A couple years ago I got a reply to a Craigslist ad I had posted looking for 90's and 00's era computers people were looking to get rid of. This guy said he used to run a small website starting around 1995, and had a couple "SUN servers" taking up space in his storage unit that he'd love to get rid of.
He was a bit of a curmudgeon, going on about how his business partner screwed him out of a "seven-digit payout" when his domain eventually got bought by some Japanese company. But a minivan rental and some elbow grease later I had a whole pile of hardware that he was all to happy to be done with: A Sun SPARCstation 20, a Sun ULTRA 1 Creator, an Axil Ultima 1 (a third-party Sun clone), an gorgeous amber Wyse CRT terminal, and a few other odds and ends.
I wrote a more detailed list on my blog [1], but so far all I've managed to do with them is get the drives out and cloned and the ULTRA 1 running (an involved process as the internal BIOS memory lost power long ago, wiping such transient properties as "what is my MAC address".
I was excited to read about cool hardware including a gorgeous amber Wyse CRT terminal, and disappointed that there were no pictures whatsoever on the blog post.
Love those terminals, was just thinking about looking for one!
I remember that the programmable MAC address feature occasionally came in handy when dealing with recalcitrant / braindead software ‘entitlement’ schemes vendors would occasionally require.
I absolutely adore the terminal. It appears to have several VT-compatible modes, so should be very usable with modern Linux. Except I don't have the accompanying Wyse keyboard with the appropriate setup keys required to switch compatibility modes. Gotta trawl ebay for one one of these days...
It was nice to see the bit in the video about the Tadpole SPARCbook 3000XT. They are incredibly rare compared to Sun desktop workstations, but a lot of fun. I wrote about the 3000ST model: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...
The idea anyone would be running a Sparc in 2007 for performance . . .
Some time around 2003 my boss had a Sparc machine as his desktop, though this was widely viewed as unix nerd nostalgia even then. As a junior I got a PC. It turned out my PC built the project 5x faster than the Sparc managed. After this I don’t think we bought much from Sun except one of those big tape drives, and lots of Dell servers appeared instead.
This is part of the reason why Linux ate their lunch. For the price of one Sun server, you could get 4 Dell servers that ran Linux, and they were faster. Granted, you didn't have all of the redundancy that was built into these higher end Sun systems or the really good support, but hey you had 3 extra machines as a backup.
However, I did consider it a bit of genius when, toward the bitter end, they pretty much went all-in with the PCI-bus, ATA disks, and all those PC-compatible interfaces replaced the Sun-specific ones which had been so distinctive (and expensive) up until then.
It must've cushioned the blow for orgs that were still investing in new Suns but were able to plug in regular commodity peripherals, at long last.
Sun used common stuff quite early on, well before "the bitter end". They adopted PCI in 1997. Their workstations they moved from SCSI to ATA around the same time, though the servers are still with the SCSI family today. Regardless, mostly you couldn't plug in generic hardware anyway because there are no Solaris drivers for most of it. Honestly, it was never a big deal.
You can also add SGI and most proprietary Unix vendors at the time. To a certain extent I think Apple also had a hand in killing the workstation market. When you can get a Mac that did Unix things and also ran Office and Photoshop, why get a SGI workstation (of course not all things could run on the MacOS that people got SGI's for)
I would say that there were three factors that superseded Sun, along with most of the other proprietary workstations and servers: FOSS Unix, commodity PC-compatible hardware, and TCP/IP.
The big vendors used to be differentiated on how they communicated on a network, shared files, type of bus architecture, and workloads, and so each company or unit would choose a vendor and rely on them for solutions, and the staff had specialized expertise in those systems.
But all those vendors found themselves adopting TCP/IP and Ethernet. And Sun's NFS was widely adopted. X11 also became standard. The BSDs already had a wide hardware compatibility list, so that spare machine with no OS license could be returned to service. A few generations of college grads had direct experience with Unix and building PCs. Once Linux on PC-compatibles began showing up in the server room, Windows NT was mature, and software vendors were porting to Linux, it was a fait accompli.
Kind of strange to talk about TCP/IP and Ethernet. Sun was the company that pushed that from the beginning. The self configured before others. It was part of why they had more new adoption then DEC/VAX systems.
It all comes back to SPARC. Price to performance. If Sun had amazing high quality x86 servers and workstation by 1998, their software would have been perfectly fine. Its not like there was anything missing from Solaris at that time.
Many people were not unhappy, they just realized that they could get a faster cheaper machine, and run the same software on a linux. Even if linux was less optimized, still end up cheaper overall for the majority of workloads.
Its not like running linux on unsupported PCs in the early 2000 was that much fun. But Sun by 2002 they were still trying to kill x86 based stuff. They bought x64 server line in 2004.
Around that time I was working as a Solaris admin, C/C++ systems programmer and software packager, our manager gifted us all a SunBlade 1000 in my final year there, although we all used Windows laptops for our day to day work.
I got blank look when I asked "why?". Sure they were snappy, and you could run StarOffice on them, but really there wasn't a lot that they were useful for in our day to day work. Nice machines to be sure, but completely extraneous. I already had a fleet of Sparc build servers running everything from Solaris 2.5.1 through 2.9 which I used to build and package open source stuff for our corp servers. Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere.
I used a Blade 2000 as my main machine until the early 2010s. Doing UNIX work on Windows back then with cygwin was way more painful than it is nowadays, and the hardware was a lot nicer than x86 desktops (and workstations offering things like ECC would've seen you in the same price range anyway).
Back then with just dual cores running heavily loaded VMs always was annoying, and slowed your main system down noticeably - so I preferred not doing that on my x86 box. My Sun on the other hand had three SunPCI cards I used for Windows development and testing - which had pretty decent performance, still allowed me to have the disk images on my UNIX filesystem, but didn't ruin my native performance.
At my first job in 1997 I convinced my manager to put Linux x86 boxes on everyone's desks and move the Suns to the server room. The Suns required expensive Sun monitors while we could put cheaper larger higher resolution monitors on a Linux x86 box and display everything over X11. I was in the semiconductor / chip design business and everything ran on Solaris until around 2003 when the 64-bit Opteron came out and we never bought a Sun again.
I'm sure this end-of-the-line machine had its merits. But if you want the cool of Elvis before he got fat, go back to when a SPARCstation 1 running SunOS 4 was new.
The contemporary PC running MS-DOS or early Windows was just a toy by comparison.
I was one of those annoying unix “I know this” kids except from early exposure to a pizza box Sparcstation, not SGI. That was in the era when Suns sold strangely well to people doing lots of color processing work. (I think you can blame Kodak for that). When the PC ran rings round the Sparc at work I fully understood how far they had fallen.
Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working, in a way that 2007 Linux would not; however RAM was dropping in price at the time and this wasn't much of a concern as a result, for desktops at least.
> Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working […]
And under high load.
I've had Linux live lock on more than one occasion when load averages hit >100. I've never a Solaris (or FreeBSD) system live lock even under ridiculous loads (200+), and was always been able to login and kill whatever process(es) went sideways.
I once ran into an issue on a GNU Mailman host putting out an email storm and the load average was > 800 on an x86 Solaris box that probably only had 4x AMD cores. I was eventually able to get in as root on the serial console and fix it. Back in those days it was almost shameful to just reboot something vs. slogging through and trying to fix it. Also I miss not having to deal with OOM issues.
one time we had something going ... wrong. took forever to login and the first person on entered 'uptime' and the load average was in the thousands. nothing was failing. just taking a really really long time to complete.
That's what I remember my sys admin friends saying. The Sun machines could handle heavy loads without falling over. But if you were running a heavy single user application or compiling a big project a commodity wintel box was faster.
definitely. my company was paid a buncha cash by MS to convert our web infrastructure to Windows NT. We had to have roughly 8x the number of boxes. 4x to handle the load and double that because they had to be rebooted all the damn time to keep them serving.
Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks. BTW, even Linux lose benchmarks to windows often times.
We used a Sparc Ultra 10 for a Authentication server in 2000, it supports concurrent 100K users without any issue, obviously you need to write your own software, but the server is super stable. And yes, we use cheap x86 + Linux for all sorts of thing from 1996 and it was quite faster but you can not trust it the same way as a Sparc.
