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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

I'm actually surprised it took this long. I did unix admin work, including SunOS and Solaris since the early 90's.

I was a big fan of Solaris, and it had an edge over Linux for quite some time...as did the Sparc hardware over 32 bit x86.

The writing on the wall was around 2003, when AMD opteron servers came out. 64 bit Linux on dirt cheap, fast, servers.

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Sun responded swiftly and justly with OpenSolaris for x86. It's a lot easier to go evaluate this in hindsight and see that cheap x86 was not really a barrier, OpenSolaris could have become another Java level of ubiquity save politics and inertia. I remember how tainted things seemed when reading LWN.net.. which in retrospect were largely FUD around the CDDL and fear of actual competition. The continued rise of Linux was really just inertia at that point, it was largely inferior outside desktop use, but had too much sunk cost investment from IBM, SGI, HP (where a lot of the real scalability culture was imported from - RCU, NUMA, locking refinements in particular).

UNIX rose to prominence because it's what everyone learned in college in the '80s. Linux, because you installed it on your laptop or a VM in high school or college late '90s. Don't underestimate the power of this.

I disagree regarding Solaris x86.

There was a lot of commercial software that either didn't have Solaris x86 binaries at all, or only had 32 bit binaries.

It was arguably "better" from a purely technical view, but cheaper beat out better.

That sounds very believable and would have slowed commercial SPARC users from switching to whitebox x86, likely intentionally, but would have had no relevance to startups and the rapid onslaught of hyperscalers.

A video that amuses me with respect to engineering culture and organization blindness is Cantrill doing a DTrace demo at Google in 2007 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6chLw2aodYQ. The audience seems completely unaware about the significance of what they are seeing. The length of time between Linux getting cogent tracing support is telling. GOOG could have single-handedly propped up an extra-Sun OpenSolaris community, and there would have been nice symbiosis considering their early container usage and how long that took to grow as well.

Solaris had some neat integration with Java, containerization way before lxc, and DTrace which still lives on.

The reason I think it didn't rise to ubiquity in the same way that Linux did is the lack of customization.

One can easily customize the Linux kernel for their use case (i.e. Embedded), compile it, add busybox/dropbear, and you have a decent starting point for an embedded OS. You couldn't do the same with Solaris.

It was arguably "better" from a purely technical view, but cheaper beat out better.

The commodity always wins. Never forget that.

Steve Jobs might disagree :)

Sun changed its mind about whether SunOS / Solaris x86 was going to be a real, serious thing several times over the years. I wouldn't blame vendors for steering clear of the mess until it worked itself out. Which it certainly did...

In pre-Linux world Solaris was the best Eco-system out there. Working with various flavors of Unix was frustrating compared to Solaris. It became apparent that Sun was in trouble right after Linux started gaining a foothold.

Now that I am thinking about that time it was like over night. Linux over took everything else so fast. I personally used Linux and BeOS in 1999-2001 and always thought Linux was coming and then it just happened.

Oh BeOS. One of the best promises that failed to succeed.

BeOS was really amazing. You could encode video from two video capture cards at the same time on a 600Mhz P3. You could turn off a processor in a multi-cpu system.

Be realized they couldn't compete with Windows, so they wanted to sell dual-boot boxes. But the Microsoft EULA for OEMs banned that (similar to OHA and Google not allowing Google-Android manufactures to create Amazon-Fire products).

> Be realized they couldn't compete with Windows

Crazy as it sounds BeOS wouldn't run on X86 for the first few years. They were trying to capture away Apple people. Also it was close to being the OS X successor, but Apple walked away when BeOS upped the price.

https://www.wired.com/2015/05/os-almost-made-apple-entirely-...

PS The only desktop OS that could pull off this stunt. Play a bunch of videos and music files and unplug the computer. Boot back up and everything is playing again just as you left it.

I always thought of BeOS as basically a reboot of the NeXT. Same niche, same promise, same flop ;-(. BeOS was later so they avoided the H/W side-road. A good thing.

They didn't - BEOS was first launched only for their own line of hardware, the BeBox - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox

Didn't know that. The numbers sold are tiny.

Technologically it didn't flop, nor did Amiga. Inferior technology won in the 90s.

No, it was a different niche, different promise and only one of them flopped (after all NeXTSTEP lives on as macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, etc)

NeXTSTEP was Steve Jobs' attempt to build an OS that fulfilled the promise of what he saw during his visit to PARC (as opposed to just the graphical interface which is what was implemented with the Mac). It was a true-multi-user Unix with a beautiful UI and an object-oriented framework that was far more influential than its marketshare would have suggested (it led to Microsoft starting Cairo, IBM building WorkplaceOS, and Apple/IBM sinking fortunes and thousands of man-hours into Taligent/Pink).

BeOS was Jean-Louis Gasse's attempt to build a successor to the Mac (including Quicktime which came after Jobs) but built to be multiprocessor and SMT (symmetric multitasking) friendly from the start. It was --like the Mac-- a single-user OS but intended to extract all the performance possible from "modern hardware"

ACCESS Co. the current owner of the PalmOS and BeOS assets basically frittered away whatever potential BeOS had. So it definitely flopped.

Interestingly it wasn't initially targeted at the PowerPC (let alone the PowerMac), the original BeBox prototypes used 2 AT&T ATT92010 Hobbit processors and 3 AT&T DSP3210 DSPs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110806044928/http://www.bebox....

> You could turn off a processor in a multi-cpu system.

I saw a BeOS demo of turning off processors. The GUI allowed you to uncheck all the processor checkboxes and the machine goes dead. :)

I loved the sense of humor in the API as well.

int32 is_computer_on(); //Returns 1 if the computer is on. If the computer isn't on, the value returned by this function is undefined.

double is_computer_on_fire(); //Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on fire. If the computer isn't on fire, the function returns some other value.

It really was. IIRC, I remember installing it from a floppy (was there a CD too? My memory is fuzzy) on a Pentium based computer in the late 90s (R4 maybe... I think the floppy is buried in a box in my basement).

I was amazed that back then I could have four (!) windows open playing videos (albeit at low res) at the same time without hiccups -- doing it Windows 95 on the same box would choke it up.

But some are still trying to keep it alive: https://www.haiku-os.org/

I know. So brilliant. Still remember the first demo I saw. Just floored me.

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