From: cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net
In article ,
John Dallman wrote:
>In article <10cdflq$5c0$2@reader2.panix.com>,
>cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net (Dan Cross) wrote:
>
>> I'd argue that Sun more or less abandoned the workstation market
>> when they switched to SVR4 and away from BSD with the move to
>> Solaris from SunOS 4.
>
>That doesn't match my experience. Solaris was first released in 1992 and
>had taken over by 1996. Sun released the Blade workstations in 2000, and
>new Ultra workstations in 2006, and didn't discontinue them until 2008.
>Until at least 2005, we had customers doing serious work on SPARC
>workstations, although nobody was switching to them from other platforms.
I remember well the transition from 4.2/4.3BSD/SunOS 4.1.3U1 and
4.1.4, to Solaris 2.5/2.5.1/2.6. On the same hardware, Solaris
was significantly slower, but beyond that, the user experience
just wasn't what it had been on SunOS 4. Really basic stuff
that, in retrospect, seems like nitpicking but at the time felt
indicitive of a change in overall focus, were as simple as which
version of the interpreter the `awk` command ran: on SunOS 4,
this had been `nawk`; on Solaris it was the old, pre-book `awk`
from 7th Edition Unix.
Thins like that really made it feel like like Sun had abandoned
their traditional engineer/CS/sciencist userbase in favor of
more business/finance style applications added up. This was no
longer the hacker's box; it was now a macine for doing Serious
Work. Apparently, even the guy who was charged with doing the
SVR4 bringup on SPARC at Sun (after the AT&T deal) was dismayed
by just how much of a step backwards it really was.
By 1997 or so, I had fully switched to either Linux or FreeBSD
on Intel, as had a lot of people. A few years later everything
was 64 bit anyway.
>Our stuff does gain significantly from 64-bit addressing; I could believe
>fields that didn't need 64-bit gave up on Sun earlier.
I can see that. Personally, I really liked Tru64 nee DEC Unix
nee OSF/1 AXP on Alpha. OSF/1 felt like it was a much better
system overall if one had to go if swimming in Unix waters,
while Solaris felt underbaked.
Of course, Solaris was still better than AIX, HP-UX, or even
Irix, but it was a real disappointment when none of the other
OSF members followed through on actually adopting OSF/1.
"Oppose Sun Forever!"
>> I think also the focus shifted dramatically once Java came onto
>> the scene; Sun seemed to move away from its traditional computer
>> business in order to focus more full on java and its ecosystem.
>
>They tried that on us, but were deeply unconvincing.
>
>They were expecting us to be impressed that they'd done JNI wrappers of
>about ten functions from our 500+ function API. We said "Presumably you
>have tools to generate this stuff automatically?" and they didn't
>understand what we were talking about.
I never quite got the business play behind Java from Sun's
perspective. It seemed to explode in popularity overnight, but
they never quite figured out how to monetize it; I remember
hearing from some Sun folks that they wanted to set standards
and be at the center of the ecosystem, but were content to let
other players actually build the production infrastructure. I
thought Microsoft really ran circles around them with Java on
the client side, and on the server side, it made less sense. A
bytecode language makes some sense in a fractured and extremely
heterogenious client environment; less so in more controlled
server environments. I'll grant that the _language_ was better
than many of the alternatives, but the JRE felt like more of an
impediment for where Java ultimately landed.
- Dan C.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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