For a brief moment before epoll came along it looked like Linux would get /dev/poll.[1] In fact, IIRC, epoll started as a /dev/poll implementation. I don't think Sun's /dev/poll ever saw much uptake because, aside from the limitations mentioned the kqueue paper, the pace of software development was much more rapid and dynamic in the FOSS and web worlds, and the center of gravity had already shifted to BSD and Linux.
For better and worse, Linux developers seemed more inclined toward adopting extensions from SysV and SunOS/Solaris than from the contemporary BSDs.
And then Solaris added EventPorts in reaction to kqueue. Arguably they should have just adopted kqueue. Would be much better if both Solaris and Linux had just adopted kqueue. Having that unified accross the 3 major server OSs would have been helpful.
Been there done that? Circa 2001 I had a customer with a rack of 220R's and Clariion storage arrays. I was paged about an app outage and saw (IIRC) "environmental errors" in the logs about the temperature of the machines. One of the Clariion's, in the same rack, had caught fire which brought the database / app down but the 220R's kept chugging along. Unsurprisingly this was quickly followed a call from the NOC that the fire suppression kicking in and that I should down get there ASAP.
I don't know, it seems that while SPARC was an industry leader, there were plenty of peers competing in that space helping to supersede VAX.
HP PA-RISC, RS/6000, MIPS on SGI and others, DEC Alpha itself. Every workstation and server vendor had a proprietary architecture and a Unix variant to match.
It is a little different now, in the 90’s there was so much low hanging fruit that new-thing could be multiple times better than old-thing. Arm might get a durable lead of, ya know, a couple or a dozen percentage points over x86. It isn’t like a quantitative difference so huge that it becomes a qualitative one.
In the 90’s, after all, aliens were coming to Earth to steal Intel’s chips.
Arm64 (M3) lags behind in some single core benchmarks vs Intel's high end desktop CPUs and is abysmal in multi-core benchmarks due to the limited number of cores, at least according to https://www.cpu-monkey.com.
Granted, the Intel CPU at the high end is pulling 250W+ (or was it 300W+?).
There are places for both architectures. I don't see x86 going anywhere unless Intel folds and ceases to design chips. Not sure AMD could power on alone given their current market share, though I certainly hope they could as a user of their chips in the desktop (and conversely, an M2 Air for my laptop).
I agree actually, I just wanted to set an upper-bound that nobody could really disagree with in the pro-ARM direction.
A minor quibble—high end desktop is a niche almost seemingly intentionally(?) ignored by ARM. Ampere puts out interesting server chips, and Apple puts out interesting laptop chips. What a high end desktop ARM chip? Apple’s max and ultra chips maybe, but they are pretty clearly a compromise with the fact that that market is pretty niche.
I developed cross-platform simulator software back in 2008. One of our platforms was SPARC. Still used heavily at the time. They tried to replace them with SGI Itanium servers and we know how that turned out.
Yeah - my AlphaServer DS25, which is five years older and has dual 1 GHz Alpha CPUs, can keep up quite well in many regards with a dual 1.5 GHz Sun Fire V245 (which is very similar to the Sun machine here).
This was especially true for workloads that were hard to parallelize. Stuff that lent itself well to parallel execution was sometimes faster, though hyperthreads and multicore single-package CPUs took care of that a few years later.
As I recall in also exactly 2002 to 2003 my desktop setup shifted to a x86 whitebox PC I built myself (32-bit) FreeBSD machine that was running X and KDE2. I had a really nicely customized KDE2 setup and could do a lot with it. It was worlds better than a proprietary OS based Unix-like setup.
SparcOS was an awesome unix. Linux was respectable as well, but the hardware story in 2007 was much more shitty. Hardware vendors pretty much ignored linux, going for windows as I recall.
So if you just wanted a good Unix environment, SparcOS was it.
Java/ZFS were both Sun products, and we're still using them today. Just not SparcOS. Sun tried with Project Indiana, but they were getting outpaced by Linux and the open source movement.
No, if you just wanted a good Unix environment in 2007 you would buy an x86 workstation with Linux preinstalled which existed from multiple vendors/VARs. Or Mac.
Solaris 10 worked pretty good on x86 and was free back then. Once Oracle acquired Sun, they eventually started to demand $1K per year per CPU core on hardware that wasn't made by Sun/Oracle.
I was specifically talking about the corporate experiment of deciding to go that hard for open sourcing your crown jewels, and Oracle has notably discontinued their participation in that experiment.
Sun had few paths forward, with Linux + commodity hardware, what were they going to do, keep selling the OS and support contract at a price fewer and fewer were willing to pay? Sun had a suite of IDE and compilers that at one time sold for thousands of dollars per seat, the compiler was optimized for the architecture, but gdb was free and can get you code that runs just as well, unless you're under a benchmark. They were also under pressure from the OpenSource dev tools that were getting richer for GNU + Linux. Now that Solaris is practically dead, and RHEL is a subsidiary of IBM, given the dev and support state of CentOS and RockyLinux, I wonder if the community ever regret the loss of what could have flourished as another branch of the *nix ecosystem.
Just to add some nuance: SunOS up to version 4 was strictly BSD-based with vendor enhancement. "SunOS 5" became Solaris 2, and conversely, SunOS 4 was retroactively dubbed "Solaris 1".
Solaris 2 and up were derived from System V release 4, which had actually merged the best of System V with both Xenix and BSD, so rather than being purely AT&T Unix, SVR4 was promised as the best of all worlds, with some ability to pick and choose which variety was in play, based somewhat on provision of both types of utilities in separate directories, and appropriate libraries and APIs.
SVR4, IMHO, was the best and most stable Unix, and the right choice for vendors to adopt in those days.
funnily enough, solaris 2 was also identifying as sunos 5 depending on what tool you used to query.
sun's pivot from bsd to at&t was a very nice and clean change (I was the one who ended up upgrading our sunos servers to solaris when the time came in the 90's), sequent's switch was a nightmare.
I still miss my e4500, though, but not the noise or electric bill.
Not the first time for Windows, Windows 7 is v6.1 internally, then Windows 8 and 8.1 get 6.2 and 6.3[1]. Main explanation is basically "programmers suck at checking version numbers" so Microsoft tried to avoid bumping the major version. I guess they risked pushing the version number to 10 for the "last" version of Windows, but have fallen back to just not touching it now that a new generation of management have decided that it isn't the last version of Windows.
[1] Windows 95 also tells 16 bit apps that it's v3.95, but 32 bit apps get the correct 4.0.
Small addition: there were also the x86-based Sun 386i models, running up to SunOS 4.0.2.
(The Sun 386i didn't get SunOS 4.1 nor Solaris 2, at least not at our site, where we had a few sitting around in empty cubicles, and occasionally used for random things.)
> x86-based Sun 386i models, running up to SunOS 4.0.2
oh gosh, I always forget about those, thanks! around here, it was mostly the 68k suns, followed by sparc. the 386 unix variants were mostly sequent.
I remember one fun job interview in the 90's, where before we went to grab beer the interviewer (my future boss) stopped in the office and said "and this will be your sparc" - to be quite honest, that was such a huge perk!
I think Sun was trying to be more friendly for customers who needed to run a little PC software in addition to real workstation software.
Incidentally, we were a Sun ISV and customer out in the Silicon Forest, where Sequent was located (and Intel, Tektronix...). I initially learned C++ and Smalltalk from an adjunct professor from Sequent. Also where Cray Research Superservers (nee FPS) was, who developed a multiprocessing SPARC system before Sun. Which is how, as a teen, I got sent by a marketing guy to onsite at Cray, to "port" some of our software to the Cray S-MP. It was a nice time and place, with a little like a mini version of being in Silicon Valley, but with more rain.
yup - the job interview I was talking about was for EasyStreet, one of the big local IPSs in the Portland area. we were located in beaverton off of Allen.
I also spent a lot of time in the old sequent campus, at the OSDL, and a bunch of time at OGI before it got subsumed.
I still remember the day when Microsoft visited the office, saw I had a Microsoft keyboard connected to my sparc, and asked if I ran internet explorer (they had a solaris version). I laughed and said, "no, I only have 96mb of ram, you can't run internet explorer in only 96mb of ram".
