What Sun got wrong(bcantrill.dtrace.org) |
What Sun got wrong(bcantrill.dtrace.org) |
You can't just say that without sharing those too!
I think the big US mega-mega-corporations, while powerful and dominating, also became super-boring. Nobody mentions how epic Google allegedly should be, or is; in 2012 that was much more common. People fatigued from corporate propaganda. And now the AI slop propaganda - that one accelerates disinterest and decay.
I think Sun should probably have pushed more on its key technologies. Simplify java, simplify Solaris while pushing on it hard - who knows what could have happened. It is idle to want to talk about it now though.
Things were going great at Dell until its wildly popular advertising campaign suddenly came tumbling down over an unfortunate indiscretion on the Lower East Side that surprised absolutely nobody...
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!)
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.
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.
By the early 2000's, 1) Linux was solid, why bother with Solaris? 2) ebay and other channels were flooded with used Sun hardware from failed dot-com companies anyway. No need to buy new.
Afterwards Nokia Networks were still deploying into HP-UX, and the first big Linux project started around late 2005, to Red-Hat.
Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the 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.
(perhaps it doesn't do your rather full blog post justice to compare it to something considerably less complete like a comment thread)
> Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome
I emphatically agree. Maybe it goes without saying but with Sun, multiple generations of leadership, I think.
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).
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.
Sun could've been the "Apple" of x86 Unix: it just works.
I saw the end coming for Sun when I had a dx2/66 at home running Linux in the late 90s. It was brilliant.
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.
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.
The only way you could get people with Solaris experience was to hire people from colleges where students had access to expensive hard to access servers. This limited the number of people a company could hire to handle their Solaris servers.
I remember being told by the now forgotten snap.com—back when snap.com was a web portal business owned by NBC (these days it’s owned by Snapchat but is a completely different company)—to pound sand because I had Linux but not Solaris experience. There was a certain elitism among Solaris users at the time that Linux was a toy operating system. [1]
I already knew that wasn’t true; I remember, before the height of the dot-com wave, installing Linux on my desktop PC at work because the Sun servers we logged in to to run X applications were overloaded and difficult to access, so I just had a local instance of Slackware (and later on RedHat) so I could run X applications locally and just telnet in to the Sun servers, which was a good deal faster.
A few years after my unpleasant experience being interviewed by the NBC portal incarnation of snap.com, I saw that the company folded and went under—which didn’t surprise me because they weren’t being economical about the servers they were running. The company I was at was running a couple of Dell RedHat Linux servers, which kept us on the Internet cheaply and reliably.
It didn’t surprise me that Linux soon overtook Solaris and ate them for breakfast.
[1] Bryan Cantrill—the person who wrote the blog this thread is about—infamously said “Have you ever kissed a girl” to a Linux Kernel developer who explained why Linux was more efficient that Solaris on Sparc (and was easier to get support for); this is the prime example of the snobbishness Sun users had at the time.
[2] https://landley.net/history/mirror/linux/kissedagirl.html
I actually appreciate many things post Solaris were net beneficial. The scripted install stuff presaged a lot of what emerged as puppet/chef/ansible/helm type processes. (this is pre YAML/JSON) -The disk/drive/segment labelling scheme has been completely normalised, the BSD device/partition scheme had limits.
And of course ZFS.
In the end commoditisation eat it's lunch, just as with SGI, and they didn't manage to adapt in time.
A lesson for AI companies perhaps....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto#Software
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor)
But it was the "Steve from Dell" revelation at the end that absolutely killed me!
They were quite fun.
But can confirm, buying Sun was PITA.
Me gusta
Oracle expressed the opposite. Within a year or two Larry killed OpenSolaris, let the MySQL, Hudson and OpenOffice communities fork away, sued Google over Java, and watched Gosling and most of the engineers who embodied Sun walk out.
The part that rankles the most, and undermines many a retrospective I think, is that Larry the lawnmower turned out to be a better steward of Java & MySQL than Sun was. Coldbloodedness is a survival trait.
Since then, companies had to develop policies about installing JVM from anywhere but official java.com address, ban VirtualBox, and so on, because the lawnmower is lawnmowing.
And I do not really think Sun/Java is in anyway major income source for Oracle other than the form of providing integrated database appliances cheaper than previous deal with HP-UX on IA-64
In the later, I don't have to worry about hardware/power/networking/etc at all.
