 years we've found it a better use of time & treasure to buy generic servers and consumer laptops, and just have spares. We found Dell's support so costly and so ineffective that just buying extras turned out to be a better move.
Dell is at a sweet spot for many organizations where you can get hardware support from dell, or not.
You can (with dell) just buy used junk and use that, and you can still access their support library for firmware updates.
I did a lot of work with storage with dell stuff and I found it far simpler to "outsource" the storage integration to dell than to do it myself -- they make sure that all "2tb disks" are the same (exact!) size, they all use the same mechanism for firmware updates, etc.
A much larger org could have saved some money doing that integration and testing internally; a much smaller organization could save money just buying stuff from wherever and not worrying.
I personally haven't used dell support in over a decade, but I have found that their "look up the serial number" web site has been invaluable; I've found the fact that they publish firmware for all their stuff and let anyone install it valuable; the huge secondary market for dell is helpful, etc. And, if you care, you can even give them more money to directly support you, instead of just doing it yourself.
HPE, on the other hand, locks their stuff down super hard; I assume there are reasons to go with HPE, but I'd rather get clocked on my superdome with an HPUXy stick than ever touch that stuff again.
>I personally haven't used dell support in over a decade,
We used to buy the top-tier support plans for our laptops and servers, and we found they just consistently could NOT meet their obligations. Laptops stayed broken and nonfunctional for weeks and weeks.
> Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps.
Can you get an x86_64 CPU from someone other than Intel or AMD? x86 is much more proprietary than SPARC ever was.
Sun used the non-proprietary Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) for booting (also used by Apple with PowerPC), and SBus (IEEE 1496) for cards before moving to PCI. SCSI and Ethernet/IP were there since forever as well.
The "proprietary" label on Sun, at least when it came to hardware, was always a mystery to me.
Sun used a lot of open parts, but they had absolute control over the platform. Everything in your solution came from Sun or a Sun partner. Fujitsu doing weird stuff with Japanese mainframes was an interesting fact but irrelevant to 99% of Sun's user base.
Intel/AMD combined with EFI or IBM-compatible BIOS? You can get that from anybody. An HP server is basically interchangeable with a Dell.
> SPARC has been licensed to several manufacturers, including Atmel, Bipolar Integrated Technology, Cypress Semiconductor, Fujitsu, Matsushita and Texas Instruments.
Fujitsu was selling Solaris-compatible systems (as were many others). Linux and BSDs also ran on them.
There were a number of x86 makers up until the 1990s or so, but who is left of them? Can you still license x86(_x64) to fab your own CPUs? You can with SPARC:
It wasn't just the chip, it was the whole ecosystem.
Could an every day consumer buy a Sparc motherboard, chip, and build their own system? No. There may have been one or two vendors that did that late in the 90's, but they didn't stick around.
You kind of proved my point: that's an embedded platform. No consumer is going to be running it. The last link indicates "VxWorks, PikeOS, and RTEMS operating systems available."
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you can load a Linux distro on there. You have a couple other problems: there's no ethernet or wifi, and you only have 512 megs of RAM.
> You kind of proved my point: that's an embedded platform. No consumer is going to be running it. The last link indicates "VxWorks, PikeOS, and RTEMS operating systems available."
"Consumers" can be running it just as much as "consumers" could be running Raspberry Pis, which could also be considered 'embedded' by some. SPARC is no less (or more) proprietary than ARM: you can license the ISA, fab a CPU, and sell some kind of hardware stack.
Do you think it would be more or less difficult to get a license from Intel/AMD for x86(_X64) than ARM and/or SPARC so you could fab your own chips?
Yes you could do this, from Sun Microelectronics back in the 1990's.
We purchased an Ultra-10 motherboard with 250 MHz Ultrasparc II in 1998/1999, fitted it out with compatible third party SVGA, Ethernet and SCSI adapters and ran Solaris on it. Was our production LDAP, Mail and database server for a small ISP for many years.
I later worked for a systems builder that built and sold Sparc/Ultrasparc systems for government (eg. Hong Kong Mass Transit). We were the only vendor in the Southern Hemisphere doing it. So it wasn't common. But yes you could order parts from Sun Microelectronics and build your own systems, and it became easier use certain standard PC compatible parts once they standardised on PCI. We had shelves full of the older incompatible MBus compatible systems and boards as well.
I went to their server site and clicked “shop now.”
I picked a PowerEdge R360. It has the price right here at $5k and a big green “Add to Cart” button along with an incredibly long list of customization options just like I was buying a laptop or desktop. It doesn’t seem like I have to contact anyone to get an order in.
It can be that easy if you want a small number of servers and are willing to pay the outrageous sticker price. In reality, nobody pays $5k for that R360. You either play their game and deal with their insane sales team to get a big discount or you buy from a partner instead of Dell directly. We did the latter and it was just as easy as ordering from Dell online but also way cheaper.
> At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you
This is how license compliance shakedowns work. Make sure your DRM is more flexible than theicensing terms, find an overage and see what you can get the customer to agree to.
I have seen senior Oracle sales reps deliberately misreading their license doc to inflate what is owed.
DELL was an innovator in this "incomparable pricing" model for normal consumers.
You'd price out a machine and then go look at comparable machines (difficult) from other vendors, then the next day your machine wouldn't be "the" configuration anymore. Instead there'd be half the ram and double the harddrive space for an extra $50, and if you swapped back to what it had been yesterday it'd cost you an extra $200.
IIRC they won business awards for this.
Where's Cartman when you need a vigorous "SHENANNIGANS!!!!"?
We sold web traffic analysis software to Dell Europe, around 1998 or so. They never kept their data more than a week. As the traffic and purchase behaviour they were analysing in the store changed so much every week they said (if I remember correctly) it didn’t make any sense to compare the data over time. I took from that that what they sold every week changed all the time. Of course, data storage and processing was then not as cheap as it is today, so maybe there was more to it.
And that is the "thing". Every failed mini company had the same exact issue, seems customers had to beg and/or go through hell to purchase equipment. Never mind that the hardware was more expensive than what you cold buy from companies like Dell.
IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.
Sun commercial sales reps, at least in Europe, were astoundingly slimy.
I had a colleague where almost his whole job consisted of beating them in sheer sliminess, and at this he was good. I don't think we ever paid 30% of the prices they'd start at, but the process of achieving this was disgusting, and there was still the sense everyone was being screwed.
Yeah, and it wasn't just the "call for pricing" game, it was having to deal with monthly "touching base" calls which were mostly an opportunity to push corporate hospitality and other not-quite-inducements.
Whereas Dell just gave us a flat 30% discount on list pricing, and were clear in advance about what level of annual spend would trigger an increase to 35%. We'd order online and our sales rep would phone a few hours later to confirm. Other than that, they'd initiate contact maybe once a year when Dell refreshed their server or storage product lines and would offer to either send some bumpf or arrange for some demo kit.
Dealing with them was so much less hassle all round, you never got covered in slime, and you never felt like they were on the verge of offering you bribes.
Uh, as in "excessive paperwork", like brochures/leaflets [1] about the new products? Not a native speaker, had a parse error I'm just trying to resolve ...
Yep, a mix of glossy brochures and things like white papers from Intel about their latest Xeon 3 architecture or whatever. They tended to lie about on someone's desk for 6 months before being chucked out...
(and I'd had no idea about the "bum fodder" derivation, so thanks!)
Yeah, and then Dell more-or-less turned into that. Companies get big, customers and sales get more complicated, process gets more calcified.
SUNW would probably still be around if the whole x86 commodity pizza box revolution hadn't happened OR if they had pivoted away from SPARC and went heavy into x86. Example: buying from IBM doesn't sound too different from buying from Sun, but they're still around because mainframes will be around until the Earth implodes (probably).
(I think that their channel/partner programs along with their professional services org are big reasons why Dell is still a key player in the datacenter space. You can buy Dell direct, and the sales process is still good, but bigger players usually get their Dell kit through distributors/vendors with Dell professional services handling architecture, build-out, enablement, etc. I'm not sure how much energy SUNW invested in this, as they were before my time.)
Also thanks to virtualization being originally invented in mainframes, and the OS design done by IBM (and Unisys as well), they get to run the old workloads on modern hardware, and also support various UNIX flavours.
You can even run most cool Python, Go, Java, Rust, PHP among others, on systems like z/OS.
We have a couple mainframes at work, had an incident last year when someone forgot to apply a new license to one. p1, no payments happening.
I was kinda stunned; there’s a level of balls involved in selling an x millions machine and having it fail closed that I’m sort of impressed by but also utterly appalled they’d treat their big customers like that..
I mean surely to fuck it could have been an automated reminder email to the mothership and not just: sorry folks no banking for you today.
IIRC (never got to physically play with that part) it's configurable - when you install licensing. And you can get quite expedited support/unlocks/etc.