Neat. We were actually in the OGI science park. (We were the "CADRE" sign people would see, as they turned left into the park off Walker Rd., IIRC, with the wildflower field on the other side of the Walker. Earlier, the sign might've been "MicroCASE" or "NWIS". And originally a Tektronix spinoff, to build high-end in-circuit emulator hardware with workstation frontends, which evolved to include integrated full-lifecycle CASE.)
Also in the OGI science park was Verdix (makers of Ada development tools, and some kind of multilevel-secure workstation software).
I don't know what all the other companies were. But amenities included private showers for biking to work, a small forest jogging trail, and a restaurant that made nice turkey sandwiches and huge blueberry muffins to replenish those calories.
'As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months.'
@18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and did pretty good, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.
Yes I know. But this person came to sun after doing the Rainbow 100. DEC did better once they went away from that approach and went towards actual PC compatible. Neither DEC Rainbow nor Sun i386 were PC compatible. For DEC this is understandable as PC wasn't really a standard (their problem was that they pushed 3 different incompatible products into virtually the same market). For Sun to do this didn't make much sense.
I can't find the link anymore, but there is the hacker song 'Bye Bye SunOS 4.3'. Its quite funny. If somebody has the link.
It really is an incredibly important part of Unix history, not just Sun. It basically really started the outright Unix wars. Had Sun just gone with BSD and tried to create that as a standard, they could have taken most of the world with them without creating a massive blowback counter-reaction that their alliance with AT&T provoked.
And AT&T would have been dead in the water, they might have tried with somebody else, but that would have just cast Sun as the good guys and AT&T and whoever as the bad guys and with Sun already being the market leader, that standard would have been pretty dominant I would think.
my boss at the time refused to move to solaris from sunos (on his personal sparc, we moved to solaris at the company), it was my responsibility to deal with the solaris hosts from that point forward. we were definitely a sparc shop (though at the time we only had sun clones, no real sun sparc boxes).
I think it was mostly that he liked the bsd tooling over the at&t tooling, but it instilled so much in me that I still have a hard time remembering the gnu command line options: I tend to default to svr4, then to bsd, and finally to gnu. probably one of the reasons I still feel at home on macOS.
Always facinated with the SPARC, NeXT, or SGI machines back in the day. Being a kid in the 90s.. always felt like reaching for something that would I would never see let along touch.
Indeed, these were the machines to have for a long time! My first UNIX account was on a SPARCserver 670MP (Grex, if anyone remembers that) and definitely colored my opinion of what a "real computer" was.
My R&D group at headquarters had our own 670MP pedestal, over against the far wall. That group also had one of those SPARCprinters (which offloaded the compute of printing to a very expensive workstation, sorta like Winmodems of the day).
Before that, opposite coast, the company had a larger and older 4/390. Which historically performed all "server" tasks (NFS, email, even quietly a UUCP node). Eventually, 1GB IPI hard drive for it, arriving in a package the size of a person, wouldn't scale fast enough to storage needs, so we started getting multi-drive SCSI chassis, and hanging them off random Sun workstations in cubicles. Unlike the mainframe-like big fridge in the locked machine room. And some flaky Exabyte drives scattered around, each handling multiple workstation-turned-server nightly network backups, which backups would fail more often than they worked.
When I arrived at CERN back in 2003, there was a pile of Sun workstations on a corner from my office, waiting to be dispatched to computer heaven.
Most folks were either using the new OS X, or Windows, with a custom Linux distribution on the servers, eventually replaced by Scientic Linux distribution.
There were still some Sun stations kind of serving the X Windows sessions on the restaurant area, and even those didn´t last much longer.
Late 90s / early 2000s was when Sun workstations changed from very expensive but well constructed proprietary machines to very expensive PCs with cheap internals and unusual processors. However I still got an ex-university Sun workstation around 2002 for free (or a token price?) which served me well as a desktop machine for years and years. It eventually died of the capacitor plague that (to be fair to Sun) affects just about everything from that era.
Setting the SPARC bits aside, I feel like the Ultra 20/24/27 machines were well-constructed 64-bit x86 machines with regular AMD and Intel processors and ECC memory and reasonable fans and so on. I don't remember how they were on price, but I feel like they were not outrageous when compared to similar lines from Dell or HP at the time.
The pricing was the other Sun problem. It was a super grimy negotiation to get them down from their ludicrous publicly stated pricing to what you could actually get them for, which was more reasonable, you just wanted to clean yourself afterwards.
In the UK Sun had done some deals of the type that in North America are dominated by IBM (banking infra etc.), so they were probably absolutely milking those clients and giving the rest of us more slack than they wanted to let on.
I had a very different experience. I was responsible for about 100 Sun servers in the early 2000. To get to our server room, I had to go through another datacenter, where all was HP. We had every single week 1 or 2 outages (power supply, disk, mainboard, memory…) all the time. EVERY WEEk! Meanwhile, the other datacenter had just a few visits per year, for upgrades…
I have fond memories of my $veryfirstjob doing my $veryfirstprojet, end of life of old SPARC machines (replaced with Solaris Zones on T4/T5 for which I automated the deployment). Some of those machines had multiple years of uptime, I wish I had recorded all of those but I remember at least a couple of 1500+ days. Those things wouldn't die.
I miss Sun hardware, especially in the sun4c era. Everything was so solidly built and well thought out compared to a lot of PC hardware. The IPC/IPX is still one of my favorite form factors.
I still have an IPC on my desk as a monitor stand. In 1996 I used it as a router for my 24hour 56kbps modem connection, serving all of 204.94.173.x - I was paying tlg.org $145/mo for my Class C address space, and all my home machines were just hanging out there. that is the internet I really miss.
I have been thinking about getting an old IPC or IPX and swapping out the internals with a modern PC motherboard and components, but only if I can do it cleanly. I haven't done it due to not having enough free time and... it just feels wrong to me in some way.
Ah the trouble of finding a unix workstation with a pristine case and thoroughly cooked interior so you don't feel bad about gutting it for a casemod. Call me when you find one.
Same! My IPC served my domain using Solaris on a nailed up bonded ISDN circuit until someone filled the root disk trying to patch the rpc.cmsd remote exploit. After that it was BSDs until I settled on OpenBSD.
Ditto here. I loved their hardware from that era up until the early 2000s. I still have a few dozen systems from those years in my basement. I tried getting rid of them years ago using the Marie Kondo method, but they all SPARC joy...
I can remember carrying a Sun machine around for demos in '95 or so - the IPX was easy to carry but the monitor less than easy. What I particularly remember is getting the occasional electric shocks from the monitor when carrying it (presumably from energy stored in capacitors) and being really careful not to drop it as our two person company only had one Sun monitor!
I greatly enjoy the Sun3 and Sun4c/Sun4m era, always under SunOS 4. Probably because that's what I started on with my first UNIX account (Grex). Probably why I still prefer the BSD-style distros nowadays.
I wanted on of these sooo bad. I've always had a softspot in my heart for SPARC. I loved working with those systems at work. I used to have a second hand T5440 that I got off ebay for super cheap, I think it had 128G of RAM and 256 threads!
Or better yet: NeXT. It’s just that it renamed itself Apple after acquiring the company and the brand for one Steve Jobs (and getting 400 million as change).
As a sysadmin, the only thing I miss about Sun hardware and Solaris was how reliable it was. My record for uptime was over 6 years on a Sun Blade workstation.
I always salivated over Sun SPARC workstations. I'm kind of sad to hear that the specs of the last SPARC workstation were so … low… but I guess time destroys all things
There are far better SPARC64 servers available, but many are so incredibly loud (looking at you SunFire T1000) that running them outside a dedicated area is not practical.
I worked on building Debian packages en masse to Nexenta back in the day. I really loved zones+zfs+dtrace which were incredibly well integrated together. All of those technologies live on in some form but none of them are nearly as well integrated as they were on Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris.
My favorite video of the time is still a guy screaming into a rack of spinning rust and watching read latencies spike on the drives nearest his mouth.
I worked for Sun Microsystems as a placement year. The first time I saw Sun Rays, I couldn't believe it wasn't already used everywhere. We had badges that let us go from desk to desk, from one building to another, and even to our home, without losing the session.
