It's sinking in that Sun is gone | Hacker News Reader

It's sinking in that Sun is gone

utcc.utoronto.ca

40 pointsfogus38 comments

Ahhh, I still have fond memories of the Sun Ultra Enterprise server we ran back in the late 90s.

The computer so fast (for its day) that it came with it's own spoiler (e.g. a separate bit of snap-on plastic for its top fan ducting). It was affectionately known around the lab as the "Purple Monster".

I won't miss Solaris's "pkg-add" installer though--what a kludge.

<voice actor="Phil Hartman" role="Bill McNeil" show="News Radio"> Good times...good times. </voice>

Yeah I find myself wincing a little every time I go to a page on Sun's website and that Oracle logo pops up in the corner where the Sun logo was.

Sun actually discontinued their UNIX workstations a couple of years ago. Ironically, I believe IBM was the very last vendor of real UNIX workstations.

IBM has since discontinued its last workstations. You can still buy a tower server and stick a Matrox card in it, but that's as close as it gets.

> I believe IBM was the very last vendor of real UNIX workstations.

How about Apple?

I guess it depends on how you define Unix. While Apple provides both software and hardware, and is a certified Unix (I still haven't met anyone who actually cares about this), there are a lot of older Unix admins who think CDE and X constitutes a Unix workstation, for right or wrong.

A pity Sun was so acquisition happy as Apple might have been interested in buying the server part of the company - older versions of OS X had partial ZFS support, and there's still pretty good support for dtrace. Buying the server-only part could have been a good play if Apple decided to re-enter the server market (ask Apple staff about OS X server - the company doesn't want to pursue the server market right now).

Yeah, the lack of CDE and X (and the addition of Quartz and Aqua) definitely make a Mac feel like a different sort of thing than "a UNIX workstation".

Though on the other hand, were I the "Spirit of UNIX", I'd prefer CDE (and to some degree, X) not to be thought of as my defining characteristics... :)

Certification aside, OS X's treatment of X applications as second-class citizens make it sufficiently not-unix-like in my mind. Apple is definitely not pursuing the almost-big-iron server market, but their easy to use sharing features do make it an attractive server choice for some (many?).

I agree (I actually commented on the linked site before coming here), Apple became the largest seller of "real" UNIX workstations a while ago.

CDE does not UNIX make.

oh god, when I saw "CDE" i actually had a flashback. not a pleasant one

Apple makes PCs that run Unix.

There is a huge difference between a glorified PC and a Unix workstation.

What makes a workstation, anyway? Exotic graphics hardware? (I thought you could get Apple to build you a Mac Pro with a stack of Quadros, although I just checked the Apple Store and that doesn't seem to be an option anymore, so maybe you've got a point there.) A RISC processor? (Good luck with that, these days.)

If the Mac Pro is insufficiently workstation-y for you, how about the Cray CX-1 family, which last I checked is still in production?

A Mac Pro is just an overgrown PC, much like any Intel server you can get from Dell. It's pretty and classy and, while it runs a real Unix, the whole platform was really designed to run Windows, much like every Intel box has been for a long time. It was a compromise made when Apple switched away from PowerPCs.

What made a Unix workstation something unique is that it was built not to run legacy software (I bet the latest Dell can still boot MS-DOS 3.3) but to be the fastest possible machine that given amount of money could buy. That involved, of course, custom graphics hardware, weird disk controllers and exotic buses with hardware-assisted everything. It's a shame most people never experienced this and, for the time being (can you imagine someone building a desktop computer that cannot run Windows?), won't.

As for the CX-1, it's a cluster of PCs in a deskside package. Lame. Seymour would never approve it.

Today the fastest possible machine that given amount of money can buy is an x86 PC. The cost of the backwards compatibility crap is more than subsidized by the huge economy of scale. Removing DOS/Windows support would actually cost money and would make no performance difference.

"backwards compatibility crap"

You said it better than I would.

Also, "the fastest possible machine that given amount of money can buy" is an x86 PC precisely because there are no more Unix workstation manufacturers left.

I disagree about cause and effect. If you tried to make a RISC workstation today, it would be so slow or expensive that no one would buy it.

You can still buy SPARC servers, and they've benchmarked behind Intel for some time now.

I bet it depends on the benchmark you are running.

How much do you bet?

In particular, the fastest possible machines that any amount of money can buy tend to be, these days, basically just piles of x86 PCs. http://www.top500.org/lists/2009/11

Which differences would those be?

Unix workstations were built to run Unix. A Mac pro is essentially a PC. It boots through EFI and is capable of running OSX, but all of the parts of a PC are still there. The proof is that it runs Windows.

The difference looks subtle now, when every desktop computer is essentially the same. For those who lived through this, like the writer of the original article, it was blatantly obvious.

Well it's a question of artificial ontology, isn't it? I mean, it'd be awfully tough to legally define what's a "UNIX workstation" and what's a mere "PC". Plenty of UNIX workstations have run Windows in varying capacities, so that can't really be it.

I'd think to capture the "spirit" you'd start with something like "UNIX workstation: a primarily single-user computing system designed by a vendor to primarily run that same vendor's UNIX operating system, an operating system designed exclusively to be run on that vendor's computing systems and which can't easily be run on other vendors systems". That sounds a lot like the business Apple's in (and which apparently nobody else is anymore).

"Macs were only interesting because they were 1) not Intel and 2) not Unix. Now they're both!" - Mark V. Shaney's Dad

Not RISC, not SysV.

You can still buy their outstanding keyboard and quite average mice: http://www.sun.com/desktop/peripherals.jsp

Unfortunately I can't. They won't ship them to Brazil and the local retailer wants US$ 200 for both.

The whole concept of "real UNIX" has been discontinued; workstations are just a symptom.

(Or as the kids say, "Unix? Is that like Linux?")

What do you mean by 'real UNIX'? OSX is a 'real' UNIX. And in practise, Linux is far more UNIXy than that is. The BSDs are still reasonably popular too. Are they not 'real' UNIX?

The Five Stages of Oracle buying Sun (with apologies to the Joy of Tech):

http://bens.me.uk/oracle-buys-sun

After almost 20 years, I still miss the happy ritual of inserting all of the documentation for your new Sun workstation into the zillion folders.

Hell, I still have "borrowed" copies of the PostScript Blue and Red books from my NeWS/HyperNeWS days.

<sob>

Missing NeWS... That one is a really bad sign ;-)

On the other hand, it would be a beautiful idea were it not built upon PostScript.

Well, I still remember the demo I used to do for people - draw a "broken" window in the graphical editor and copy this shape and paste it to be the shape of an existing terminal window and have everything work.

OK not very practical but very very cool.

I read the title as "It's sinking in that THE Sun is gone." Oops.

On a related note, in college we programmed SPARC Assembly on some Sun workstations. Those days will be missed. Sort of.

I hugged my sparc box after reading this. sniff

I can't wait until I get home to hug mine...

I was a huge fan of SunOS, I loved my Sun 3/60s and my 4/110. Even though I hate Solaris with a burning passion, I am sad for Sun.

OpenSolaris is actually good. You should try it.

Unfortunately Oracle isn't including OpenSolaris in their roadmaps, haven't responded to the open letter, and just published EOL dates for OpenSolaris for the first time (but still say OpenSolaris isn't going anywhere).

Yeah, the lack of GNU tools is what really annoys me most about Solaris. The Solaris kernel (and assorted kickass technologies like dtrace and ZFS) with a GNU userland sounds pretty great, but there is some FUD surrounding its future and roadmap.

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