I had a similar experience earlier this year. Cheaper situation than a mainframe, but... why do some companies make it hard for them to take my money? I'm already a customer ffs.
The rise of the Internet made channel sales handoffs a weak point in the business model. I bet this missed sale went to a reseller who didn't respond and Sun didn't have any controls or visibility on that failure.
Dealing with VARs was always the worst part of dealing with Sun (and certain other companies). Though a great many old-school CTOs I worked under loved the schmoozing, it meant engineering decisions were always fed through the management meat grinder and the risks of "added value" changes to orders were always there.
Yeah it was so much more accessible to play around with configs and pricing and then all you needed was a credit card.
Even now I think enterprise companies should be more open about what's possible and what the price and delivery date would be without having to talk/chat/email anybody. Even for something like a Juniper $100k+ device it would be kind of cool to configure it.
I’ve had that experience with dell consistently over the last 6+ years. While with other vendors I can do everything over email from start to finish, Dell insists on meetings, follow-ups on topics that I said I am not interested in talking about, services that I do not need, meetings with teams I am not interested in meeting, reps that straight up skip meetings, so I have to console a junior rep that got stuck in a meeting that is above their pay grade. Different reps same slimy bs.
I needed to add a bunch of capacity running Sun/Solaris back in the late-90s. Same thing: pointless meetings with sales reps without clarity in pricing. Finally, I found the gear we were looking for on eBay, bought it, drove over and picked it up in my Ford Explorer, and had it up-and-running in one day. To my surprise, people in my company were PO'ed. But I had air cover because the CEO found out and loved it.
In a time frame like 1999 to 2002, much more broadly than that, just the increasing gap in cost vs what you would get between buying any hardware+OS package from a legacy Unix-like vendor (Sun, DEC, SGI) and doing your own thing on a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux on x86 hardware.
Dell was obviously a top choice, but by 2000 or so, Linux or FreeBSD had become good enough that you could do exactly the same thing for a fraction of the cost and run it on x86 hardware you had purchased from either Dell or one of the top 5 or 6 Dell-competitors.
As compared to, as you say, sitting through sales meetings, price quotes, revisions, a long slow and arduous process to arrive at a figure where you come to a conclusion "yeah you can spend $60,000 on these Sun servers or we can buy $20,000 of x86 servers and get creative with our own software stack to do the same thing in house".
At a certain point 1U and 2U server hardware got fast enough on boring standard x86 single or dual socket motherboards from Taiwan, in the era of like the 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 with 512KB cache, that the performance was pretty damn good and the machine cost a fraction of what the equivalent Sun or SGI rackmount machine would cost. This is in the era before a multi core x86 CPU existed. And you could be sure that its BIOS and motherboard were already OK for use with a current Linux kernel, we're talking about motherboards from Supermicro, Tyan, intel whitebox reference server boards, etc.
It's easier to see in hindsight but servers have eaten a lot of macro economic headwinds.
1999 and 2002 correspond roughly to telecom and dotcom bubbles popping. So open source operating systems were also pulled up into these positions through a lot of work and by the early 2000s it was kind of obvious this was the way forward.
2008 financial crisis really knocked the high end (RISC/UNIX/Itanium) and started the long migration to renting vs owning. In hindsight it's remarkable how much money used to just be there in the economy of all this. But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.
> But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.
It's not like there's less servers being sold, they're just bespoke designs from companies like the big Taiwanese ODMs that go straight into hyperscaler facilities, and we don't get to see public marketing websites and product info about them. The open compute platform stuff that's been publicly shown is like the tip of an iceberg.
> The open compute platform stuff that's been publicly shown is like the tip of an iceberg.
I find it a real shame it's not easier to get OCP hardware for our homelabs. Would be so much easier to operate, upgrade, and so on. And where would you even get decommissioned OCP gear?
Some of the ethernet switching top of rack 1U stuff used to show up on ebay. I think large other portions of it go into an industrial shredder/recycling process.
OCP was designed by vendors, including ones that didn't want to get sunsetted. It was never going to be practical for homeless until EOL hardware started to filter down.
I'm referencing the premium you pay to get some paltry VM in a public cloud with bizarre storage and networking that primarily make sense for the market maker versus the actual cost of the hardware. There are ways to make cloud economics work as a user, but only where staffing costs would dwarf spend (i.e. small businesses) and I've never seen them in practice.
People would sneer that you were using shoddy free software, but then the guys who bought the expensive vendor solution would discover that the paid software was also of poor quality and unlike the free version you didn't get the source so your only option for getting something fixed was to file a bug report and pray, despite spending 6 figures on a support contract.
If you click through to the anecdote[0] mentioned in the article, the problem was not with having to contact a sales rep. In fact the startup wanted a sales rep. Sun specifically asked them to use the website:
> More than once though, the Sun people did suggest I just buy the servers off the web site.
Dell was just the only one to callback.
I don't doubt your experience but that was at the height of Sun's business, not it's nadir as this article is about.
One of the first "expert systems" was one that helped you spec your DEC computer. It was easy to order a VAX that was missing necessary hardware (or had incompatible hardware).
Love to hear stories and real-world experience like this shared! I feel us tech folks should start Facebook groups similar to those "Old Photos from <city I grew up in>", except photos and stories from tech :)
when I was a student in the waning days of Sun, the SPARC/Solaris machines were impenetrable Big Iron guarded closely by the greybeards -- not to be touched by the likes of mere undergrads. Never really did get beyond noodling around with cast off gear from eBay, though I did get to enjoy a bit of it via the Sun DNA in SmartOS years later.
I did get to sit in front of the consoles that served the whole school (via telnet) and even hard rebooted them a few times and I wasn't even in a techy major. Just had good relations with the head of school IT. That much exposure was enough to crave a similar computing experience and that's when I installed Linux at home right after college.
Solaris lack of a package manager and crappy patches where patches replaced things wholesale, caused us a lot of overtime, but hey, got me a bigger house! Thanks Sun!
Oh btw their hardware was way ahead of their shit software, which wasn’t as bad as shittier IBM or Digital or HP
But yeah, the lack of package manager hurt a lot, and there were competing third-party package managers which had totally different pro's/con's and packages and were incompatible with each other... what a mess.
Compared to apt/yum it was kinda comical... but the first party software really was excellent otherwise.
Yes. The software really wasn't all that great. I played a lot with Sun gear and had SGI stuff as well, the polish of the SGI machines vs the 1980's vibe that the Sun gear gave off was on a completely different level. Sun was quality hardware but the software was really a time capsule of what Unix workstations had looked like in the past.
Not to mention the horrible installer. At that time, Debian and Red Hat installs were super-easy compared to Solaris. And Sun controlled their own hardware stack too!
I actually haven't read a ton of these, so would love to be pointed to what you have found. But yes, everyone will be biased, and I am too. I think that the organization that I was in fucked up plenty (when I joined the company in 1996, SunSoft was led by truly one of the most incompetent executives I have ever encountered, a bumbling oaf that Sun kept putting in charge of different business units, letting him asphyxiate them one by one), but the fact that everyone also sees something else wrong probably tells you a few things: everyone at Sun earnestly wanted the company to succeed; Sun did a bunch of stuff right; Sun did a bunch of other stuff wrong.
Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the ultimate outcome -- and I think it's pretty telling that Sun's executive leadership basically went on to do more or less nothing after Sun. I loved Sun -- but it was a breeding ground for engineers, not executive leadership.
I seriously don't know what Sun could have done to survive - once Linux was stable, running Linux on commodity hardware was just a better solution than anything Sun could offer.
They should have seen commodity hardware coming and built cheaper hardware themselves. They could have. Other companies were making clone Spark machines for much less so it would have been possible.
I'm not saying it would've been easy. They could've installed the GNU tools in a different path and left it up to the user to change their preference. They did something similar with putting the BSD tools in "/usr/ucb" (I may have that path wrong.)
They could've also just built a real package manager, left it up to the community to add GNU tools. I remember the Solaris package situation being annoying, having to download crap off FTP and install manually. Or often build from source.
Solaris was pretty bare bones, out of the box. I spent days customizing it. Even early Linux distros, like Slackware, were in better shape.
I've never spent much time with Sun equipment, but the hardware and OS had features I haven't seen on commodity hardware with Linux. IIRC, Solaris could deal with an unrecoverable ECC error by killing the process that had the bad memory. And I think they had hot swap memory on some systems.
ZFS was pretty unrivaled for long term storage for a long time. Solaris zones were containers before they were cool. Dtrace is pretty neat. Etc.
Maybe they could have survived with their OpenSolaris push driving low end adoption and high end customers buying their hardware. Pretty sure they would have had to migrate to x86, but they were dabling in that.
Maybe make some low end commodity x86 servers. Sell enterprise a fully engineered big ass database server and a bunch of commodity web servers. Doesn't have to be exceptionally priced, just good enough to let customers have single vendor server purchasing instead of getting the big stuff from sun and the little stuff from dell or hp.