I did hear rumours that CIA/NSA used them. It meant no one could steal a computer and take data. Only thin clients everywhere. There were thin client "laptops" too.
Citrix/Terminal Services was certainly worse in the design sense, but from the corporate buyer's perspective (i.e. the only buyer) it was significantly better: They could deploy hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of cheap, disposable PC's as thin clients, while centrally managing everything that mattered. And unlike Sun Rays, they could natively run Windows applications.
There's a reason Citrix ended up worth $16.5B when they went private a couple of years ago, they were highly successful propagating the thin client vision that Sun championed but fumbled.
I feel such nostalgia for Sun hardware. I've had several sparcstations over the years: a SparcStation IPC, SparcStation 5, and an Ultra 10. I still have the Ultra 10, and put OpenBSD on it the other month, after replacing the NVRAM chip.
I just booted up an old Sun 3/80 a little while ago for fun. Needed a new NVRAM chip (and had to figure out how to reprogram it). Used an SD to SCSI adapter, as the old hard drive was toast. Finally used tftp to network boot it off a linux VM, and install SunOS 4.1.3. Then played around with it for a bit and thought, "man, I used to think this slow as molasses machine was fast." I looked over at the 3/50 and thought about trying to boot it, but thought better of it. I've got a Sparc 5 I could try, I guess, or the SGI Indigo... I think there's a DECstation 2100 buried in the pile somewhere too.
I was gifted an old Sparcstation, but it didn't have a hard drive, and while I had a suitable drive, I didn't have the cable - and then I looked up its performance, and never bothered to get it running. It would have been about the equivalent of a 486, when we already had Athlon 64x2 readily available.
And, the future marches on, such as the DECstation 3000 emulator that runs on an RP2040. [0] Seeing a cheap microcontroller doing something like that makes me laugh out loud.
This reminds me! I used to have a Sun 3/60 way back before I got the Sparcs. Boy those things were slow... Still, I learned so much from SunOS 4.x systems.
...but yeah, the slow factor means it doesn't get bench time, the 3/160 almost always gets picked over the 3/50 for hacking. I'd still like to do a dataless install for the 3/50, I recently refurbished a Sun SCSI shoebox with an 80 MB MFM drive on an Adaptec ACB-4000 and that'd probably be the "best" use for it.
While not quite a Sun system, I still have my Tadpole Viper. The only thing that runs on it in a straight forward manner is OpenBSD; even Solaris needs patch discs. I'd still use it regularly if only web browsers would work. I still prefer its keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever owned. It's the machine I was using when I finally was able to overcome my previous difficulties in learning C. And I even got to diagnose an endian problem.
In general, OpenBSD/sparc64 support is excellent. Up until a few years ago, we were still maintaining high security routers running OpenBSD/sparc64 on various SPARC64 products (mostly SunFire T1000 1U boxes). Even with the additional hardening, it's often faster than even NetBSD.
When I was looking for a not-Solaris OS, OpenBSD was the only game in town for it. Literally. Somebody maintaining the UltraSPARC OpenBSD port decided to support this oddity specifically. Nothing else, including NetBSD, would work.
Probably not especially difficult to port the platform-specific bits from OpenBSD to NetBSD, but also not trivial.
A lot of the "wow, this actually Just Works on OpenBSD!" support is because one or more OpenBSD developer actually runs the given system. Supposedly that's why there's really good support for a large number of laptop peculiarities that NetBSD lacks -- OpenBSD devs are actually dailying OpenBSD on those machines.
Nostalgia.
I had a SparcStation 20 back in 2003 I got for free. I ended up getting NetBSD running on the thing, but for some reason I had to patch the boot floppy with a patch file I got off comp.os.bsd.netbsd for it to actually boot. Of course it was basically useless and I never really used it for anything, but it looked cool.
The power button in the top left corner was so prone to being hit by ones knee in its underdesk location almost all of them in my office had little polo/lifesaver shaped guards jerryrigged to stop it…
I sure do... there was someone on YouTube who owned one, he was going to let people use it for giggles, but he seems to have gone AWOL... shame really, because I don't know how else people can get to experience such hardware like this without physical access.
Good luck downloading a firmware upgrade for these. Oracle requires a subscription nowadays, even if there are security related issues that the firmware resolves. And mind you, it's not a $29 subscription.
A couple years ago I got a reply to a Craigslist ad I had posted looking for 90's and 00's era computers people were looking to get rid of. This guy said he used to run a small website starting around 1995, and had a couple "SUN servers" taking up space in his storage unit that he'd love to get rid of.
He was a bit of a curmudgeon, going on about how his business partner screwed him out of a "seven-digit payout" when his domain eventually got bought by some Japanese company. But a minivan rental and some elbow grease later I had a whole pile of hardware that he was all to happy to be done with: A Sun SPARCstation 20, a Sun ULTRA 1 Creator, an Axil Ultima 1 (a third-party Sun clone), an gorgeous amber Wyse CRT terminal, and a few other odds and ends.
I wrote a more detailed list on my blog [1], but so far all I've managed to do with them is get the drives out and cloned and the ULTRA 1 running (an involved process as the internal BIOS memory lost power long ago, wiping such transient properties as "what is my MAC address".
[1]: https://sidneys1.com/retrocomputing/2022/06/03/retro-roundup...
The Sun Rescue email mailing list has people who can help (I’m on the list also); much lower volume than in previous years but still helpful.
http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org
I was excited to read about cool hardware including a gorgeous amber Wyse CRT terminal, and disappointed that there were no pictures whatsoever on the blog post.
Here, eat your heart out: https://sidneys1.com/retrocomputing/2024/10/04/booting-sun-s...
Yes, I got ahold of these just weeks before moving to a new state. Things have been a bit chaotic since then. Here's a video of it booting, though!
https://youtu.be/lGCLvFzGYX8
Love those terminals, was just thinking about looking for one!
I remember that the programmable MAC address feature occasionally came in handy when dealing with recalcitrant / braindead software ‘entitlement’ schemes vendors would occasionally require.
I absolutely adore the terminal. It appears to have several VT-compatible modes, so should be very usable with modern Linux. Except I don't have the accompanying Wyse keyboard with the appropriate setup keys required to switch compatibility modes. Gotta trawl ebay for one one of these days...
It was nice to see the bit in the video about the Tadpole SPARCbook 3000XT. They are incredibly rare compared to Sun desktop workstations, but a lot of fun. I wrote about the 3000ST model: https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...
Amazing score, getting a Tadpole, especially in that condition, and for that price.
The idea anyone would be running a Sparc in 2007 for performance . . .
Some time around 2003 my boss had a Sparc machine as his desktop, though this was widely viewed as unix nerd nostalgia even then. As a junior I got a PC. It turned out my PC built the project 5x faster than the Sparc managed. After this I don’t think we bought much from Sun except one of those big tape drives, and lots of Dell servers appeared instead.
This is part of the reason why Linux ate their lunch. For the price of one Sun server, you could get 4 Dell servers that ran Linux, and they were faster. Granted, you didn't have all of the redundancy that was built into these higher end Sun systems or the really good support, but hey you had 3 extra machines as a backup.
However, I did consider it a bit of genius when, toward the bitter end, they pretty much went all-in with the PCI-bus, ATA disks, and all those PC-compatible interfaces replaced the Sun-specific ones which had been so distinctive (and expensive) up until then.
It must've cushioned the blow for orgs that were still investing in new Suns but were able to plug in regular commodity peripherals, at long last.
Sun used common stuff quite early on, well before "the bitter end". They adopted PCI in 1997. Their workstations they moved from SCSI to ATA around the same time, though the servers are still with the SCSI family today. Regardless, mostly you couldn't plug in generic hardware anyway because there are no Solaris drivers for most of it. Honestly, it was never a big deal.
Yeah, our Enterprise E450 had 10 PCI slots of various speeds and bus widths
Yeah people used to say in the late 1990s "Linux enthusiasts want it to kill Microsoft, but what it really is doing is killing Sun".
You can also add SGI and most proprietary Unix vendors at the time. To a certain extent I think Apple also had a hand in killing the workstation market. When you can get a Mac that did Unix things and also ran Office and Photoshop, why get a SGI workstation (of course not all things could run on the MacOS that people got SGI's for)
I agree, but to nitpick, there was a port (based on the Mac version) of Photoshop for Irix.