So far the best theory I've heard was that it was bait to make them tastier to IBM and Oracle - but even that seems kind of weak; had they really given up at that point? Does anyone have a better theory?
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.
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.
That was my guess back then, and it's my guess now. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong and you know for certain why.
Solaris was pretty bare bones, out of the box. I spent days customizing it. Even early Linux distros, like Slackware, were in better shape.
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.
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!!!!"?
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.
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 think this would be expected from a company that has acquired and absorbed EMC and Perot.
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 earlier and went heavily 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" as far as enterprise sales goes, 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, but this combo is a major revenue driver for them.)
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.
Imagine every bank you know going through tech modernization and maybe 70% of those are now using Red Hat OpenShift.
They own Red Hat (OpenShift kubernetes, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible Automation Platform) AND HashiCorp (Terraform, Nomad, Consul, Packer, Vault, etc.) now, on top of their previous mainframe, services gigs, global financing arm, and calling everything they sell "watson".
Perhaps my story will explain what others experienced. I flew out to visit a customer on my first day on the job with the most capable sales rep in the world. Well, we did great, but eventually she left, and I was working with pinch-hitter sales reps from SoCal, doing roughly twice my previous workload, and holding the fort well.
It was not easy, so when there was a division meeting in Santa Barbara, I didn't feel like going, but my wife booked a flight and a car, on the spot, and I ended up driving the 3 or 4 hours through LA to the meeting, and got an SE of the quarter award.
My sales rep's replacement was a kid with no product understanding, and who hung around his boss, learning the ropes, a lot of 880 traffic from my home and home office. We didn't coordinate sales calls and brought duplicate literature and presentations. He did manage to get one customer to go ballistic.
During all this time, even as a techie, I was bamboozled how Sun actually sold as much as it did. The sales side of the fence looked to me, as a newbie there, like a mess, so I started reading "MBA" books and that helped me personally, but no greater understanding of my organization. But what the hell did I know, being on the front lines.
I was considering shifting home base to Santa Clara but left for a startup rather than be part of a team with a minor league talent and a very large territory.
That was before our market went to hell, and before Oracle.
A shame, but I gave the job 200% or more. And wear the Java jacket proudly.
I bought it at a thrift store for real cheap.
- Cancelling -if briefly- Solaris on x86 in 2002. This killed Solaris in the minds of many who didn't want to be locked into Sun for SPARC.
- Failing to make a deal with Google in 2002. Apparently Sun insisted on knowing how many servers Google had, something that Google considered a high-value secret, so Sun failed to make a deal with Google, so Google ended up using Linux and contributing to Linux. This was a tremendous mind-share disaster -- it's hard to overestimate the damage done by this.
- Closing Sun PS (professional services). Bad bad move, possibly the worst of them.
- Not giving up on J2ME earlier -- it's not the sort of thing that could last forever, and Steve Jobs killed it with the iPhone. This was a case of vendor lock-in clouding Sun's decision making.
- Failure to recognize that Sun needed to become a systems company, not a CPU company.
- Failure to respond to Active Directory. This was yet another case of vendor lock-in clouding Sun's decision making: the Sun DS product team was milking their existing customers more than they wanted to go after more business with a sustainable strategy.
- UltraSPARC was more than a decade too late to make up for SPARC falling way behind x86_64. Sun needed to give up on SPARC, but again, vendor lock-in sounds sweet but turns out to be poison.
- Failure to make a deal with Apple for it to use ZFS in OS X.
- The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid. The only interesting effect of this was to make Sun a target of acquisition for Oracle. But of course, it turns out that Oracle -a company built on building mind-share- had become too blinded by vendor lock-in just like Sun, so...
There were numerous other mistakes along the way. These are the most salient, for me anyway.
What's shocking is how long it took Sun to fail under those circumstances!
Also shocking is how much amazing stuff came out of Solaris engineering and the systems division!
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.
Only if you never repurchased.
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 lean more towards passive and (total) market index funds, and just riding the roller coaster, as anything else is fairly either impossible or too time consuming:
* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-co...
I would contend that Sun was never interested in running a business. They always cared more about building amazing technology and suffered the sales to make money.
You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them).
Edit: I had on rose colored glasses. I was thinking of late 90s SUN. They did in fact start getting crushed in the early 2000s.
