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Comment by reacweb | Hacker News Reader

At school (1991-1994), we had HP and Sun workstations. The HP were nicknamed the toasters because they were hot. The Sun were beautiful beasts. After power failure, we regularly had problems with Sun, never with HP. When we were downloading games from the net, it was easy to compile them on Sun, but was always a nighmare on HP (non standard includes, libraries, ...). I think HP is excellent about hardware, but terrible for software. I often see the similar problem for car makers: good cars but with a terrible computer.

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In the mid-90s I worked for a software vendor which supported most of the “open systems” Unix flavors along with Windows, DOS, VMS, etc. There were individual C files which were thousands of lines long, almost all #ifdefs working around buggy C compilers.

GCC was often preferred even at a performance cost because it wasn't worth figuring out some quirk of the HP, Data General, SCO, etc. C toolchain, especially because the pricing models of that era often meant that it cost tens of thousands of dollars just to setup the same environment that a single customer had.

it was easy to compile them on Sun

The Sun machines were much more common and a lot of software was tested/built on SunOS.

In the 90's and early 2000's Sun machines were pretty much the default for developing new software during the dot com boom. I was told this was due partly because Sun sold a lot of hardware on credit (and then this crashed when the dot com boom crashed.)

I worked at HP during this time helping software vendors port to HP-UX. I also spent some time on the side compiling open source projects for fun on HP-UX and then pushing the required patches back to the project's owner.

Anyone remember Pointcast?! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_(dotcom)

I was assigned to them briefly.

the default for developing new software during the dot com boom. I was told this was due partly because Sun sold a lot of hardware on credit (and then this crashed when the dot com boom crashed.

I think this might be something HP people were telling each other at the time while getting smacked around by Sun. The Sun machines were still ridiculously expensive and while common, I don't think they were the default. SGI Indies were also quite popular and the Pentium Pro quickly started eating the overpriced Unix workstation market. By 2000, I doubt there were that many SV startup developers sitting in front of a Sun box. There were piles of them in server rooms, of course.

In the 90's and 2000s, Sun machines might have been a kind of default for deploying new software, but they certainly weren't the default for developing it. By 1998, you'd be getting a much better machine from Intel than you could get even in the same ballpark cost as from Sun. If you did work on a Sun workstation, you probably did it grudgingly (except that they had a really good C++ compiler for the time).

The companies I worked with primarily developed on the systems customers used. You really want to see the issues on your tier1 platform as you develop. Linux was not tier1 at that time.

This meant that code written on Sun that performed well performed poorly on HP-UX occasionally -- not because HP-UX was a worse platform, but because corner cases in architecture could bite you. On your tier1 development platform you tend to weed those issues out early.

Having worked there long ago, this is 100% the case. They're a hardware company at heart and never made a good effort to modernize.

I always though of them as a hardware company having seen their name on laptops, but they did have their own brand of Unix and I am currently working on a CDN originally written by them.

When I was doing C in the early 2000's, our ANSI C code would cope with Aix, Linux, NT/2000 and Solaris.

But on HP-UX 11 we still had a version of aCC that was a mix between ANSI and K&R, so it was the variant with more pre-processor logic.

That was solved in the newer versions of aCC. I had no issues compiling most contemporary code all the way ‘till 2014 when I finally retired my private HP-UX server infrastructure. For particularly badly written software, there was GCC on HP-UX.

GCC wasn't an option on our case back then, as we were required to use the system compilers due to our customer base.

I don't understand what that would have to do with anything, as long as you made a PSF SD-UX "gcc-runtime" fileset with libgcc_s.so.1 in it. That's what I did, worked just fine.

Our customers required being able to build our product with the system compilers managed by their IT.

GCC was only accepted by customers with Linux installs.

Asking GCC to be available in any sort was not an option for other customers. In fact was a deciding factor why we got some contracts back then, as we always cope with whatever they had.

Hmm... toasters that are hotter than the Sun.

similarly Sony was the semi god of electronics but fell so hard on software

They've been getting better lately, at least where I've used Sony as I realize their portfolio is huge. The PS4 software is quite nice and very stable - leaps ahead of what xbox has done. Sony is also a huge contributor to Android and has one of the nicest phone OS's on the market.

true, the ps3/ps4 had good UX/kernel

I stopped following their smartphone efforts though

Sony Xperia X is one of the few smartphones which runs Jolla's Sailfish officially (Sailfish X). The successor of Maemo/MeeGo and a decent, Linux-based alternative to Android.

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