Yeah. I think it was version 3 and never was updated beyond that for Irix.
Not really the same for Apple. The mac running OSX is a Unix workstation. It is an updated NeXT.
Well, and what really killed Sun wasn't Linux by itself, but Linux on Opteron/AMD64.
The last Sun systems I operated -- x2200s not up to Sun standards -- ran GNU/Linux on Opteron in an HPC cluster.
I would say that there were three factors that superseded Sun, along with most of the other proprietary workstations and servers: FOSS Unix, commodity PC-compatible hardware, and TCP/IP.
The big vendors used to be differentiated on how they communicated on a network, shared files, type of bus architecture, and workloads, and so each company or unit would choose a vendor and rely on them for solutions, and the staff had specialized expertise in those systems.
But all those vendors found themselves adopting TCP/IP and Ethernet. And Sun's NFS was widely adopted. X11 also became standard. The BSDs already had a wide hardware compatibility list, so that spare machine with no OS license could be returned to service. A few generations of college grads had direct experience with Unix and building PCs. Once Linux on PC-compatibles began showing up in the server room, Windows NT was mature, and software vendors were porting to Linux, it was a fait accompli.
Kind of strange to talk about TCP/IP and Ethernet. Sun was the company that pushed that from the beginning. The self configured before others. It was part of why they had more new adoption then DEC/VAX systems.
It all comes back to SPARC. Price to performance. If Sun had amazing high quality x86 servers and workstation by 1998, their software would have been perfectly fine. Its not like there was anything missing from Solaris at that time.
Many people were not unhappy, they just realized that they could get a faster cheaper machine, and run the same software on a linux. Even if linux was less optimized, still end up cheaper overall for the majority of workloads.
Its not like running linux on unsupported PCs in the early 2000 was that much fun. But Sun by 2002 they were still trying to kill x86 based stuff. They bought x64 server line in 2004.
Around that time I was working as a Solaris admin, C/C++ systems programmer and software packager, our manager gifted us all a SunBlade 1000 in my final year there, although we all used Windows laptops for our day to day work.
I got blank look when I asked "why?". Sure they were snappy, and you could run StarOffice on them, but really there wasn't a lot that they were useful for in our day to day work. Nice machines to be sure, but completely extraneous. I already had a fleet of Sparc build servers running everything from Solaris 2.5.1 through 2.9 which I used to build and package open source stuff for our corp servers. Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere.
> Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere.
Ah, the beloved "use it or lose it" end-of-year crap. So much needless waste just to keep the beancounters happy.
I used a Blade 2000 as my main machine until the early 2010s. Doing UNIX work on Windows back then with cygwin was way more painful than it is nowadays, and the hardware was a lot nicer than x86 desktops (and workstations offering things like ECC would've seen you in the same price range anyway).
Back then with just dual cores running heavily loaded VMs always was annoying, and slowed your main system down noticeably - so I preferred not doing that on my x86 box. My Sun on the other hand had three SunPCI cards I used for Windows development and testing - which had pretty decent performance, still allowed me to have the disk images on my UNIX filesystem, but didn't ruin my native performance.
At my first job in 1997 I convinced my manager to put Linux x86 boxes on everyone's desks and move the Suns to the server room. The Suns required expensive Sun monitors while we could put cheaper larger higher resolution monitors on a Linux x86 box and display everything over X11. I was in the semiconductor / chip design business and everything ran on Solaris until around 2003 when the 64-bit Opteron came out and we never bought a Sun again.
I'm sure this end-of-the-line machine had its merits. But if you want the cool of Elvis before he got fat, go back to when a SPARCstation 1 running SunOS 4 was new.
The contemporary PC running MS-DOS or early Windows was just a toy by comparison.
I was one of those annoying unix “I know this” kids except from early exposure to a pizza box Sparcstation, not SGI. That was in the era when Suns sold strangely well to people doing lots of color processing work. (I think you can blame Kodak for that). When the PC ran rings round the Sparc at work I fully understood how far they had fallen.
Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working, in a way that 2007 Linux would not; however RAM was dropping in price at the time and this wasn't much of a concern as a result, for desktops at least.
> Solaris' strength was handling jobs under memory pressure and still working […]
And under high load.
I've had Linux live lock on more than one occasion when load averages hit >100. I've never a Solaris (or FreeBSD) system live lock even under ridiculous loads (200+), and was always been able to login and kill whatever process(es) went sideways.
I once ran into an issue on a GNU Mailman host putting out an email storm and the load average was > 800 on an x86 Solaris box that probably only had 4x AMD cores. I was eventually able to get in as root on the serial console and fix it. Back in those days it was almost shameful to just reboot something vs. slogging through and trying to fix it. Also I miss not having to deal with OOM issues.
one time we had something going ... wrong. took forever to login and the first person on entered 'uptime' and the load average was in the thousands. nothing was failing. just taking a really really long time to complete.
That's what I remember my sys admin friends saying. The Sun machines could handle heavy loads without falling over. But if you were running a heavy single user application or compiling a big project a commodity wintel box was faster.
definitely. my company was paid a buncha cash by MS to convert our web infrastructure to Windows NT. We had to have roughly 8x the number of boxes. 4x to handle the load and double that because they had to be rebooted all the damn time to keep them serving.
Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks. BTW, even Linux lose benchmarks to windows often times.
We used a Sparc Ultra 10 for a Authentication server in 2000, it supports concurrent 100K users without any issue, obviously you need to write your own software, but the server is super stable. And yes, we use cheap x86 + Linux for all sorts of thing from 1996 and it was quite faster but you can not trust it the same way as a Sparc.
My recollection is anyone doing massive concurrency per server (at the time over 10k connections) was moving to using a BSD because of kqueue.
We even went through a phase of email on OpenBSD before being bought by a company that insisted on Exchange.
Linux didn’t seem to pull decisively ahead of the BSDs until multicore x86 became mainstream. Up until then it always seemed flaky.
SunOS had /dev/poll, which the kqueue paper cited as prior art. https://web.archive.org/web/20000823103627/http://docs.sun.c... via citation 4 in https://people.freebsd.org/~jlemon/papers/kqueue.pdf
For a brief moment before epoll came along it looked like Linux would get /dev/poll.[1] In fact, IIRC, epoll started as a /dev/poll implementation. I don't think Sun's /dev/poll ever saw much uptake because, aside from the limitations mentioned the kqueue paper, the pace of software development was much more rapid and dynamic in the FOSS and web worlds, and the center of gravity had already shifted to BSD and Linux.
For better and worse, Linux developers seemed more inclined toward adopting extensions from SysV and SunOS/Solaris than from the contemporary BSDs.
[1] See, e.g., https://lwn.net/2001/0712/a/devpoll.php3
And then Solaris added EventPorts in reaction to kqueue. Arguably they should have just adopted kqueue. Would be much better if both Solaris and Linux had just adopted kqueue. Having that unified accross the 3 major server OSs would have been helpful.
> Sparc is not for performance, particularly for benchmarks
It certainly was from 2011 to 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_computer
> obviously you need to write your own software
Kerberos ran fine for me on cast-off SPARCstation 10(?) which was well obsolete at the time.
we used to 'joke' that you would have to set one of fire to get it to stop responding to a ping. even then, might take a while.
Been there done that? Circa 2001 I had a customer with a rack of 220R's and Clariion storage arrays. I was paged about an app outage and saw (IIRC) "environmental errors" in the logs about the temperature of the machines. One of the Clariion's, in the same rack, had caught fire which brought the database / app down but the 220R's kept chugging along. Unsurprisingly this was quickly followed a call from the NOC that the fire suppression kicking in and that I should down get there ASAP.
Oh wow.
I have plenty of fond memories about the stability of Spark Stations but none as fun as that.
Thanks for sharing.
I did once have a Bullfrog TSS that survived a literal explosion. They certainly don’t build hardware like they used to.
That was the joke my VMS colleagues said to us the younger unix hotshots.
The funny thing is that this is precisely what SPARC did to the VAX.
I don't know, it seems that while SPARC was an industry leader, there were plenty of peers competing in that space helping to supersede VAX.