More systems consulting? Sun had great engineers, but you don't see too many war stories about them fixing stuff for customers (maybe they keep quiet though).
> IIRC, Solaris could deal with an unrecoverable ECC error by killing the process that had the bad memory. And I think they had hot swap memory on some systems.
I saw references to Linux support for hotswappable ram a long time ago, but I've yet to run into a commodity server that supports it. And honestly, I've yet to run a system that needed it nor did I have systems where are hard stop from an unrecoverable ECC error was a problem.
I'm not terribly surprised that Linux grew support for poisoning pages eventually (and I appreciate the link!), but I believe Solaris had memory retirement in Solaris 10 (2005), and Linux got page poisoning in 2009. If you were running workloads where it would be important, then Solaris was better for you at that time, unlike the claim from the poster above that
> once Linux was stable, running Linux on commodity hardware was just a better solution than anything Sun could offer.
I think only a curmudgeon would claim Linux wasn't stable in 2005. Although certainly the userland could use less churn. :P
There was (and still is) a bunch of niche Linux kernels. I remember reading about a team that used Xen to do triple-redundancy with voting for Linux. They virtualized _all_ the non-deterministic IO paths (including rdtsc) and observed the outgoing network packets, ensuring that they are completely identical. I think this was around the mid-2000-s timeframe.
But yeah, it was all super-niche. The consensus now is that you should design your systems to be fault-tolerant and self-recovering, rather than depending on perfect hardware functionality. And for everything else IBM still exists.
Sun clearly suffered some from being a bit too early to what would become cloud computing —- didn’t help that their tagline was “the network is the computer”, which IMO was a bit too obtuse, because I didn’t really understand what it meant (sounded like a violation of the 7-layer OSI model lol) until I saw actual cloud computing come about.
But as some sibling comments indicate they already had a lot of the software infra for distributed computing the way it eventually came to be done today, with SOA/microservices, service discovery, or serverless lambdas etc. via frameworks like EJB or JXTA. They were admittedly pretty cumbersome, like the contemporary equivalents COM/DCOM, and made the fundamental mistake of trying to abstract away the fallacies of distributed computing, but also solved most of the common problems involved.
Potentially they could have pivoted to monetizing that software infra even if it got deployed on arbitrary hardware, which may have tided them over until they could spin up their own cloud service, even if it was a fast follow to AWS. However Sun seemed committed to making their expensive servers their primary business model and relegated the software to “loss leader” complements.
If they had just looked at how services were being developed on Linux + commodity servers, they’d have seen they already had offerings in that space that could be monetized.
With the benefit of perfect hindsight, which is a bit silly?
Open source Solaris as early as possible.
Really compete with MIPS, ARM, Motorola, etc. in the embedded space. Don't even try to make it a huge financial win, just get the SPARC architecture and dev tools out there with good Linux support.
Consistently support Solaris x86 and frequently release new generations of Intel and AMD workstation-class hardware.
Partner with TSMC for SPARC production a lot earlier.
Since we're just having fun here: acquire Nvidia in 1999, at which time it was pretty obvious workstation graphics was going to be commodified, and Sun could have bought them with their pocket change.
That doesn't exist. No department is every completely at fault. No department has enough budget to sink a company alone. It is always a lot of departments that don't turn in expected results - often for reasons not in their control.
The fault is always upper management not doing their job. Even if one department really would be that bad (which again they are not), upper management allowed them to be that bad.
The Sun model of beefy server, ultra-thin client worked incredibly well and presaged the widespread adoption of virtualisation that eventually led to cloud computing and containerised software. Unfortunately that model made it very easy to undercut their prices using commodity hardware; I managed a Solaris/Sun Ray network c.2004 and it was cheaper to switch to Linux/Intel and buy spare hardware to keep in a cupboard “just in case” than to keep the Sun network going through its support contract.
I think prices will go down not up eventually and everybody will have access to it in abundance. That might make most current AI companies go down of course.
And space launches. The Big Names will lose a ton of money and disappear as the tech commoditises.
The moat is Being Able To Do Things No One Else Can and as both hardware and software commoditise that moat disappears.
Open LLMs are already only a few months behind the frontier models and as soon as someone works out that accessible and cheap domain-specific custom training has the potential to be a gamechanger the Big Names will die.
Math puzzles only get you so far.
LLMs are in their Big Compute phase, and it's only a matter of time before that ends - because the intelligence of the frontier models isn't increasing fast enough and providing big enough benefits to make the models more valuable than cheaper, smaller competition.
i mean, imagine if your a business and suddenly you had to expense > $200 a month for every employee just to run a compiler, or you could just buy a computer and use it for everything else and that as well…
i think llms will be the same.
n=1 but at $work they are forcing us off enterprise and on to personal claude max that caps at $200 and people are like “you don’t need the top end models anyways just use the cheaper one for coding”, which begs the question how long till those “good enough” models run locally (with relative ease) and our company can cut that huge monthly cost with just the macbook pro they are gonna buy anyways.
I worked at Sun labs and used a Sun Ray daily for a whole summer. It worked...OK. Definitely not "Incredibly well". We had a network of a few hundred Sun Rays and two E10Ks backing it. More than a million for the servers and $1000k a piece for the Sun Rays was not cheap. Basically any $1000 laptop was more powerful, without the need for a crazy powerful Sun server. The experience of taking out my ID card, walking down the hall to another cubicle and popping it in and getting my session was magical. But I did that less than once a week, so I don't think it was overall worth it. The Sun Rays also had a pretty crappy LCD, about 1-2 years behind the SoTA.
It was a cool idea. It will keep coming back again and again. But at Sun's price points around the early 2000s, it was a loser, and I actually agree with the market in this instance. Sun Ray was a flop.
Citrix is still everywhere you need a client that can do things a web browser can’t—like run ancient VB4 software or talk to device hardware—deployed at scale.
Citrix was bought out by PE for $16.5B a few years ago, under the (sadly correct) assumption they hadn’t been charging their customers enough money for this essential tech.
GeForce is pretty successful. But only because Nvidia can sell itself GPUs at cost and reuse old data center hardware to get lower prices than anyone else.
If you're not cheaper than buying a PC or console you can't win. No one wants to pay more for the privilege of input lag and compressed video, or getting in trouble with their ISP if they have a strict data cap.
The "two E10Ks" part is the important part there, as you need a very powerful server to support SunRay users running Solaris. At my university there was something like 200 SunRays supported by cluster of T2000s (7 nodes IIRC), it was fine for CDE, Firefox and few dtterms, completely unusable with Gnome (it took Gnome like 10 minutes to even start).
On the other hand I have heard of some success stories about using SunRays as RDP clients, which is actually supported configuration (you still need a Solaris box that manages the sunrays and translates RDP to ALP).
the lab I was at got on this train right around the beginning of the sparc architecture. yellow pages. nfs based swap, nfs based boot. 10Mbit thinnet. we suffered for a few months and then moved to xterms for the cheap seats (which was a much better place to cut services) and went back to buying self-sufficient workstations.
the best was having everyone with a disk cross-mount each other. any failure snowballed into a global failure.
I interned for Sun and then worked as an MTS in Sun Labs for a couple of years. I miss Sun; I think they were very much an engineer's company that was spoiled by two things: big success in the early workstation market, and the dumb luck of the dot com boom. Sun hardware was solid (even though they fell behind the curve because of mismanagement of a couple of CPU lines), and its kernel (Solaris) was one of the well-engineered kernels ever. While any business makes some bad business decisions from time to time, one thing that was fatal was a crippling enterprise focus that failed to understand the huge growth opportunity that OSS and Linux represented. It was growth in a direction they not only didn't understand, but refused to understand, study, or adapt to.
Sun's heyday was in the boom. The fish were jumping in the boat. So naturally they were building bigger and bigger boats.
There was always the one-off ideas that might have gone here or there, but that core server cow just seemed like an endless source of cash. Thus they neglected the workstation market and ironically, the market for anything bigger than one single server rack. They didn't understand horizontal scaling, and the rise of cheap-but-replaceable consumer hardware like how Google did things was alien to them. They poo-poo'ed Linux, they killed and then unkilled Solaris x86, and a number of other things.
I do miss Sun though. As far as engineering goes, they were a very serious company full of serious engineers. Basically the polar opposite of 10X tech bros and startup culture.
Oof, the killing and subsequent unkilling of Solaris x86 in 2002 brings back very bad memories -- Sun management at its worst. It also highlighted the relative power of Sun's engineering in that everyone in Solaris knew it was the wrong decision, and we more or less disobeyed orders: during that period (January 2002 to August 2002, when it was reversed), we didn't change our treatment of x86. (And in particular, breaking x86 was grounds for a putback to be backed out.)
