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Comment by z1mm32m4n | Hacker News Reader

As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits I'm curious: can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?

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For some Solaris has been one of the first UNIX experiences, as it was one of the most popular unices out there. Most university used it before Linux became popular.

For others, like me, who learned Solaris fairly late (2006), Solaris was a testbed for one of the best operating system technologies out there. Modern filesystem (ZFS), dynamic tracing (dtrace), containerization (zones), dependency management during boot (svc) and virtual network stack (crossbow), have been in solaris way before Linux. Most of modern Linux tools, such as eBPF, systap, btrfs, etc are a direct answer to the research done by Sun.

So some are nostalgic as it's their first experience, others, because it felt like a really good operating system a few years ago (despite it's quirks).

> For some Solaris has been one of the first UNIX experiences, as it was one of the most popular unices out there. Most university used it before Linux became popular.

This was my case. I was playing around with Linux, both on my own machine at home as well as with a server at my high school (shell accounts being a perk of joining the computer club). While learning about Linux I also picked up some of the history of UNIX. At some point I learned that you could get a copy of x86 Solaris 7 for for < $50 (I can't remember if this was an educational offer or a developer network offer). But I ordered one and was really excited to get to use a real UNIX. I played with it for a while, but ended up going back to Linux for my own computers. Later, in the last year and a half of undergrad and my first year of grad school, I used a Sun Ultra 5 to do the work for and write my first published paper and do much of the work that would end up becoming my MS thesis and my second paper (with some of the heavy lifting outsourced to an Ultra 10 that a postdoc in the research group was using).

Every few months I browse ebay and look at SPARC machines. Though it's not really practically useful, I think it would be cool to have an Ultra 5 again.

> I think it would be cool to have an Ultra 5 again.

I have an ultra 5 in a closet that hasn't been powered on in the current decade. Was thinking of giving it a spin in light of recent news.

That would be fun. Now you have me wondering if I still have those Solaris 7 disks in a drawer somewhere...

If you do and you happen to be in the bay area, I may need to borrow them. :-)

I thought about that machine and I wondered which would be more interesting... Trying to get a recent OS on there or maintaining a more typical 90s setup? Somehow I think the latter is more fun.

I'd agree that the 90s setup would be more fun. Unfortunately I don't think my disks would help though – if I remember correctly, they only had the x86 version of Solaris 7.

I had an ultra 10 in my bedroom closet and it was impossible to sleep with that thing on. But I don't think it was much worse than HP 9000s or IIRC DEC alphas. Feeling nostalgic now.

My 90s university cohort became part of the dot.com boom, and thanks to their ubiquity in the CS labs, ordering Sun kit seemed like the familiar, natural, and obvious choice.

"Get 'em whilst they're young" - I doubt it was an intentional strategy for Sun, but it definitely helped their sales in the bubble.

I know many people mentioned dtrace, ZFS, mdb.. in describing Solaris' merits but it was not a very good OS in 1997 when I first got my hands on it. It was slow - the SPARC hardware didn't help and ZFS/MDB/Dtrace did not exist back then. But I think back then for Enterprises Solaris was the most easily accessible platform SPARC hardware came with and it had a good run for a short while.

It was only when Linux started to seriously kick its ass that Sun engineers took it upon themselves to do some great work and make Solaris interesting again - I remember they had a policy - if something is slower than Linux it was a bug. I guess it all came in too late (including the Open Source part ) and people did not like being tied to SPARC hardware and CDDL was a buzz kill for whatever reasons.

Ha -- isn't that ever the truth! When I came to Sun in 1996, Solaris was really good at only two things: scaling on SMP machines and not crashing while doing it. Morale wasn't necessarily high (the early history of Solaris had been brutal, and it had only been due to the budding success of 2.5 and UltraSPARC that engineers were beginning to feel forward-looking), and it took us several more years just to get the house in order. MDB came out of this period, as well as important primordial tooling like lockstat(1M).

But as we were getting the OS to work as advertised, we had bigger ideas brewing. In Bonwick's case, it was ZFS, for me it was DTrace, for Tucker it was zones, for Casper it was least-priv, etc. I know that it looks like it was in response to Linux and/or as a result of the dot-com bust (and it's impossible to say to what degree these were contributing factors), but I can tell you that from the epicenter it felt much more like a natural evolution than a competitive response. That said, I know that the competition didn't hurt, and you're certainly right about Linux finally causing us to take small-systems performance and system call latency seriously!

> scaling on SMP machines and not crashing while doing it

Yep - Only ever had one time when it hosed on us (100 people team, many running JVM based applications and some doing load tests on it - IIRC it was 2.6 days.) And there wasn't a challenger in sight as far as SMP goes(h/w and s/w both).

In the 90s, it was frequently referred to as 'Slowlaris'. Yeah, in the early days of Solaris, I definitely used to miss SunOS 4.