HP PA-RISC, RS/6000, MIPS on SGI and others, DEC Alpha itself. Every workstation and server vendor had a proprietary architecture and a Unix variant to match.
It now it seems likely that arm64 will do the same to amd64.
It is a little different now, in the 90’s there was so much low hanging fruit that new-thing could be multiple times better than old-thing. Arm might get a durable lead of, ya know, a couple or a dozen percentage points over x86. It isn’t like a quantitative difference so huge that it becomes a qualitative one.
In the 90’s, after all, aliens were coming to Earth to steal Intel’s chips.
Arm64 (M3) lags behind in some single core benchmarks vs Intel's high end desktop CPUs and is abysmal in multi-core benchmarks due to the limited number of cores, at least according to https://www.cpu-monkey.com.
Granted, the Intel CPU at the high end is pulling 250W+ (or was it 300W+?).
There are places for both architectures. I don't see x86 going anywhere unless Intel folds and ceases to design chips. Not sure AMD could power on alone given their current market share, though I certainly hope they could as a user of their chips in the desktop (and conversely, an M2 Air for my laptop).
I agree actually, I just wanted to set an upper-bound that nobody could really disagree with in the pro-ARM direction.
A minor quibble—high end desktop is a niche almost seemingly intentionally(?) ignored by ARM. Ampere puts out interesting server chips, and Apple puts out interesting laptop chips. What a high end desktop ARM chip? Apple’s max and ultra chips maybe, but they are pretty clearly a compromise with the fact that that market is pretty niche.
I was under the impression the M4 chip already in the iPad Pro and laptops soon to be launched this month will bring them to single core parity again.
The A18 launched with the iPhone 16 was also supposedly beating Intel single core as well.
While I'm sure they had their use case, the Sun desktops we had while at university in the early 2000s always felt sluggish.
The servers didn't seem much better. They'd handle a ton of users, but each would get the same slow experience.
Their really competitive era was over by the early 2000’s, right? More of a 90’s company.
And they were already feeling sluggish by the second half of the 90s. That might be because I had an SGI on my desktop, though.
I developed cross-platform simulator software back in 2008. One of our platforms was SPARC. Still used heavily at the time. They tried to replace them with SGI Itanium servers and we know how that turned out.
I had a Sun as my desktop until 2010 when my Solaris admin gig was eliminated. It was running KDE on three displays. Loved it.
Yeah - my AlphaServer DS25, which is five years older and has dual 1 GHz Alpha CPUs, can keep up quite well in many regards with a dual 1.5 GHz Sun Fire V245 (which is very similar to the Sun machine here).
This was especially true for workloads that were hard to parallelize. Stuff that lent itself well to parallel execution was sometimes faster, though hyperthreads and multicore single-package CPUs took care of that a few years later.
As I recall in also exactly 2002 to 2003 my desktop setup shifted to a x86 whitebox PC I built myself (32-bit) FreeBSD machine that was running X and KDE2. I had a really nicely customized KDE2 setup and could do a lot with it. It was worlds better than a proprietary OS based Unix-like setup.
SparcOS was an awesome unix. Linux was respectable as well, but the hardware story in 2007 was much more shitty. Hardware vendors pretty much ignored linux, going for windows as I recall.
So if you just wanted a good Unix environment, SparcOS was it.
Java/ZFS were both Sun products, and we're still using them today. Just not SparcOS. Sun tried with Project Indiana, but they were getting outpaced by Linux and the open source movement.
No, if you just wanted a good Unix environment in 2007 you would buy an x86 workstation with Linux preinstalled which existed from multiple vendors/VARs. Or Mac.
Solaris 10 worked pretty good on x86 and was free back then. Once Oracle acquired Sun, they eventually started to demand $1K per year per CPU core on hardware that wasn't made by Sun/Oracle.
SunOS/Solaris, I believe you mean.
OpenSolaris was an interesting experiment.
It’s still going, in the form of Illumos: https://illumos.org/
Kind of.
I was specifically talking about the corporate experiment of deciding to go that hard for open sourcing your crown jewels, and Oracle has notably discontinued their participation in that experiment.
Sun had few paths forward, with Linux + commodity hardware, what were they going to do, keep selling the OS and support contract at a price fewer and fewer were willing to pay? Sun had a suite of IDE and compilers that at one time sold for thousands of dollars per seat, the compiler was optimized for the architecture, but gdb was free and can get you code that runs just as well, unless you're under a benchmark. They were also under pressure from the OpenSource dev tools that were getting richer for GNU + Linux. Now that Solaris is practically dead, and RHEL is a subsidiary of IBM, given the dev and support state of CentOS and RockyLinux, I wonder if the community ever regret the loss of what could have flourished as another branch of the *nix ecosystem.
I mean, I regret it to this day.
Solaris had (and illumos has) truly unmatched tooling around a number of things.
sunos was the bsd-based sun operating system for 68k and sparc. solaris was the at&t based sun operating system for sparc and x86.
Just to add some nuance: SunOS up to version 4 was strictly BSD-based with vendor enhancement. "SunOS 5" became Solaris 2, and conversely, SunOS 4 was retroactively dubbed "Solaris 1".
Solaris 2 and up were derived from System V release 4, which had actually merged the best of System V with both Xenix and BSD, so rather than being purely AT&T Unix, SVR4 was promised as the best of all worlds, with some ability to pick and choose which variety was in play, based somewhat on provision of both types of utilities in separate directories, and appropriate libraries and APIs.
SVR4, IMHO, was the best and most stable Unix, and the right choice for vendors to adopt in those days.
funnily enough, solaris 2 was also identifying as sunos 5 depending on what tool you used to query.
sun's pivot from bsd to at&t was a very nice and clean change (I was the one who ended up upgrading our sunos servers to solaris when the time came in the 90's), sequent's switch was a nightmare.
I still miss my e4500, though, but not the noise or electric bill.
solaris 2 was also identifying as sunos 5 depending on what tool you used to query.
Still true:
Not entirely unlike Windows 11, a.k.a.Not the first time for Windows, Windows 7 is v6.1 internally, then Windows 8 and 8.1 get 6.2 and 6.3[1]. Main explanation is basically "programmers suck at checking version numbers" so Microsoft tried to avoid bumping the major version. I guess they risked pushing the version number to 10 for the "last" version of Windows, but have fallen back to just not touching it now that a new generation of management have decided that it isn't the last version of Windows.
[1] Windows 95 also tells 16 bit apps that it's v3.95, but 32 bit apps get the correct 4.0.
adding: /usr/ucb - a very nice bone to throw.
Small addition: there were also the x86-based Sun 386i models, running up to SunOS 4.0.2.
(The Sun 386i didn't get SunOS 4.1 nor Solaris 2, at least not at our site, where we had a few sitting around in empty cubicles, and occasionally used for random things.)
> x86-based Sun 386i models, running up to SunOS 4.0.2
oh gosh, I always forget about those, thanks! around here, it was mostly the 68k suns, followed by sparc. the 386 unix variants were mostly sequent.
I remember one fun job interview in the 90's, where before we went to grab beer the interviewer (my future boss) stopped in the office and said "and this will be your sparc" - to be quite honest, that was such a huge perk!
I think Sun was trying to be more friendly for customers who needed to run a little PC software in addition to real workstation software.
Incidentally, we were a Sun ISV and customer out in the Silicon Forest, where Sequent was located (and Intel, Tektronix...). I initially learned C++ and Smalltalk from an adjunct professor from Sequent. Also where Cray Research Superservers (nee FPS) was, who developed a multiprocessing SPARC system before Sun. Which is how, as a teen, I got sent by a marketing guy to onsite at Cray, to "port" some of our software to the Cray S-MP. It was a nice time and place, with a little like a mini version of being in Silicon Valley, but with more rain.
yup - the job interview I was talking about was for EasyStreet, one of the big local IPSs in the Portland area. we were located in beaverton off of Allen.
I also spent a lot of time in the old sequent campus, at the OSDL, and a bunch of time at OGI before it got subsumed.
I still remember the day when Microsoft visited the office, saw I had a Microsoft keyboard connected to my sparc, and asked if I ran internet explorer (they had a solaris version). I laughed and said, "no, I only have 96mb of ram, you can't run internet explorer in only 96mb of ram".