When Solaris x86 was unkilled (and then became increasingly important as x86 eclipsed SPARC), there was damage done that I don't think we ever fully repaired.
Agreed. When I was in the labs (2007 - 2010), my workstation was an AMD with Solaris on it, with a modern window manager and all, with IntelliJ and a great development environment. I almost didn't know it was Linux. But by then the ship had long sailed.
I worked at sun (sunsoft) right out of school near the peak. It was great. I was very excited to have all of the sources for sunos easily available to read.
Later, in grad school I went to work at a startup… google. For me it recaptured everything I liked about Sun. And had the same CEO.
What of Jini, JavaSpaces / Linda, JXTA, "grid computing"?
Were they too early? Dismissed as (Bill Joy's) hobby projects?
At the time, I was very enthusiastic. Especiall grid computing. So much so that when cloud computing arrived, I couldn't recognize the sea change. Square peg, round hole.
We even POC'd some Jini support. Demo'd for hardware manufacturers, customers, our dealer channel. Customers loved the idea.
But like UPnP, Jini failed to get traction.
As for JXTA (peer-to-peer), although I didn't gave any skin in that gane, I really expected it to vecome the norm. eg My brother (for his ISP) POC'd video delivery in anticipation. But that got mooted pretty quick.
Arguably, AWS Lambda (et al) was is "dumb" grid (run anywhere in asandbox) and the OpenClaw agentic (madness) is the "evil" incarnation. (I'm aware of efforts like Emerald AI (et al) to make a "smart" grid.)
RE: JXTA, right around the turn of the century, it felt like there was an opportunity for a globe-spanning peer-to-peer application layer, based on content-addressable storage.
DHTs—Chord paper was 2001—started popping up. The big software vendors looked at the architectural (if not legal) success of Napster & the other P2P networks and were invested in finding legitimate applications. Open standards were seeing real adoption left and right.
But it didn’t happen. Maybe simultaneously too late in the Internet’s evolution and too early.
Too late because the big kids were involved. Especially Microsoft, who would never allow any standard they couldn’t EEE to emerge. Too early because the players like Google who later could muscle through core infrastructure standards weren’t there yet.
And now it’s likely too late, with mobile embedding a client-server model with the weight of 10B devices.
At my employer in 1999 we were maintaining home-grown binary modification to the Solaris kernel so that IP segment send and receive were not O(N^2) where N was the number of addresses on the interface :-/ It was, as far as I could tell, an operating system that nobody had ever tried to use before. For anything where we could avoid Sun we used FreeBSD. One of the nice things about the free Unixes of that time was that process and thread creation or destruction were orders of magnitude faster than on Sun. To me, Sun was obviously in a lower category than Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD.
Around 1998-2000 my dad made a little business out of setting up linux servers on commodity hardware in my hometown. Primitive social networks, LAN provider servers, mail servers all worked just fine. Not without some involved convincing, and tinkering, and kernel patching but they did work.
One or two of the companies later became regional champions, running 100s of linux/x86/dell machines.
None of them would be able to afford a proper Sun server. Sun would never bother itself with these original tiny contracts.
It dont think Sun even stood a chance in this game. They couldnt even realize this happening!
The linux kernel didn't even gain SMP until 1996. Solaris was running circles around it both before and after that point. Solaris was vastly more mature and stable.
Of course, after that, Solaris just kept running in very expensive circles while linux went on to make steady progress.
it was called "Slow arse". This was because it was rather reluctant in handing out resources (memory fe).
Having fought it, I remember the system APIs being really well defined and picky (which was good). At one point, the C compiler had some identity issues "am I 32 bit, or 64 bit?"
Heh, yeah, we're hearing that a lot. We'll find a way of getting these out to people, but we're still debating the best way to do that (running an online store isn't zero work -- but it's also not an unsolved problem!). Stay tuned!
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.
Whatever 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
There's a vast gulf between Android and a Linux desktop environment. Android is a Linux kernel with the Android environment on top and is not just some Linux distro like anyone uses on a PC. ChromeOS is very similar.
Android and ChromeOS are still Linux distros, with a UI dedicated for their exact purpose. There have been other distros in the past trying to explore different ways of building a Linux, Gobolinux for example tried to get rid of the traditional POSIX filesystem hierarchy. Sure Android and ChromeOS probably diverged more but that doesn't make them any less linux distros. For a start, termux couldn't exist if android wasn't a Linux distro as no emulation or vm is involved, these are typical linux userland and processes running on android.
FWIW and for good reasons current Android UI is terrible for a desktop usage and ChromeOS is too limited for some people.
> 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.
> 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.
That's really an old-school UNIX convention that should have died with the move from teletypes to CRT terminals. The default behavior was that ERASE was # and KILL was @ (rather than backspace and Ctrl-C). It was typical for these to get set properly on logging in.
Well, of course, getty doesn't know whether the thing plugged into the serial port is a teletype or a CRT terminal. But the actual Sun console isn't a serial port!
Ahh, ^H brings back memories. We had Solaris x86 machines in the computer lab at UC Santa Barbara when I was there from 97 to 02. They were deathly slow never mind that CDE was miserable too. I made it slightly less painful by loading the BSD versions of the utilities and using those. Pretty much gave up and ran FreeBSD on the desktop with Window Maker.
Sun got by because they had faster and more reliable hardware than what was available in the x86 space at the time. eBay's services ran on a handful of 64 CPU Starfire servers. And proprietary UNIX workstations had a bunch of specialized apps that weren't available on Linux at that point.
This was my experience as well, from the same time period 2003ish. My University's computer lab was all Sun. I thought CDE was shocking, I was immediately repelled by it when I started using it and had a similar experience with those Sun keyboards.
One of the other students in that class gave me a Mandrake Linux cd (It ran KDE) he taught me how to use SSH. After that I worked from home and submitted my assignments remotely. I have not looked back from Linux since.
I don't think it was limited to Sun. The first job I had out of university there were computers running HPUX also had CDE gave me flashbacks straight back to university. It definitely gave me the impression that all the commercial Unix companies were ancient Dinosaurs that had zero taste.
> 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.
Linux having better UI than proprietary Unices (except SGI) was true from the beginning. In 01993, even before package managers, the Linux standard was color rxvt, color ls, Seyon, fvwm with multiple virtual desktops (really important at 800×600), Emacs preinstalled, and you could termify your web browser and whatnot so you could run them at home on a dialup shell account. Proprietary Unices (except SGI) had monochrome xterm, vi (with no arrow key support), and typically either twm or mwm, which both looked like shit and still do. Suns sometimes had olwm but Sun had sort of abandoned Open Look by that point. If you had a Sun at home connected through a dialup shell account, you could forget about running any TCP/IP apps on your Sun. By 01996 the Linux world had slirp, so you didn't even have to termify your TCP/IP apps, while Solaris didn't even include a C compiler anymore.
CDE seems like somebody thought that the problem with Motif was that, although it was butt-ugly, it wasn't quite ugly enough.
And, yeah, backspace worked. Also automatic window resizing. And for years Solaris had a totally fatal TCP round-trip estimation bug which made TCP connections to Solaris machines over dialup incredibly slow. Linux was just dramatically more technically competent.
Sun did have a pretty amazing engineering culture. They shipped SPARC, Open Look, NeWS, Java, HotJava, HotSpot, NFS, Sun RPC, yp/NIS, Spring, ZFS, OpenBoot/Open Firmware, and I think even Sprite, and for a while they employed the Tcl team, bringing Tcl out of the stone age. But they sucked at fixing the fatal flaws in their actual products, and half the engineering achievements in my list above were murdered by Sun's incompetent management.
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.
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.
Part of my maturing as I've gotten older is realizing how much business success actually comes from Sales, BizzDev, Product, etc. Engineering is great, but if you don't have people actually getting things shipped, getting customers, and talking with customers, you will eventually fail. Sure sometimes some internet companies find a money printer and get around this, but I think they are the exceptions to the rule. Sun having great tech, but having a shit sales channel, is not going to lead to success. Dell, small or large, they are going to get you someone on the phone and sell you a server.
Part of my maturing with getting older in addition to the above is that luck is a larger factor than most people are willing to admit. So I'm with you that GTM is just as important as engineering, but execution on all fronts is what tilts the luck factor. And with luck you get exceptions which is why you can get companies that seem to succeed despite themselves.
>Monday, February 10, 2003 Posted: 3:55 PM EST (2055 GMT)
>NEW YORK (CNN) -- Benjamin Curtis, better known as the "Dell Dude" from the computer company's television commercials, was arrested Sunday while he allegedly attempted to buy marijuana on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Steve The Dell Dude Commercial Compilation (DUDE WE'RE GETTING A DELL!)
I worked at Sun from 1995 to 2004. My take is that Sun had major structural problems all along, but as long as money streamed in from the tech bubble, these issues could be ignored. When the tech bubble ended, it was too late to fix the problems.