What 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 selling to Sun Microsystems as a vendor was a joy. It paid bills like clockwork (net 35 IIRC). Completely showed up all the multi-$B IT competitors. They preached hyper-efficiency, but Sun delivered it in its own dealings. Unfortunately after the dot-com downfall Sun extended days payments outstanding (DPO) just like everyone else.
The same applies to IBM's POWER and Z - how many green field projects are being built for them? Apart from weirdos (such as myself) who is even interested in that? And even then, I will not suggest building anything new on AIX or z/OS, or Linux on either, unless there is a really compelling (such as "we got the hardware for free", or "we really need instruction-cycle latencies to run inference and we can't match that with any other NPU") reason.
Don't get me wrong - I love using uncommon hardware with uncommon OSs (which expose bugs that are affected by endianness, or Linuxisms, or blindly assuming a string is ASCII, or that a file stays put while you use it).
Meanwhile I have to imagine Sun, like IBM and everyone else at the time, was noticing what incredible margins you get from software services. No factories or fabs. No supply chain logistics. Sun's proprietary hardware business should have been dying (or at least radically shifting: a product/engineering problem, not a sales one) by all market indications of the time.
So if I was a sales person and got a call from a startup for a colo's worth of machines... I probably don't have much incentive to pick up. The startup will probably fail, as most do, so the opportunity to build a relationship and sell higher margin services is probably nil. Startups hate paying for that stuff anyway.
I have incredible respect for Bryan Cantrill. He obviously knows far more about this situation and business than I do, so he's almost definitely more correct than I am...
However I would ask readers to at least be curious why sales didn't pick up the phone. Were they "bored?" Or was it a rational choice and much deeper problems with Sun's business model were the cause of their demise?
I went to the Menlo Park offices to see a demo of their 64-cpu (I think) system at the time but it didn’t take long for Linux on intel killed the entire market.
He points out that Sun, a hardware company, was smart to work on open source window managers to make it easier to use their hardware.
In turn, they were dumb to create an open source language (Java) that could run on any hardware. This was a strange move as it dramatically reduced the need for Sun's specific machines.
Highly recommend the article as it has lots of other examples of this.
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.
I got to see a server installed via crane because they couldn't go up in that building's elevator.
It seemed to me like they couldn't decide whether they were a hardware company or a software company.
Mind you, I was young at the time so possibly didn't have the best understanding of the situation. Seems like they left the decision too late though.
Dismissing Linux as a hobbiest OS definitely turned out badly.
That actually made me laugh. Not because it's untrue, but because it reminded me of this:
One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How
enthusiastic is our support for UNIX?
Unix was written on our machines and for our machines
many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on
our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX
use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy
to get started with. It’s great for students, great for
somewhat casual users, and it’s great for interchanging
programs between different machines. And so, because of
its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have
good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
It is our belief, however, that serious professional
users will run out of things they can do with UNIX.
They’ll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when
they get to be serious about programming.
With UNIX, if you’re looking for something, you can
easily and quickly check that small manual and find out
that it’s not there. With VMS, no matter what you look
for — it’s literally a five-foot shelf of documentation —
if you look long enough it’s there. That’s the difference
— the beauty of UNIX is it’s simple; and the beauty of
VMS is that it’s all there.
— Ken Olsen, president of DEC, DECWORLD Vol. 8 No. 5, 1984I loved the Sun kit and Solaris. Touched everything from Sparc workstations to E10K/E15K. It felt like home!
A random selection of areas where they went wrong from my viewpoint as a junior to senior unix admin at the time..
Biggest of all - IBM did a complete number on them in my workplace. Hugely aggressive presence. We had a regular Sun PS person onsite. IBM dropped a whole bunch of people in. Sales, pre sales tech, anything we wanted. Completely undercut Sun and leveraged mainframe deals to push their p5 kit. Before we knew it there was a 'unix consolidation project' and I found myself grumpily using a HMC and bloody AIX. Millions in lost revenue. Went from a tiny IBM presence in a lovely multicultural Unix estate (HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, even Dynix) to bland banks of Power racks in the datacentres. A complete capitulation.
That whole "attributing mysterious system crashes and memory corruption in SPARC Enterprise servers to stray cosmic rays" thing. They handled this really badly. I got called out so often for this. An open goal for IBM. Sun was so expensive and yet we'd be having to report
They should have made more of an effort with their estate management software or made stuff free to use. They had such good ideas around patching etc but everything seemed to cost money. Our Sun estate was a real mess of patch levels. Our poor PS guy would be sent along and try to get jumpstart implemented but would say it'll cost ££££. IBM ate their lunch (even if their stuff wasn't as good, or ever really implemented properly in our shop). They had Dtrace and it was never used in our estate despite being free.