Neat. We were actually in the OGI science park. (We were the "CADRE" sign people would see, as they turned left into the park off Walker Rd., IIRC, with the wildflower field on the other side of the Walker. Earlier, the sign might've been "MicroCASE" or "NWIS". And originally a Tektronix spinoff, to build high-end in-circuit emulator hardware with workstation frontends, which evolved to include integrated full-lifecycle CASE.)
Also in the OGI science park was Verdix (makers of Ada development tools, and some kind of multilevel-secure workstation software).
I don't know what all the other companies were. But amenities included private showers for biking to work, a small forest jogging trail, and a restaurant that made nice turkey sandwiches and huge blueberry muffins to replenish those calories.
I remember microcase - not too much at this point, but I remember the sign.
the ISP was founded by a mixture of ex-intel and ex-ogi telecom, so there was always a bit of closeness there.
eventually, at the OSDL, we had a Fred Meyer across the street, and not much else. but damnit, we had a great raised floor datacenter!
Same guy who did the non-PC compatible x86 for DEC where it also failed. This was kind of the brainchild of Sun East-Coast.
DEC had a moment between 1990-92 when they did pretty good in PC market.
Oral History of Grant Saviers, part 2 of 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od830KDrLUU
Oral History of Grant Saviers part 1: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201...
Oral History of Grant Saviers part 2: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
'As DEC’s Corporate Vice President of PC Systems and Peripherals from 1990 to 1992 Grant successfully restarted DEC’s PC business from a dormant state and grew revenues to $350M and break-even profitability in 18 months.'
@18 minute timestamp - they copied DELL strategy and did pretty good, business was growing and then DEC founder and CEO Ken Olsen decided to kill it. Grant got recruited to lead Adaptec.
Yes I know. But this person came to sun after doing the Rainbow 100. DEC did better once they went away from that approach and went towards actual PC compatible. Neither DEC Rainbow nor Sun i386 were PC compatible. For DEC this is understandable as PC wasn't really a standard (their problem was that they pushed 3 different incompatible products into virtually the same market). For Sun to do this didn't make much sense.
I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted except for the minor error that SunOS was available for i386 for a short while.
The SunOS -> Solaris transition is an important piece of Sun history.
I can't find the link anymore, but there is the hacker song 'Bye Bye SunOS 4.3'. Its quite funny. If somebody has the link.
It really is an incredibly important part of Unix history, not just Sun. It basically really started the outright Unix wars. Had Sun just gone with BSD and tried to create that as a standard, they could have taken most of the world with them without creating a massive blowback counter-reaction that their alliance with AT&T provoked.
And AT&T would have been dead in the water, they might have tried with somebody else, but that would have just cast Sun as the good guys and AT&T and whoever as the bad guys and with Sun already being the market leader, that standard would have been pretty dominant I would think.
http://www.poppyfields.net/filks/00070.html
my boss at the time refused to move to solaris from sunos (on his personal sparc, we moved to solaris at the company), it was my responsibility to deal with the solaris hosts from that point forward. we were definitely a sparc shop (though at the time we only had sun clones, no real sun sparc boxes).
I think it was mostly that he liked the bsd tooling over the at&t tooling, but it instilled so much in me that I still have a hard time remembering the gnu command line options: I tend to default to svr4, then to bsd, and finally to gnu. probably one of the reasons I still feel at home on macOS.
My homage to Solaris as an iPhone wallpaper.
https://www.w6rz.net/solaris_iphone.png
https://www.w6rz.net/solarisios.png
Always facinated with the SPARC, NeXT, or SGI machines back in the day. Being a kid in the 90s.. always felt like reaching for something that would I would never see let along touch.
Indeed, these were the machines to have for a long time! My first UNIX account was on a SPARCserver 670MP (Grex, if anyone remembers that) and definitely colored my opinion of what a "real computer" was.
My R&D group at headquarters had our own 670MP pedestal, over against the far wall. That group also had one of those SPARCprinters (which offloaded the compute of printing to a very expensive workstation, sorta like Winmodems of the day).
Before that, opposite coast, the company had a larger and older 4/390. Which historically performed all "server" tasks (NFS, email, even quietly a UUCP node). Eventually, 1GB IPI hard drive for it, arriving in a package the size of a person, wouldn't scale fast enough to storage needs, so we started getting multi-drive SCSI chassis, and hanging them off random Sun workstations in cubicles. Unlike the mainframe-like big fridge in the locked machine room. And some flaky Exabyte drives scattered around, each handling multiple workstation-turned-server nightly network backups, which backups would fail more often than they worked.
"Distributed server" eh :P
HP-UX was very nice too. I used to love its desktop, VUE (that was later boringified into CDE).
I was offered a Xerox Lisp Machine to take home by a former employer in the mid 90's - I wish I'd taken up that offer!
Not forgetting the DEC Alphas!
When I arrived at CERN back in 2003, there was a pile of Sun workstations on a corner from my office, waiting to be dispatched to computer heaven.
Most folks were either using the new OS X, or Windows, with a custom Linux distribution on the servers, eventually replaced by Scientic Linux distribution.
There were still some Sun stations kind of serving the X Windows sessions on the restaurant area, and even those didn´t last much longer.
Late 90s / early 2000s was when Sun workstations changed from very expensive but well constructed proprietary machines to very expensive PCs with cheap internals and unusual processors. However I still got an ex-university Sun workstation around 2002 for free (or a token price?) which served me well as a desktop machine for years and years. It eventually died of the capacitor plague that (to be fair to Sun) affects just about everything from that era.
Setting the SPARC bits aside, I feel like the Ultra 20/24/27 machines were well-constructed 64-bit x86 machines with regular AMD and Intel processors and ECC memory and reasonable fans and so on. I don't remember how they were on price, but I feel like they were not outrageous when compared to similar lines from Dell or HP at the time.
The pricing was the other Sun problem. It was a super grimy negotiation to get them down from their ludicrous publicly stated pricing to what you could actually get them for, which was more reasonable, you just wanted to clean yourself afterwards.
In the UK Sun had done some deals of the type that in North America are dominated by IBM (banking infra etc.), so they were probably absolutely milking those clients and giving the rest of us more slack than they wanted to let on.
I had a very different experience. I was responsible for about 100 Sun servers in the early 2000. To get to our server room, I had to go through another datacenter, where all was HP. We had every single week 1 or 2 outages (power supply, disk, mainboard, memory…) all the time. EVERY WEEk! Meanwhile, the other datacenter had just a few visits per year, for upgrades…
I have fond memories of my $veryfirstjob doing my $veryfirstprojet, end of life of old SPARC machines (replaced with Solaris Zones on T4/T5 for which I automated the deployment). Some of those machines had multiple years of uptime, I wish I had recorded all of those but I remember at least a couple of 1500+ days. Those things wouldn't die.
I miss Sun hardware, especially in the sun4c era. Everything was so solidly built and well thought out compared to a lot of PC hardware. The IPC/IPX is still one of my favorite form factors.
I still have an IPC on my desk as a monitor stand. In 1996 I used it as a router for my 24hour 56kbps modem connection, serving all of 204.94.173.x - I was paying tlg.org $145/mo for my Class C address space, and all my home machines were just hanging out there. that is the internet I really miss.
I have been thinking about getting an old IPC or IPX and swapping out the internals with a modern PC motherboard and components, but only if I can do it cleanly. I haven't done it due to not having enough free time and... it just feels wrong to me in some way.
Ah the trouble of finding a unix workstation with a pristine case and thoroughly cooked interior so you don't feel bad about gutting it for a casemod. Call me when you find one.
I hear you. For most of the 90's, I had my home network on a publicly routed /24, no firewall.
Hosted my own domain and mail server right under my desk...
Same! I now have the /24 routed over a wireguard tunnel. About 5 years back I was able to register my own ASN and set up peering through a VPS.
Same! My IPC served my domain using Solaris on a nailed up bonded ISDN circuit until someone filled the root disk trying to patch the rpc.cmsd remote exploit. After that it was BSDs until I settled on OpenBSD.
Ditto here. I loved their hardware from that era up until the early 2000s. I still have a few dozen systems from those years in my basement. I tried getting rid of them years ago using the Marie Kondo method, but they all SPARC joy...