One big problem was that there was no cooperation inside Sun. Groups in Sun kind of viewed HP as a competitor, kind of viewed SGI as a competitor, but the real competitor to be destroyed was that other group in Sun. The leaders of the project I worked on spent most of their time in political battles, trying to acquire or outmaneuver the other teams working on similar projects.
Another problem was that the main parts of Sun had conflicting strategies. The Solaris/SunSoft division wanted to run on SPARC, x86, and Power PC for the largest market. The SPARC division, of course, wanted none of that. The hardware division wanted to make expensive servers, but the other teams saw cheaper hardware as the right direction. The market ended up moving to cheap rack-mounted Linux x86 servers, so nobody at Sun won in the end.
Right before they fell face-first into the grave, they did finally ship the v20z, which was a completely reasonable way to run Solaris x86. Its management board ran Linux on PowerPC, for irony purposes.
Since we're sharing, I have fond memories of my using my the Sun thin clients at university. They were slow to start up and use for the most part, but once you got to the terminal... it was great.
Being a hacker-type, I did everything with it.
Email? Forget waiting for some bloated email client, I'm using pine.
Want some html on my personal page? Use vi.
I think they didn't take away my access for years after college, and I would sometimes login and poke around just for fun.
I do blame them, along with the rise of Java and the awful gui toolkit motif for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree. I was so frustrated that our grades were dependent on learning something that I saw as completely worthless in light of the dotcom boom happening at the time. I wanted them to teach us web technologies, or at least some good system code, but all I got was broken x11 and awful performance.
> I do blame them, along with the rise of Java ...for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree.
I avoided studying CS for this reason: I saw my girlfriend's Java textbooks and thought if I had to appreciate this, I wasn't cut out to be a programmer, and stuck to network engineering. Years later, after 'Gang of Four' style OOP started dying, I have some code in a new things people use here everyday.
I used a machine that had 8MB of RAM and a huge b&w monitor. One day I found out it would crash if your process forked more than 127 times. These things were so cool at the time but are nothing compared to a Raspberry Pi.
It's absolutely crazy to realize that even a Pi 400 running from MicroSD would smoke classic workstations of yesteryear, and yet by today's standards it's slow.
People used to joke that EMACS was an acronym for "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping", just to give you an idea of how constrained memory was in those days.
Even the computers we think about as the first "PCs", the IBM 5150, shipped with 16 or 64kb of main memory. They were much closer to machines like the Apple II or the Commodore 64 than most people realize.
I was spoilt by SGI and their wonderful interface, where every detail was awesomely cool. The Sun machines were just old-fashioned at this superficial but important level of how it all looked, but only if you knew better, and that meant experience of SGI. In the world of IRIX, we had CPU-eater desktop wallpaper, meanwhile, on Sun, you had some badly drawn window decorations.
I imagine this to be the awful GUI that you speak of.
I say look and feel is superficial, however, when you have to learn a variant of UNIX with slightly different command line switches to the UNIX you know, with an interface worse than even Windows (3.11), for it to run dog slow, a lot of copium is needed. A poor interface gets in the way of what you are trying to do, a cool interface just lets you get on with it.
Motif wasn't considered ugly at the time (at least by most people). If you ran Netscape on your SGI, you know what Motif looks like.
Motif did have a reputation for being a total drag to develop with, though. It's based on Xt. So is Athena, so if you've ever written an Xaw app it's pretty similar.
Right, I still remember the dotted XaW scrollbars that would scroll a little or a lot depending on where you clicked them; and playing Freeciv with XaW in my early Linux days. Good times.
Motif was even released as open source OpenMotif, but faaar too late. The whole Xt architecture in general seemed like an overcomplex solution looking for a problem, and it was easier to either use Xlib directly or go the gtk route.
Considerable portion of later Irix software was Motif too - just "Irix-special" version (major optimizations for rendering among other things by mixing 8bit pseudocolor and hardware compositing)
I think motif was fine for its time, but definitely not much better than OpenLook.
However, 30 years ago, developing a standard SunOS app with devGuide was the most enjoyable and productive programming I've ever experienced. Simply layout your GUI, link actions to methods, generate code, fill in the abstracted methods, compile and run. I didn't have to learn X or any other bloated low level graphics library.
The good thing about Sun (when working at a corporate customer) was that they were very good at getting their distinguished tech people into give talks - Tim Bray, James Gosling etc.
I sold my Sun stock at the internet bubble top for $70 a share. A few months later it was $7. I think of that when I see PE ratios in the hundreds for Tesla, SpaceX and other AI stocks.
Good timing. But on the other hand if you had sold AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, ORCL, AVGO, ADI, KLAC, LRCX, etc at the Internet bubble top then you would have missed out on huge gains since then.
Your point is correct, but let's not gloss over that most of those had 80% drawdowns or more. The nasdaq took 15 years to recover and it's only been 25 years total, meaning 60% of the time since then you'd have been living with a paper loss. Timing is difficult but powerful. (Just not as powerful as 25 years of waiting.)
People will eagerly tell you that some types of investments are guaranteed to show returns over a long enough period, but over a long enough period we'll all be dead.
> […] etc at the Internet bubble top then you would have missed out on huge gains since then.
Only if you did not repurchase.
Or you could DCA out: have a standard policy that no single stock can be more that x% of your portfolio, and as any one gets above that limit you crystallize profits. It's no different than having a 60/40 portfolio and rebalancing your equities if they get >60%.
I know OP has an intimately inside perspective, whereas what I know about Sun is only from what I read online as an admirer and developer on its platforms… but “gotten bored of the mechanics of running a business” does not match what seemed to be more about having gotten “too enterprise-y” or “too out of touch with the market” and maybe also “too hubristic.”
It's full RRP for everything less than 1000 units. If you want a 100 unit refresh you are better off going to your local corner shop for price and service.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 59.2 ms ] threadAt this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.
Eventually they’ll come back and have some impressive sounding exec reply saying they need 20% less to get it in the budget.
The key thing is being transparent with customers on price, availability, and delivery schedules. In the short term server vendors can use tricks and personal relationships to extract higher profit margins but eventually the senior executives at major customers figure out what's happening and start looking for other options.
I don't blame them in the sense that I wish for them to be imprisoned or anything. But I wouldn't do business with them, either. I want business partners whom I can count on, not ones who will stop returning my calls as soon as a more lucrative opportunity arises.
This is precisely the role of the sales person for something like a service, but for a physical product it is pretty egregious. There is no greater sin than leaving money on the table. There's an old story about someone offering a quote that was apparently pretty low based on reaction, so they quickly add "that was for my assistant" to give way for pushing the number higher.
I don’t understand what this means? I understand that they bumped the price. But I du not understand what is meant by it being for the assistant? Care to explain?
Electrician: "Okay, so my services start at $100/hr"
<nobody bats an eye>
Electrician: "... for when my assistant can handle things."
Replace Electrician by whatever skilled professional you prefer.
You price it at what you think works. There is no push back, so you make room to push the price higher.
You were happy to do it at the original price.
The 'that was for my assistant' is just something they say to explain away the earlier quoted price. They are pretending that what they said wasn't the quote for this conversation, it was for another, different conversation, between the salesman and their assistant. This only works when the assistant is not in the call.
This is why when I go to the price page for a product and seeing "contact our sales team for a quote" I look for an alternative.
Dell does a soft version of this by setting uncompetitive prices on the website and making you call to get the real price, although ironically that usually just means we go with a different company that simply posts a competitive price.
Sure they had an in house chip development ARM team right at the time when RISC economics looked good but CPU architecture had to work harder and harder to beat the memory wall and SPARC was not competitive by 2005 and “Hail Mary” projects like CoolThreads were difficult and expensive but did not deliver for customers.
Hypothetically customers could benefit from that proprietary stuff but they benefit even more from rapid progress is competitive, commodity markets.
why were you thinking of going Sun, as late as 2005? just easier to lock down, like kiosks?
> I wasn't able to get Mozilla to build
You must be misremembering something. Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox had always tier one support on Solaris. You had nothing to build, just download and run, with perfect compatibility.
I only ever ran Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox browser (and still today in 2026). My desktops and servers were all Solaris from mid-90s to 2012 or so. Never a hiccup running the Netscape family browsers (and servers too).
They probably had an official Solaris build of Mozilla later on but if one had been available at that point in time I would have installed it on the SPARC machine I had under my desk. The ship had sailed in terms of the organization's capital planning.
If you were happy running Netscape later than I was you might have felt supported.
When Netscape Navigator first came out eary/mid-90s I ran it on SunOS while working at a Sun shop, it always worked perfectly.
By the time the Netscape browser was open sourced in 1998 I was working at Sun and running it on Solaris, always worked perfectly. I attended the open sourcing party Netscape held in San Francisco, still have the autographed CD with the very first open source release source code. Netscape paid for buses from Silicon Valley to SF for people to attend the party. Fun times!!