They were unfortunately too early on a bunch of things. Such good ideas around open source and things like technical blogs! But the culture was different, certainly in corporate UK at the time (I started an internal blog in the Unix team and people thought I was insane). They should have given away compilers and stuff. Everything seemed to cost money.
They could have aggressively supported Linux as something to differentiate them from IBM. The battles I had trying to get Linux in the door for anything, but when it did arrive it was running on Power. Their whole Solaris x86 thing was just confusing.
ZFS seemed to be fumbled. We spent a fortune on Veritas products. I did love Veritas filesystem and their clustering stuff. Sun could have gone for that market and somehow it never happened.
I've been amazed in the past looking at the Wikipedia article on Bill Joy, and all I have to say right now as a UNIX philosophy leaning Linux and BSD user is: thank you for NFS.
Being a Unix shop on our project didn't stop them from creating a new timecard system that worked only on windows.... The solution, citirx. It was a difficult time for non x86 / windows machines.
At some point we got SunRays as light terminals. Those were pretty good I must say.
Plus they put the Control key in the right place...
Later on, when Schwartz was the CEO, they had a datacenter in a shipping container concept selling to management/IT folks. Delivering that infra via APIs to developers being the key differentiator. I'd love to hear Bryan's take since he was involved in the cloud space after he left.
Eventually they’ll come back and have some impressive sounding exec reply saying they need 20% less to get it in the budget.
UltraSPARC came out in 1995, and Athlon 64 in 2003. I'm confused on how it could be late?
> - The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid. The only interesting effect of this was to make Sun a target of acquisition for Oracle. [..]
I disagree with this assessment strongly. I believe Oracle wanted Java and only Java. All other Sun properties were collateral damage of the acquisition. It might be weird that Oracle now owns MySQL, but Oracle never cared about it. (Of course, both your and my assessment are mere opinions.)
Ah, sorry, I was referring to the CMT architecture.
Sun did really well in the academic workstation market, converting the old "VAX and a sea of terminals" into a "sea of Sun workstations".
X11, YP/NIS and NFS worked pretty well for a while, but then Microsoft came out with NT and AD, and Sun failed to respond. Like, ever. I think this was perhaps the worst software mistake Sun made.
Strong disagree with this!
The MySQL purchase wasn't a lot of money and was a move towards becoming a systems company (like you suggested they need to be)
Oracle bought Sun for Java, not for MySQL.
They, and the software that ran on it (Dataviews), and their customers (Westinghouse Software in my case) were all soon undone by the arrival of powerful commodity Wintel.
Why do you think ZFS on MacOS would have helped in any significant way? AFAIK, and I may be wrong, but Apple doesn't have a history relying on OEMs for their software, especially something as critical as operating systems. Am I wrong? Was it different back then?
It would have bought Sun mind-share. In that time frame Sun was trying really hard to re-acquire mind-share it had lost to Linux due to the non-deal with Google, the brief cancellation of Solaris x86, etc. OpenSolaris was an attempt to rebuild mind-share. Was rebuilding mind-share enough? No, no way, but it was a start.
It could have led to Apple acquiring Sun, say.
> AFAIK, and I may be wrong, but Apple doesn't have a history relying on OEMs for their software, especially something as critical as operating systems. Am I wrong? Was it different back then?
Apple did the work of integrating ZFS into OS X. They believed in it. Steve Jobs wanted indemnification in light of the NetApp lawsuit. Jonathan wouldn't agree to it. Giving it could have been a betting-the-company event, but Sun needed that sort of thing.
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.
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 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.
Also sometime in 2000 I had interviewed at Compaq - the old Alpha group who I think later worked on Itanium at Intel. They were constantly frustrated because they couldn't even get a build from Synopsys of the design tools they needed to run on Alpha and were forced to use Sun hardware they described as "gasping and wheezing" to design their crazy fast cpu.
Sun lost on a bunch of fronts, but I think the amazing thing is they let happen to them what they did to the other big UNIX vendors before - they were eaten from the bottom by faster cheaper hardware.