Agreed. When I got into IT professionally in 1990 I tolerated dealing with SunOS. It was still BSD'ish. But then when it went full re^h^h SysV I put a bullet in its head for me personally. Never used it again after that. I think the last time I touched a Solaris box was 2001 @ TWA in KC. Then 9/11 happened. It was never anything special in my eyes. I just remember hating having to try to find things and software for it. No package management, everything had to be compiled from source. Shiver. AND!!! They didn't ship with CC! It SUCKED! They unbundled it. Yeah not many fond memories of it.

Oh yeah - you had to buy the compiler separately and GCC SPARC wasn't very good at all - I remember the software we sold sucked at performance benchmarks because we had to compile it with GCC! Solaris though was always a great platform to develop Java/JVM apps on.

Sun absorbed most of the original BSD team the drove the Unix breakout from academia. Their hardware wasn't necessarily all that groundbreaking (starting with 68k boxes like everyone else, then moving to an in-house RISC platform that lagged MIPS in most ways), but as software SunOS basically defined Unix for most of a decade.

Now, really that product (SunOS) is not the "Solaris" that exists today. Solaris was a somewhat kludgey merger of the early BSD code with the System V tree from AT&T, done as much to settle legal issues as for market reasons. But nonetheless when we all look back to the golden days of unix, we see Sun's logo.

It was solid, well laid out, consistent, and it advanced good technology seemingly far ahead of its time. ZFS, dtrace, zones (i.e. containers), FireEngine networking, etc.

dtrace has got to be one of the best and most useful (when you need it) pieces of software ever written, tbh.

I'd add SMF to the list as well which systemd seems to take inspiration from.

Actually, it was SystemXVI that was inspired by the SMF.

* https://github.com/ServiceManager/ServiceManager/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10212770)

systemd was inspired by upstart, according to Lennart Poettering.

There was a time, so I'm told by Oracle DBAs, that Oracle was developed on Solaris first, then ported to other platforms. So, Solaris had the best support, and least problems. Bugs were fixed there first. To quote, "If you're going to run Oracle, you might as well run it on Solaris"

I guess that is not the case any more.

> least problems.

I guess if oracle wants those support contracts, they can't have an operating system that doesn't need it!

I've always thought Oracle's primary goal was to keep Oracle engineers in employment.

Oracles primary goal for the last two decades seems to be the finance of racing sailboats.

So, Ferrari, then.

This comment is probably more about Oracle than about Solaris as such. IIRC, there was also a time when Oracle partnered with HP and a joint selling point was that Oracle ran fastest on HP-UX. I can't seem to find a link for this. Later, there was also a bitter fight and a lawsuit between the two companies on Oracle dropping support for Itanium based machines from HP. [1]

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/hp-aw...

If you are interested, this talk says a lot about what was cool about Solaris, its place in history, the troubles it encountered, and what was wrong with Oracle's approach, leading to little-known open-source forks.

https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc (entitled: Fork yeah! The rise and development of Illumos)

Sun was a company that very much focussed on correctness. "Good enough", wasn't. Features were delivered complete and solid. The downside of that is that features were delivered infrequently, and they sacrificed a lot of performance to do the correct thing.

Nostalgia-wise, SunOS (later Solaris) was my first peek at the 'real' computers which weren't what I was exposed to at home (Commodore/Amiga, Spectrum home computers, occasional DOS). Likewise with IRIX. Also, as others have said - it was a good solid OS.

A lot of us that got CS and Engineering degrees in the 90's and early 2000's probably learned to program on Solaris. At least at the school I went to most of the CS department was using Solaris and Sun equipment.

It was a solid Unix, it added some diversity to our OS choices, and for a time in the 90s Sun had some really stylish hardware that ran Solaris.

You never really get over your first love.

> As someone who's never used Solaris [...], can someone comment on why [...]

I can't, because I'm not somebody who's never used Solaris.

If you have indeed used Solaris, you could have left a more useful comment. Your creative use of ellipsis is totally cheating by the way: you did not preserve the structure of the sentence.

Oh, but I did preserve the structure. It's OP who doesn't understand how this grammatical construction works, and this particular mistake irritates me so much.

This preserves the structure better:

> As someone who's never used Solaris [...] I'm curious: can someone [...]

Notice that you left out the subject (I), left out the verb (am), and replaced a colon with a comma!

> Notice that you left out the subject (I), left out the verb (am), and replaced a colon with a comma!

No, I didn't left out anything important to the structure nor did I replace a colon with anything. The thing is that you and I were looking at two different sentences, because OP silently edited his comment (I only noticed that now). The original sentence was "As someone who's never used Solaris or looked into its merits, can someone comment on why all the nostalgia for Solaris?"

Fine :) The fact remains: given you knew what was meant, you could at least have answered the question as intended, in addition to nitpicking. (I would never tell someone to stop nitpicking. Well, almost never.) See also https://xkcd.com/1576/

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