In 1999 the Sun|Netscape alliance happened, AOL took the consumer software part including the browser and Sun continued the server product development under iPlanet brand. For a while I worked in the Netscape campus that year, and I continued working on iPlanet servers for years after that. Since the browser code had been open sourced, development continued outside AOL becoming Mozilla and later Firefox. Always first class on Solaris.
Firefox branding happened much later (wikipedia says 2004). Still working perfectly on Solaris. Only browser I ever ran, always on Solaris, until the bitter end (oracle lawnmower in 2010).
So yes I can confidently say it always ran perfectly on Solaris (SunOS in early years), having been there through all this and have fond memories of it all.
If someone else is paying I'd prefer one of these big OEMs for established firmware lifecycle, shock (shipping) and thermodynamics engineering. If I'm paying, Asus or MiTAC (Tyan) are good enough.
These days, I've got several Dell 5820 style workstations and I'm pretty sure someone who interned at sun in the 1990s is now running dell's workstation division. The medium sized dell deskside towers have nearly identical vibes as those old workstations, and are a pleasure to work with.
this is apple today.
Your sentence is a tacit admission that you don't have a very deep understanding of logistics and integration and what it has taken for Dell to build the deep supply chain they have. Yes, it's a commodity system; that's the point; but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right? Think about the difference there and why people still shell out for a Dell instead of a Supermicro or Exxact or plain whitebox hardware. There's a lot to a solid Dell server that you might not realize, from disk controllers to iDRAC....
We didn't think so.
I mean, if you have no knowledgable people, maybe, but for about 10 years we've found it a better use of time & treasure to buy generic servers and consumer laptops, and just have spares. We found Dell's support so costly and so ineffective that just buying extras turned out to be a better move.
Dell is at a sweet spot for many organizations where you can get hardware support from dell, or not.
You can (with dell) just buy used junk and use that, and you can still access their support library for firmware updates.
I did a lot of work with storage with dell stuff and I found it far simpler to "outsource" the storage integration to dell than to do it myself -- they make sure that all "2tb disks" are the same (exact!) size, they all use the same mechanism for firmware updates, etc.
A much larger org could have saved some money doing that integration and testing internally; a much smaller organization could save money just buying stuff from wherever and not worrying.
I personally haven't used dell support in over a decade, but I have found that their "look up the serial number" web site has been invaluable; I've found the fact that they publish firmware for all their stuff and let anyone install it valuable; the huge secondary market for dell is helpful, etc. And, if you care, you can even give them more money to directly support you, instead of just doing it yourself.
HPE, on the other hand, locks their stuff down super hard; I assume there are reasons to go with HPE, but I'd rather get clocked on my superdome with an HPUXy stick than ever touch that stuff again.
We used to buy the top-tier support plans for our laptops and servers, and we found they just consistently could NOT meet their obligations. Laptops stayed broken and nonfunctional for weeks and weeks.
They're awful.
SPARC was not proprietary, buy fully licensable:
* https://sparc.org
Fujitsu sold their own SPARC servers for many years with their own CPUs, and many third-parties put Fujitsu SPARC CPUs into (e.g.) laptops:
* https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...
Can you get an x86_64 CPU from someone other than Intel or AMD? x86 is much more proprietary than SPARC ever was.
Sun used the non-proprietary Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) for booting (also used by Apple with PowerPC), and SBus (IEEE 1496) for cards before moving to PCI. SCSI and Ethernet/IP were there since forever as well.
The "proprietary" label on Sun, at least when it came to hardware, was always a mystery to me.
Sun used a lot of open parts, but they had absolute control over the platform. Everything in your solution came from Sun or a Sun partner. Fujitsu doing weird stuff with Japanese mainframes was an interesting fact but irrelevant to 99% of Sun's user base.
Intel/AMD combined with EFI or IBM-compatible BIOS? You can get that from anybody. An HP server is basically interchangeable with a Dell.
Sun was proprietary in the same way Apple is.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC
Fujitsu was selling Solaris-compatible systems (as were many others). Linux and BSDs also ran on them.
There were a number of x86 makers up until the 1990s or so, but who is left of them? Can you still license x86(_x64) to fab your own CPUs? You can with SPARC:
* https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr765
Sadly, they left the Sparc clone business before they could even support Solaris! They stopped at SunOS 4.1.
Could an every day consumer buy a Sparc motherboard, chip, and build their own system? No. There may have been one or two vendors that did that late in the 90's, but they didn't stick around.
Yes:
* https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr765
* https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr740
* https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr-sbc-gr740
It appears there is a Linux kernel port: https://www.gaisler.com/products/linux-for-leon
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you can load a Linux distro on there. You have a couple other problems: there's no ethernet or wifi, and you only have 512 megs of RAM.
"Consumers" can be running it just as much as "consumers" could be running Raspberry Pis, which could also be considered 'embedded' by some. SPARC is no less (or more) proprietary than ARM: you can license the ISA, fab a CPU, and sell some kind of hardware stack.
Do you think it would be more or less difficult to get a license from Intel/AMD for x86(_X64) than ARM and/or SPARC so you could fab your own chips?
I later worked for a systems builder that built and sold Sparc/Ultrasparc systems for government (eg. Hong Kong Mass Transit). We were the only vendor in the Southern Hemisphere doing it. So it wasn't common. But yes you could order parts from Sun Microelectronics and build your own systems, and it became easier use certain standard PC compatible parts once they standardised on PCI. We had shelves full of the older incompatible MBus compatible systems and boards as well.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/sun-microsystems/stock-price-...
I went to their server site and clicked “shop now.”
I picked a PowerEdge R360. It has the price right here at $5k and a big green “Add to Cart” button along with an incredibly long list of customization options just like I was buying a laptop or desktop. It doesn’t seem like I have to contact anyone to get an order in.
It says I can get it as soon as October 2.
This is how license compliance shakedowns work. Make sure your DRM is more flexible than theicensing terms, find an overage and see what you can get the customer to agree to.
I have seen senior Oracle sales reps deliberately misreading their license doc to inflate what is owed.
"I guess I can't pay so much because such a huge fraction of the contract volume goes to my lawyer."
You'd price out a machine and then go look at comparable machines (difficult) from other vendors, then the next day your machine wouldn't be "the" configuration anymore. Instead there'd be half the ram and double the harddrive space for an extra $50, and if you swapped back to what it had been yesterday it'd cost you an extra $200.
IIRC they won business awards for this.
Where's Cartman when you need a vigorous "SHENANNIGANS!!!!"?
I think this would be expected from a company that has acquired and absorbed EMC and Perot.
IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture
I had a colleague where almost his whole job consisted of beating them in sheer sliminess, and at this he was good. I don't think we ever paid 30% of the prices they'd start at, but the process of achieving this was disgusting, and there was still the sense everyone was being screwed.
So when we could move to Dell we did.
Whereas Dell just gave us a flat 30% discount on list pricing, and were clear in advance about what level of annual spend would trigger an increase to 35%. We'd order online and our sales rep would phone a few hours later to confirm. Other than that, they'd initiate contact maybe once a year when Dell refreshed their server or storage product lines and would offer to either send some bumpf or arrange for some demo kit.
Dealing with them was so much less hassle all round, you never got covered in slime, and you never felt like they were on the verge of offering you bribes.
Uh, as in "excessive paperwork", like brochures/leaflets [1] about the new products? Not a native speaker, had a parse error I'm just trying to resolve ...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnglishLearning/comments/1hlbxv7/co...
(and I'd had no idea about the "bum fodder" derivation, so thanks!)
SUNW would probably still be around if the whole x86 commodity pizza box revolution hadn't happened OR if they had pivoted away from SPARC and went heavy into x86. Example: buying from IBM doesn't sound too different from buying from Sun, but they're still around because mainframes will be around until the Earth implodes (probably).
(I think that their channel/partner programs along with their professional services org are big reasons why Dell is still a key player in the datacenter space. You can buy Dell direct, and the sales process is still good, but bigger players usually get their Dell kit through distributors/vendors with Dell professional services handling architecture, build-out, enablement, etc. I'm not sure how much energy SUNW invested in this, as they were before my time.)
You can even run most cool Python, Go, Java, Rust, PHP among others, on systems like z/OS.
I was kinda stunned; there’s a level of balls involved in selling an x millions machine and having it fail closed that I’m sort of impressed by but also utterly appalled they’d treat their big customers like that..
I mean surely to fuck it could have been an automated reminder email to the mothership and not just: sorry folks no banking for you today.
The rise of the Internet made channel sales handoffs a weak point in the business model. I bet this missed sale went to a reseller who didn't respond and Sun didn't have any controls or visibility on that failure.
Even now I think enterprise companies should be more open about what's possible and what the price and delivery date would be without having to talk/chat/email anybody. Even for something like a Juniper $100k+ device it would be kind of cool to configure it.