Hahaha :)
I can remember carrying a Sun machine around for demos in '95 or so - the IPX was easy to carry but the monitor less than easy. What I particularly remember is getting the occasional electric shocks from the monitor when carrying it (presumably from energy stored in capacitors) and being really careful not to drop it as our two person company only had one Sun monitor!
My first homebrew wireless AP was an old SPARCclassic with the now-rare SBus PCMCIA adapter and a Orinoco Gold, running IIRC Debian Potato.
Still a very cool form factor, though nowadays beware that the PSU is a cap goop timebomb:
https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2017/07/24/ipc-recap
I greatly enjoy the Sun3 and Sun4c/Sun4m era, always under SunOS 4. Probably because that's what I started on with my first UNIX account (Grex). Probably why I still prefer the BSD-style distros nowadays.
URL changed from https://hackaday.com/2024/09/28/the-last-sun-sparc-workstati..., which points to this.
I wanted on of these sooo bad. I've always had a softspot in my heart for SPARC. I loved working with those systems at work. I used to have a second hand T5440 that I got off ebay for super cheap, I think it had 128G of RAM and 256 threads!
I'd say the most successful Unix workstation maker is Apple. By far.
Or better yet: NeXT. It’s just that it renamed itself Apple after acquiring the company and the brand for one Steve Jobs (and getting 400 million as change).
As a sysadmin, the only thing I miss about Sun hardware and Solaris was how reliable it was. My record for uptime was over 6 years on a Sun Blade workstation.
I always salivated over Sun SPARC workstations. I'm kind of sad to hear that the specs of the last SPARC workstation were so … low… but I guess time destroys all things
Got curious and did a quick search - at least on this one sample a regular Core 2 Duo runs circles around the IIIi:
https://www.glennklockwood.com/benchmarks/performance.html#s...
There are far better SPARC64 servers available, but many are so incredibly loud (looking at you SunFire T1000) that running them outside a dedicated area is not practical.
I worked on building Debian packages en masse to Nexenta back in the day. I really loved zones+zfs+dtrace which were incredibly well integrated together. All of those technologies live on in some form but none of them are nearly as well integrated as they were on Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris.
My favorite video of the time is still a guy screaming into a rack of spinning rust and watching read latencies spike on the drives nearest his mouth.
> a guy screaming into a rack of spinning rust and watching read latencies spike
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
That’s the one! :) Uploaded by Bryan Cantrill no less.
I worked for Sun Microsystems as a placement year. The first time I saw Sun Rays, I couldn't believe it wasn't already used everywhere. We had badges that let us go from desk to desk, from one building to another, and even to our home, without losing the session.
It was used widely, it was just called Citrix.
I did hear rumours that CIA/NSA used them. It meant no one could steal a computer and take data. Only thin clients everywhere. There were thin client "laptops" too.
Citrix was different remote desktop software. The way the sunrays worked was seamless. Thin clients and servers. Alas, that's not needed anymore.
Citrix/Terminal Services was certainly worse in the design sense, but from the corporate buyer's perspective (i.e. the only buyer) it was significantly better: They could deploy hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of cheap, disposable PC's as thin clients, while centrally managing everything that mattered. And unlike Sun Rays, they could natively run Windows applications.
There's a reason Citrix ended up worth $16.5B when they went private a couple of years ago, they were highly successful propagating the thin client vision that Sun championed but fumbled.
I feel such nostalgia for Sun hardware. I've had several sparcstations over the years: a SparcStation IPC, SparcStation 5, and an Ultra 10. I still have the Ultra 10, and put OpenBSD on it the other month, after replacing the NVRAM chip.
I just booted up an old Sun 3/80 a little while ago for fun. Needed a new NVRAM chip (and had to figure out how to reprogram it). Used an SD to SCSI adapter, as the old hard drive was toast. Finally used tftp to network boot it off a linux VM, and install SunOS 4.1.3. Then played around with it for a bit and thought, "man, I used to think this slow as molasses machine was fast." I looked over at the 3/50 and thought about trying to boot it, but thought better of it. I've got a Sparc 5 I could try, I guess, or the SGI Indigo... I think there's a DECstation 2100 buried in the pile somewhere too.
I was gifted an old Sparcstation, but it didn't have a hard drive, and while I had a suitable drive, I didn't have the cable - and then I looked up its performance, and never bothered to get it running. It would have been about the equivalent of a 486, when we already had Athlon 64x2 readily available.
And, the future marches on, such as the DECstation 3000 emulator that runs on an RP2040. [0] Seeing a cheap microcontroller doing something like that makes me laugh out loud.
[0] https://github.com/rscott2049/DECstation2040
This reminds me! I used to have a Sun 3/60 way back before I got the Sparcs. Boy those things were slow... Still, I learned so much from SunOS 4.x systems.
I need to build up a new SunOS install for my 3/50:
https://users.glitchwrks.com/~glitch/2022/09/19/sun-3-50
...but yeah, the slow factor means it doesn't get bench time, the 3/160 almost always gets picked over the 3/50 for hacking. I'd still like to do a dataless install for the 3/50, I recently refurbished a Sun SCSI shoebox with an 80 MB MFM drive on an Adaptec ACB-4000 and that'd probably be the "best" use for it.
I owned an Ultra 60 at one time and I really liked it. It was a dual processor UltraSPARC II (or III) running at something like 450 MHz.
In one of my groups we had a Sun V480 and we ran all kinds of stuff on it and it never had the slightest hiccup. It was rock solid.
Fun times!
While not quite a Sun system, I still have my Tadpole Viper. The only thing that runs on it in a straight forward manner is OpenBSD; even Solaris needs patch discs. I'd still use it regularly if only web browsers would work. I still prefer its keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever owned. It's the machine I was using when I finally was able to overcome my previous difficulties in learning C. And I even got to diagnose an endian problem.
> I'd still use it regularly if only web browsers would work. I still prefer its keyboard and screen to anything else I've ever owned.
You can just cheat: https://virtuallyfun.com/2024/08/12/vncfox-better-way-of-bro...
In general, OpenBSD/sparc64 support is excellent. Up until a few years ago, we were still maintaining high security routers running OpenBSD/sparc64 on various SPARC64 products (mostly SunFire T1000 1U boxes). Even with the additional hardening, it's often faster than even NetBSD.
I wonder how well NetBSD would run on it. There're quite a lot of current packages for it:
https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sparc64/10...
When I was looking for a not-Solaris OS, OpenBSD was the only game in town for it. Literally. Somebody maintaining the UltraSPARC OpenBSD port decided to support this oddity specifically. Nothing else, including NetBSD, would work.
Probably not especially difficult to port the platform-specific bits from OpenBSD to NetBSD, but also not trivial.
A lot of the "wow, this actually Just Works on OpenBSD!" support is because one or more OpenBSD developer actually runs the given system. Supposedly that's why there's really good support for a large number of laptop peculiarities that NetBSD lacks -- OpenBSD devs are actually dailying OpenBSD on those machines.
Nostalgia. I had a SparcStation 20 back in 2003 I got for free. I ended up getting NetBSD running on the thing, but for some reason I had to patch the boot floppy with a patch file I got off comp.os.bsd.netbsd for it to actually boot. Of course it was basically useless and I never really used it for anything, but it looked cool.
The power button in the top left corner was so prone to being hit by ones knee in its underdesk location almost all of them in my office had little polo/lifesaver shaped guards jerryrigged to stop it…
I just love the way this chassis looks. It's such a simple, minimalist, industrial yet elegant design. A thing of beauty.
remember the e10000?
It was largely developed by Cray Research, which got bought by SGI, which sold Cray's SPARC Superserver division to Sun for cheap ( < $100M)[0].
[0] https://www.forbes.com/2002/05/06/0506sun.html#703713c16a5e
I sure do... there was someone on YouTube who owned one, he was going to let people use it for giggles, but he seems to have gone AWOL... shame really, because I don't know how else people can get to experience such hardware like this without physical access.
Jim Austin has one: https://www.computermuseum.org.uk/machines/sun_e10000.html
Good luck downloading a firmware upgrade for these. Oracle requires a subscription nowadays, even if there are security related issues that the firmware resolves. And mind you, it's not a $29 subscription.
[flagged]