Around 2000 we started getting some EDA software released on Linux. I remember getting some Linux kernel patches and recompiling the kernel to change the user / kernel split from 2GB / 2GB to 3.5GB user / 0.5GB kernel. But we still needed the 64-bit Suns for some jobs that needed over 4GB RAM. Itanium was really expensive and slow and then AMD released the 64-bit Opteron in 2003. We bought them immediately and never bought another Sun.
My high school in 1992 got a bunch of old Sun3 and first gen Sun4 systems. I absolutely loved them. My dream then was to have my own Sun workstation but they were way too expensive. My other dream was to go to college and then get a job at Sun. I heard about Linux in 1993 and got my Unix system at home. I did work on some Sun UltraSPARC III companion chipsets but Sun couldn't compete on the price to performance ratio with Linux/x86
Around the beginning of 2006, I had a laptop with a 64-bit AMD Turion CPU and I could run on it Cadence and Mentor tools for ASIC design and the simulations were much faster than on a big Sun multi-processor server. Later that year our team finally got some servers with AMD Opteron, which accelerated dramatically the work in comparison with the traditional Sun servers.
The article is here: https://www.silkstream.net/blog/2006/08/comparison-ultraspar...
In terms of performance, even Linux 0.x on a 33Mhz 486-class processor could outperform a uniprocessor Sun/SPARC box at a fraction of the price.
I also question the sanity of anyone who thinks Sun's choice of 13W3 for a video connector was a good one. :-)
At least in the later stages of life Sun sales folks were literally selling the company into bankruptcy. They'd find out what competitors were offering, undercut it to the degree they'd make a loss, just to get the contract and their sweet commission.
To not realise you've got this going on really speaks to how little they were interested in the actual running of the business.
From Brian Cantrill's original HN comment in 2011(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033): "I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC". SPARC stopped being ahead of its time way before being bought by Oracle.
> SPARC stopped being ahead of its time way before being bought by Oracle.
You seem to be focusing strictly on performance, but there were other factors: e.g., remote management is still a bit of a mess with x86. With SPARC everything can be done on the CLI (serials consoles or SSH), with x86 quite often you're still clicking on "open KVM window" for so many things. And of course many/most vendors make you purchase an 'advanced license' to use the remote KVM functionality of the LOM system.
That's the whole gist.
Edit: Writing PostScript and having no discernible security probably didn't make NeWS a great fit for the world of the Internet - but it was a lot of fun.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
That wasn't even true back then.
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.
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).
It lived on in the world of Windows Terminal Services and things like Citrix - maybe still does in some places.
Nobody knows how the future will be. There are lots of options. There are self hostable open models today - they are not as good, but some report they are good enough. Right now I don't have the hardware to try them (I could - if I'm willing to accept a small number of tokens per minute - useful means more tokens per second as I can get in an hour). However I expect in a few years I'll be able buy consumer hardware with good enough GPUs (or perhaps an AI chip???). Will anyone other than a few hobbyists buy them? time will tell.
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.
I have a bunch of Aruba switches and this is what we do, because it's a lot cheaper.
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.
There was a time when ZFS would have been a good answer for this. Of course, now it's available on FreeBSD and Linux.
At one point also there was zones, but again, containerization is pretty standard elsewhere now.
I guess also if you go further back, like the Linux 2.6 era, which is close to when Solaris was open sourced ... the 2.6 release involved a concerted effort to improve SMP support. So maybe you'd be interested more in commercial Unix in the 2.4 era, for better SMP. But again, Linux surpassed this ~20 years ago.
But Illumos is a real modern viable option over Linux (and *racle Solaris) for server hardware.
Zones were lightweight, more akin to the Linux vserver project or lxc. You could make a zone on its own zfs filesystem, clone the zone (which creates a zfs clone), launch the clone, run a throw-away task, tear the zone down which also discards the zfs snapshot+clone. It was quick and cheap but also half a decade before Docker was released or popularized.
zfs integrated into other parts of the system just as well. eg: iSCSI volumes backed by a zpool and export properties configured in zfs. All of these technologies were built with the idea of being "self-healing." Meanwhile, Linux has a disparate iSCSI daemon, lvm+ext4/reiserfs, initd, and probably 20 different tools to learn if you want to grab metrics across the stack like dtrace on Solaris was capable of.
The out of band management was amazing too. Yes, some x86 hardware had ilom but like everything else in the space, it's bolted on and not truly integrated.