In a time frame like 1999 to 2002, much more broadly than that, just the increasing gap in cost vs what you would get between buying any hardware+OS package from a legacy Unix-like vendor (Sun, DEC, SGI) and doing your own thing on a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux on x86 hardware.
Dell was obviously a top choice, but by 2000 or so, Linux or FreeBSD had become good enough that you could do exactly the same thing for a fraction of the cost and run it on x86 hardware you had purchased from either Dell or one of the top 5 or 6 Dell-competitors.
As compared to, as you say, sitting through sales meetings, price quotes, revisions, a long slow and arduous process to arrive at a figure where you come to a conclusion "yeah you can spend $60,000 on these Sun servers or we can buy $20,000 of x86 servers and get creative with our own software stack to do the same thing in house".
At a certain point 1U and 2U server hardware got fast enough on boring standard x86 single or dual socket motherboards from Taiwan, in the era of like the 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 with 512KB cache, that the performance was pretty damn good and the machine cost a fraction of what the equivalent Sun or SGI rackmount machine would cost. This is in the era before a multi core x86 CPU existed. And you could be sure that its BIOS and motherboard were already OK for use with a current Linux kernel, we're talking about motherboards from Supermicro, Tyan, intel whitebox reference server boards, etc.
1999 and 2002 correspond roughly to telecom and dotcom bubbles popping. So open source operating systems were also pulled up into these positions through a lot of work and by the early 2000s it was kind of obvious this was the way forward.
2008 financial crisis really knocked the high end (RISC/UNIX/Itanium) and started the long migration to renting vs owning. In hindsight it's remarkable how much money used to just be there in the economy of all this. But I guess it still is, considering how expensive public cloud is.
It's not like there's less servers being sold, they're just bespoke designs from companies like the big Taiwanese ODMs that go straight into hyperscaler facilities, and we don't get to see public marketing websites and product info about them. The open compute platform stuff that's been publicly shown is like the tip of an iceberg.
I find it a real shame it's not easier to get OCP hardware for our homelabs. Would be so much easier to operate, upgrade, and so on. And where would you even get decommissioned OCP gear?
> More than once though, the Sun people did suggest I just buy the servers off the web site.
Dell was just the only one to callback.
I don't doubt your experience but that was at the height of Sun's business, not it's nadir as this article is about.
[0] - https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcon
But yeah, the lack of package manager hurt a lot, and there were competing third-party package managers which had totally different pro's/con's and packages and were incompatible with each other... what a mess.
Compared to apt/yum it was kinda comical... but the first party software really was excellent otherwise.
Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the ultimate outcome -- and I think it's pretty telling that Sun's executive leadership basically went on to do more or less nothing after Sun. I loved Sun -- but it was a breeding ground for engineers, not executive leadership.
Sun could've been the "Apple" of x86 Unix: it just works.
Solaris was pretty bare bones, out of the box. I spent days customizing it. Even early Linux distros, like Slackware, were in better shape.
ZFS was pretty unrivaled for long term storage for a long time. Solaris zones were containers before they were cool. Dtrace is pretty neat. Etc.
Maybe they could have survived with their OpenSolaris push driving low end adoption and high end customers buying their hardware. Pretty sure they would have had to migrate to x86, but they were dabling in that.
Maybe make some low end commodity x86 servers. Sell enterprise a fully engineered big ass database server and a bunch of commodity web servers. Doesn't have to be exceptionally priced, just good enough to let customers have single vendor server purchasing instead of getting the big stuff from sun and the little stuff from dell or hp.
More systems consulting? Sun had great engineers, but you don't see too many war stories about them fixing stuff for customers (maybe they keep quiet though).
Both of these are supported on Linux now. The kill-on-ECC is handled by hwpoison: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v5.1/vm/hwpoison.html and the hot-swappable RAM has been present for quite a bit longer.
I'm not terribly surprised that Linux grew support for poisoning pages eventually (and I appreciate the link!), but I believe Solaris had memory retirement in Solaris 10 (2005), and Linux got page poisoning in 2009. If you were running workloads where it would be important, then Solaris was better for you at that time, unlike the claim from the poster above that
> once Linux was stable, running Linux on commodity hardware was just a better solution than anything Sun could offer.
I think only a curmudgeon would claim Linux wasn't stable in 2005. Although certainly the userland could use less churn. :P
There was (and still is) a bunch of niche Linux kernels. I remember reading about a team that used Xen to do triple-redundancy with voting for Linux. They virtualized _all_ the non-deterministic IO paths (including rdtsc) and observed the outgoing network packets, ensuring that they are completely identical. I think this was around the mid-2000-s timeframe.
But yeah, it was all super-niche. The consensus now is that you should design your systems to be fault-tolerant and self-recovering, rather than depending on perfect hardware functionality. And for everything else IBM still exists.
I saw the end coming for Sun when I had a dx2/66 at home running Linux in the late 90s. It was brilliant.
But as some sibling comments indicate they already had a lot of the software infra for distributed computing the way it eventually came to be done today, with SOA/microservices, service discovery, or serverless lambdas etc. via frameworks like EJB or JXTA. They were admittedly pretty cumbersome, like the contemporary equivalents COM/DCOM, and made the fundamental mistake of trying to abstract away the fallacies of distributed computing, but also solved most of the common problems involved.
Potentially they could have pivoted to monetizing that software infra even if it got deployed on arbitrary hardware, which may have tided them over until they could spin up their own cloud service, even if it was a fast follow to AWS. However Sun seemed committed to making their expensive servers their primary business model and relegated the software to “loss leader” complements.
If they had just looked at how services were being developed on Linux + commodity servers, they’d have seen they already had offerings in that space that could be monetized.
Open source Solaris as early as possible.
Really compete with MIPS, ARM, Motorola, etc. in the embedded space. Don't even try to make it a huge financial win, just get the SPARC architecture and dev tools out there with good Linux support.
Consistently support Solaris x86 and frequently release new generations of Intel and AMD workstation-class hardware.
Partner with TSMC for SPARC production a lot earlier.
Since we're just having fun here: acquire Nvidia in 1999, at which time it was pretty obvious workstation graphics was going to be commodified, and Sun could have bought them with their pocket change.
The fault is always upper management not doing their job. Even if one department really would be that bad (which again they are not), upper management allowed them to be that bad.
The moat is Being Able To Do Things No One Else Can and as both hardware and software commoditise that moat disappears.
Open LLMs are already only a few months behind the frontier models and as soon as someone works out that accessible and cheap domain-specific custom training has the potential to be a gamechanger the Big Names will die.
Math puzzles only get you so far.
LLMs are in their Big Compute phase, and it's only a matter of time before that ends - because the intelligence of the frontier models isn't increasing fast enough and providing big enough benefits to make the models more valuable than cheaper, smaller competition.
i think llms will be the same.
n=1 but at $work they are forcing us off enterprise and on to personal claude max that caps at $200 and people are like “you don’t need the top end models anyways just use the cheaper one for coding”, which begs the question how long till those “good enough” models run locally (with relative ease) and our company can cut that huge monthly cost with just the macbook pro they are gonna buy anyways.
It was a cool idea. It will keep coming back again and again. But at Sun's price points around the early 2000s, it was a loser, and I actually agree with the market in this instance. Sun Ray was a flop.
It lived on in the world of Windows Terminal Services and things like Citrix - maybe still does in some places.
Citrix was bought out by PE for $16.5B a few years ago, under the (sadly correct) assumption they hadn’t been charging their customers enough money for this essential tech.
If you're not cheaper than buying a PC or console you can't win. No one wants to pay more for the privilege of input lag and compressed video, or getting in trouble with their ISP if they have a strict data cap.
On the other hand I have heard of some success stories about using SunRays as RDP clients, which is actually supported configuration (you still need a Solaris box that manages the sunrays and translates RDP to ALP).
Which is why it is kind of ironic having folks discussing microservices as something groundbreaking.
the best was having everyone with a disk cross-mount each other. any failure snowballed into a global failure.
Sun's heyday was in the boom. The fish were jumping in the boat. So naturally they were building bigger and bigger boats.
There was always the one-off ideas that might have gone here or there, but that core server cow just seemed like an endless source of cash. Thus they neglected the workstation market and ironically, the market for anything bigger than one single server rack. They didn't understand horizontal scaling, and the rise of cheap-but-replaceable consumer hardware like how Google did things was alien to them. They poo-poo'ed Linux, they killed and then unkilled Solaris x86, and a number of other things.
I do miss Sun though. As far as engineering goes, they were a very serious company full of serious engineers. Basically the polar opposite of 10X tech bros and startup culture.
When Solaris x86 was unkilled (and then became increasingly important as x86 eclipsed SPARC), there was damage done that I don't think we ever fully repaired.