Sun made really nice stuff that outpaced Linux in a lot of ways. The ecosystem came from a time of competing BSDs and looked for paying customers for the engineering marvel they had created. They were used to customers figuring out how to use Unix, and the Linux crowd at the time still fit that rubric. The OS was not optimized for low-latency terminal interaction and thus "felt slow" (aka: Slowaris) but a well tuned DB on Sparc really cooked.
Finally, I went to a few Sun events and had Sun reps come and look at what we were doing. They were definitely happy to help with any kind of outreach/onboarding we needed. The issue was none of "onboarding" but was a lot of "Linux is a movement." In early times, Linux was an anti-corporate movement and some of that energy carried through to the 2010s. It's sadly ironic because Sun itself has roots in open standards and an anti-establishment mentality.
True, but did you need that? These are all high-end (therefore low-volume) server stuff. I loved that, and their high-end systems with dozens of SPARCs, but I had one customer who had one, and everyone in my company knew they made a terrible decision - they needed a web server, and you could do more with a rack of Dell boxes for a fraction of the Ultra Enterprise [very large number] price tag. They also decided they should run an enterprise application server (they went with Dynamo) instead of Tomcat, so, again, they made a stack (maybe a directed acyclic graph) of bad decisions. I think I facepalmed so much that is the point my hair started falling.
I feel like they need to run a public cloud just to let people tinker with lightweight stuff and scale up to owning the thing.
That said, I’m also a moron about certain things, and this might be a moronic take.
Exactly. Oxide builds machines for the few companies that won't go with Azure or AWS, or that got so big Azure and AWS are no longer competitive (and it takes A LOT to be in that space, because pricing is ridiculously flexible). This is a niche market.
The question I always ask is "why would I deploy my software on your platform?". The answer is, most of the time, I wouldn't. I don't want to play platform bingo with company money.
Even back then, the CTO of our startup said Sun had missed the boat on dominating x86 Unix. They could have had a larger role in x86 Unix world if they had wanted to. It was definitely a misstep for Sun.
Having said that, throughout the 1990s Sun was amazing. They were even good right up to the Oracle purchase, although by that time RHEL on HP (or Dell) servers was eating their lunch.
They were always a hardware provider. If they could have offered credible desktops at PC prices, they could have made a serious dent in the low-end server (one step up from desktops), which is an essential stepping stone for securing midrange and above.
So this isn't about the people at all (they will express the same frustration!) but about leadership that wasn't interested in running a business. I do want to stop short of overly personalizing it, but the simple truth is: Scott visited customers where they lived -- and Jonathan more or less didn't.
[0] https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-m...
This is what Dell got right - for their sales team, this was an easy process - the product line was simple and easy to customise. Their sales reps wouldn't spend much time creating the proposals and could spend the remaining time building relationships with a lot more customers, some of which wouldn't fail.
> curious why sales didn't pick up the phone. Were they "bored?"
Unless you create incentives for bringing new customers, they'll leave the new names for last.
What's interesting is that the other RISC outfit at the time, little old Acorn in the UK, did manage to adapt their proprietary chip business to the future of compute and now we all use many many ARM processors every day.
So clearly there was still a hardware route available, just again: a huge product/engineering shift.
SPARC was not proprietary, buy fully licensable:
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.
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.
If someone else is paying I'd prefer one of these big OEMs for established firmware lifecycle, spare parts and long gray market availability, 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.
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) with a web browser with Sun Rays, we probably would have bought a few hundred of them and we would have bought some SPARC servers to back them up.
We could have gotten Netscape to run under Solaris but after a week of effort I wasn't able to get Mozilla to build, so no modern web browser. So no Sun Rays. No servers. DTrace and ZFS were great innovations but without the magic of "can run the software you need to run" they are just Blub. Had Sun done the work to get Mozilla running on their machines and forgotten about DTrace and ZFS people might still be using Solaris... but instead DTrace and ZFS found an audience by supporting... the commodity OS!
(arguably at that time supporting a web browser was the #1, #2 and all the way through #99 task that the Solaris team should have been working on at that time and everything else from Java to Tcl to ZFS was a dangerous distraction... and that's how companies in a position like Sun die)
> 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).
why were you thinking of going Sun, as late as 2005? just easier to lock down, like kiosks?
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.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/sun-microsystems/stock-price-...
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.
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.
* 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:
Sadly, they left the Sparc clone business before they could even support Solaris! They stopped at SunOS 4.1.
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.
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.
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.
Yes:
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 guess I can't pay so much because such a huge fraction of the contract volume goes to my lawyer."
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!)
Thinking about it, we moved to Dell as part of the run up to IPO, and I suspect had we not done so Sun would have been much harder to deal with afterwards.
What I recall from that time is Sun were very happy they'd sold a huge pile of servers to be the core of Interlink, and a whole load of people went off to work on that.
Turns out my use case was not large numbers of parallel integer only threads.
Sun not acquiring XAD was a big mistake.
There was an opportunity to build out graphical management tools, but NIS+ kinda got in the way, and the politics of commercial Unix in general didn't help.
I'd say the switch to DAP/LDAP was obvious better choice than Hesiod, and GPO essentially standardizes a lot of tooling that SIPB et al built for Athena as well
Yes, it is Oracle so there's a great chance they were considering this when they bought it.
I actually remember media speculating that Sun didn’t want to take the next step and actually file a lawsuit, because they didn’t have enough resources to go up against Google in court.
Then Oracle bought Sun, and suddenly the unproductive negotiations transformed into a lawsuit.
Note that today things are quite different, and Apple can do what Sun wanted to do, but do it well. Market conditions are very different, and Apple, of course is the 800lb gorilla that Sun couldn't quite get to be. It's kinda funny: Apple and Sun weren't all that different, and Sun then and Apple now even more so. Apple just wasn't into servers, and Sun just wasn't into consumer hardware, but both wanted to vertically integrate hardware and software. Apple has a walled garden, Sun didn't. I do think these differences are relevant to why Sun failed, but the leadership differences count for a lot too: no one would compare Steve Jobs to Jonathan Schwartz, nor even to Scott McNealy -- it's just night and day. Now the differences in what Sun and Apple sought to do also evince differences in leadership.
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 did this a little, but the things you could do with actual Linux started to get interesting for me at that time - building routers for our shared home network, hosting Quake servers, doing actual programming with gcc etc and the hardware support was a bit better as I recall.
I also interviewed at Sun in Boston - I think the small group servers group or something - I really liked the engineers I met there and I did consider working there for a minute, but ended up in Silicon Valley which I think was better fit for me.
I had the same experience twice in a few months from those two. Moving from a Sparc server to a Xeon based system, and again when the first Intel Mac Mini's came out and was faster than the dual-G5 systems we had.
Any Unix "clustering" system I've used (Veritas on Sun, HA/CMP on AIX) always seemed bolted on.
Once you have git and actions, I don't think that the language really matters all that much.
like smartphones ;-)
FWIW and for good reasons current Android UI is terrible for a desktop usage and ChromeOS is too limited for some people.
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.
Years later, the machine was still chugging around on top of that floor's networking rack. Someone added a PostIt with "Do not turn this off".
But I have to say OpenVZ didn't do all the tricks one could do with Zones, and Zones combined with Crossbow, were able to test a huge number of networking scenarios to see how things would break.
Solution providers then try to check as many boxes as they can on the list. It doesn't have to make sense; you just want to check the box. When a decision is made, the chosen solution gets to the individual engineers to "figure it out". There is also a considerable amount of CYA in all of these decisions. You never want a project to get delayed of not implemented because you as a CTO forgot to check a box. The engineers using a product could decide that the box check doesn't work for them and they can then workaround it, but management (and the solution provider) get to CYA based on whether a box is checked or not.
My favorite flavor of this is when things are lost in translation, and a box gets accidently checked without understanding the actual requirement. Then it suddenly becomes a de-facto feature request because "the box was already checked".
Later on, we even ran an ipfilter based router from a T1 on OpenSolaris for decent IPv6 connectivity with link-aggregation+vlans when our Cisco 6509 setup was found to be inadequate for the task.
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.
But yes, you are correct, it's much easier to get a SPARC license.
Not someone looking for rad hardened boards with flight qualified bootloaders...
I prefer the "This is the price" model and just make it consistent. I can't wait until AI helps us remove multiple layers of middle men across Sales in general.
Just let me buy it and move on.
Based on how things are moving, I think it's more likely that AI will _replace_ the layers of middle men (with layers of "middle AI"), then that those layers will be _removed_.
Monkey's paw - now you have to deal with a layer of bots.