This is one of the top reasons I loved and love Sun. Truth, engineering, had power.
I've never experienced this in any company since Sun.
Later, in grad school I went to work at a startup… google. For me it recaptured everything I liked about Sun. And had the same CEO.
> They didn't understand horizontal scaling
What of Jini, JavaSpaces / Linda, JXTA, "grid computing"?
Were they too early? Dismissed as (Bill Joy's) hobby projects?
At the time, I was very enthusiastic. Especiall grid computing. So much so that when cloud computing arrived, I couldn't recognize the sea change. Square peg, round hole.
We even POC'd some Jini support. Demo'd for hardware manufacturers, customers, our dealer channel. Customers loved the idea.
But like UPnP, Jini failed to get traction.
As for JXTA (peer-to-peer), although I didn't gave any skin in that gane, I really expected it to vecome the norm. eg My brother (for his ISP) POC'd video delivery in anticipation. But that got mooted pretty quick.
Arguably, AWS Lambda (et al) was is "dumb" grid (run anywhere in asandbox) and the OpenClaw agentic (madness) is the "evil" incarnation. (I'm aware of efforts like Emerald AI (et al) to make a "smart" grid.)
DHTs—Chord paper was 2001—started popping up. The big software vendors looked at the architectural (if not legal) success of Napster & the other P2P networks and were invested in finding legitimate applications. Open standards were seeing real adoption left and right.
But it didn’t happen. Maybe simultaneously too late in the Internet’s evolution and too early.
Too late because the big kids were involved. Especially Microsoft, who would never allow any standard they couldn’t EEE to emerge. Too early because the players like Google who later could muscle through core infrastructure standards weren’t there yet.
And now it’s likely too late, with mobile embedding a client-server model with the weight of 10B devices.
Even ZFS was way better integrated with the Linux kernel even while Solaris was supposedly maintained.
All development and production deployments was being done across Solaris, Aix and HP-UX in regards to UNIX flavours.
Around 1998-2000 my dad made a little business out of setting up linux servers on commodity hardware in my hometown. Primitive social networks, LAN provider servers, mail servers all worked just fine. Not without some involved convincing, and tinkering, and kernel patching but they did work.
One or two of the companies later became regional champions, running 100s of linux/x86/dell machines.
None of them would be able to afford a proper Sun server. Sun would never bother itself with these original tiny contracts.
It dont think Sun even stood a chance in this game. They couldnt even realize this happening!
Of course, after that, Solaris just kept running in very expensive circles while linux went on to make steady progress.
You can't just say that without sharing those too!
Whatever 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.
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.
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.
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.
like smartphones ;-)
FWIW and for good reasons current Android UI is terrible for a desktop usage and ChromeOS is too limited for some people.
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.
That's really an old-school UNIX convention that should have died with the move from teletypes to CRT terminals. The default behavior was that ERASE was # and KILL was @ (rather than backspace and Ctrl-C). It was typical for these to get set properly on logging in.
Sun got by because they had faster and more reliable hardware than what was available in the x86 space at the time. eBay's services ran on a handful of 64 CPU Starfire servers. And proprietary UNIX workstations had a bunch of specialized apps that weren't available on Linux at that point.
One of the other students in that class gave me a Mandrake Linux cd (It ran KDE) he taught me how to use SSH. After that I worked from home and submitted my assignments remotely. I have not looked back from Linux since.
I don't think it was limited to Sun. The first job I had out of university there were computers running HPUX also had CDE gave me flashbacks straight back to university. It definitely gave me the impression that all the commercial Unix companies were ancient Dinosaurs that had zero taste.
Linux having better UI than proprietary Unices (except SGI) was true from the beginning. In 01993, even before package managers, the Linux standard was color rxvt, color ls, Seyon, fvwm with multiple virtual desktops (really important at 800×600), Emacs preinstalled, and you could termify your web browser and whatnot so you could run them at home on a dialup shell account. Proprietary Unices (except SGI) had monochrome xterm, vi (with no arrow key support), and typically either twm or mwm, which both looked like shit and still do. Suns sometimes had olwm but Sun had sort of abandoned Open Look by that point. If you had a Sun at home connected through a dialup shell account, you could forget about running any TCP/IP apps on your Sun. By 01996 the Linux world had slirp, so you didn't even have to termify your TCP/IP apps, while Solaris didn't even include a C compiler anymore.
CDE seems like somebody thought that the problem with Motif was that, although it was butt-ugly, it wasn't quite ugly enough.
And, yeah, backspace worked. Also automatic window resizing. And for years Solaris had a totally fatal TCP round-trip estimation bug which made TCP connections to Solaris machines over dialup incredibly slow. Linux was just dramatically more technically competent.
Sun did have a pretty amazing engineering culture. They shipped SPARC, Open Look, NeWS, Java, HotJava, HotSpot, NFS, Sun RPC, yp/NIS, Spring, ZFS, OpenBoot/Open Firmware, and I think even Sprite, and for a while they employed the Tcl team, bringing Tcl out of the stone age. But they sucked at fixing the fatal flaws in their actual products, and half the engineering achievements in my list above were murdered by Sun's incompetent management.
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.
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.
Once you have git and actions, I don't think that the language really matters all that much.
That wasn't even true back then.
https://edition.cnn.com/2003/LAW/02/10/deli.dude.arrest/
>'Dell Dude' arrested for marijuana possession
>Monday, February 10, 2003 Posted: 3:55 PM EST (2055 GMT)
>NEW YORK (CNN) -- Benjamin Curtis, better known as the "Dell Dude" from the computer company's television commercials, was arrested Sunday while he allegedly attempted to buy marijuana on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Steve The Dell Dude Commercial Compilation (DUDE WE'RE GETTING A DELL!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJxTHMygpDY
One big problem was that there was no cooperation inside Sun. Groups in Sun kind of viewed HP as a competitor, kind of viewed SGI as a competitor, but the real competitor to be destroyed was that other group in Sun. The leaders of the project I worked on spent most of their time in political battles, trying to acquire or outmaneuver the other teams working on similar projects.
Another problem was that the main parts of Sun had conflicting strategies. The Solaris/SunSoft division wanted to run on SPARC, x86, and Power PC for the largest market. The SPARC division, of course, wanted none of that. The hardware division wanted to make expensive servers, but the other teams saw cheaper hardware as the right direction. The market ended up moving to cheap rack-mounted Linux x86 servers, so nobody at Sun won in the end.
Being a hacker-type, I did everything with it.
Email? Forget waiting for some bloated email client, I'm using pine.
Want some html on my personal page? Use vi.
I think they didn't take away my access for years after college, and I would sometimes login and poke around just for fun.
I do blame them, along with the rise of Java and the awful gui toolkit motif for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree. I was so frustrated that our grades were dependent on learning something that I saw as completely worthless in light of the dotcom boom happening at the time. I wanted them to teach us web technologies, or at least some good system code, but all I got was broken x11 and awful performance.
I avoided studying CS for this reason: I saw my girlfriend's Java textbooks and thought if I had to appreciate this, I wasn't cut out to be a programmer, and stuck to network engineering. Years later, after 'Gang of Four' style OOP started dying, I have some code in a new things people use here everyday.
https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard
Even the computers we think about as the first "PCs", the IBM 5150, shipped with 16 or 64kb of main memory. They were much closer to machines like the Apple II or the Commodore 64 than most people realize.
105 mb disks meant (almost) everything was NFS mounted, and NFS did a great job.
But to your point, with 8 megs, Emacs Makes A Computer Slow.
And there was no budget for upgrades to anything.
I imagine this to be the awful GUI that you speak of.
I say look and feel is superficial, however, when you have to learn a variant of UNIX with slightly different command line switches to the UNIX you know, with an interface worse than even Windows (3.11), for it to run dog slow, a lot of copium is needed. A poor interface gets in the way of what you are trying to do, a cool interface just lets you get on with it.
Motif did have a reputation for being a total drag to develop with, though. It's based on Xt. So is Athena, so if you've ever written an Xaw app it's pretty similar.
Motif was even released as open source OpenMotif, but faaar too late. The whole Xt architecture in general seemed like an overcomplex solution looking for a problem, and it was easier to either use Xlib directly or go the gtk route.
However, 30 years ago, developing a standard SunOS app with devGuide was the most enjoyable and productive programming I've ever experienced. Simply layout your GUI, link actions to methods, generate code, fill in the abstracted methods, compile and run. I didn't have to learn X or any other bloated low level graphics library.
AFAIK, nothing has been easier, especially XCode.
Same guy who invented Vi invented Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy.
Only if you did not repurchase.
Or you could DCA out: have a standard policy that no single stock can be more that x% of your portfolio, and as any one gets above that limit you crystallize profits. It's no different than having a 60/40 portfolio and rebalancing your equities if they get >60%.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40950311
In the later, I don't have to worry about hardware/power/networking/etc at all.