We need more Tesla style this is the price for all.. less dealership style with prices varying by some ones mood. As a buyer with a relationship, I should not be able to just buy through the website cheaper than your quote (for the exact item line by line). That's the scenario I had multiple times. Hell with the GB10's came out I bought a couple and the price through our Rep was 6k a piece no extras. We paid the list price $4k and were even able to use a discount coupon due to holidays that our rep wouldn't take. That's the BS Dell has been doing.
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.
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?
Just like the vast majority of buyers do. SPARC was abandoned by customers due to poor performance.
> but there were other factors: e.g., remote management is still a bit of a mess with x86
That's a property of the systems integrator, not the ISA. Dell's iDRAC works quite well.
I currently admin several racks of Dells (and Lenovo, and SuperMicro, and previously HP). Just make sure you buy the license for KVM in case you ever need to go into single-user/rescue mode (otherwise better not mind having to drive to the DC and hooking up a crash cart).
Ask @bcantrill (the author of this article/story) about how well integrators integrate (as a hint to the answer, he co-founded Oxide Computers because he ran a cloud service with Dells/HPs/etc).
The big issue is usually "remote media" support, thus my recommendation for setting up netbooting infrastructure
For Aruba I think it was 1:1; a support contract was the same price as the device itself over 2 years or something.
Support contracts never cover a "site" they always cover individual devices, so your cost scales with the amount you have... so I'm not sure I follow what you're saying..
Unless you mean to imply that you're replacing units more than once every 2 years, in which case of course you're right... but then I might consider going with another vendor entirely because that is a pretty terrible reliability record.
Wrong. I've signed many support contracts that were negotiated basically to "one flat fee for everything we sell that you use, including future purchases[1]" for some period of time. Some people think that they 'optimize' contracts by pushing for "I just want a service contract only on the SKUs I have". That's not always a real optimization.
[1] Often, this includes a tacit "including things you are using that you didn't tell us about".
I'm wondering if this is something uniquely american, because we don't seem to have much negotiating power in the UK/SE.
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.
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.
KILL isn't Ctrl-C. That's INTR, as you can verify in stty -a. KILL is Ctrl-U.
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.
The exceptions were mostly hardware graphics accelerators in some labs, when my Linux PC had to do it in software. And I got myself a surplus DEC Multia (alpha) that was really fast with Linux for natively compiled code, beating my contemporary 486DX3-100. But, the PC was still faster for web browsing, because running Netscape on alpha meant doing x86 emulation!
Likewise, my ~90 MHz Pentium MMX laptop with Linux was faster at regular dev work on my work-supplied Sun Ultra workstation in the late 90s. (Edit: Hmm, I am not sure about this laptop anymore, it might have been 166 MHz??)
Due to my positive experiences, I was an aggressive early adopter (and frequent beta tester) of nearly every Linux ecosystem frontier for decades. E.g. 2D accelerators, 3D accelerators, SMP, large file support, gigabit ethernet, wireless ethernet, power management, virtualization, 64 bit architectures, SCSI/SATA/Firewire/e-SATA/NVME, hardware and MD-RAID, ext2/ext3/xfs/btrfs, ...
Somewhere, I still have a Red Hat 5 retail CD. I'm not sure, but I might have bought it at Borders Books rather than a computer shop. I know I bought a few CD-ROM collections at the bookstore.
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 is just criminal. Reusing is much better than recycling.
When one of your Proxmox (or XCP-ng, or VMware/Nutanix/OpenStack) servers won't boot and you need go into single-user/rescue mode, then talk to me about the convenience or not of a remote KVM (versus having to drive to the DC and hook up the crash cart).
It's all very well if all you manage is VMs/instances, but some of us deal with the hardware that those VMs run on, and things break.
That 0.01% of servers is probably the layer that the other 99.99% run on (and yes, a lot of that 0.01% can also be automated, but if PXE isn't working (or you're getting strange CPU3VOLT or SLOT17ECC or BUS1RESET errors) then neither is re-imaging).
Minix existed at the time too, I know because I ran it on an 8088 PC.
But within a few years, linux started gaining mindshare and was starting to replace proprietary unix especially on individual PCs.
It wasn't until mid 1992 that distros started to exist, and I'd say it took a bit of time for those to be complete enough to be usable for someone with a goal other than smoke-testing the kernel on their PC.
I can say for certain that I, a complete newbie, was able to boot SLS Linux floppies in early 1993, and within a couple months I was installing Slackware to HDD.
You also had SuSE, which really started as German-localized Slackware.