Solaris 11.4 free for non-production personal use

But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if.

The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft.

It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!

And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh!

https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computin...

Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris.

To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke:

Q: What do you get when you cross Sun and AT&T?

A: AT&T.

(Still used a Sun workstation for the next five years at my first job, though.)

Atlanta is little? (Not aware of whether or not Mellow mushroom is in other states or not)

When Oracle bought them, they pulled the rug and demanded $1K per CPU per year for the privilege if it was non-Sun/Oracle hardware.

They were a hardware company that designed their own CPUs. If a company could pull an Apple and do an M1, it would be Sun.

Unfortunately, their low-cost machines performed just like PCs and cost the same, without PC software to run on them.

And building x86 boxes that ran with Solaris ensured they'd be no better than PCs, without any compelling software.

The Sun hardware was materially better, or so I recall. It was also more attractive. I actually still have an Ultra5 on a shelf in my office that, for a time, ran Oakley's online store (which my old company built). It's still a good looking machine.

Solaris, too, was widely viewed as better/more workable/easier to use than its competitors. It had more polish.

If you're looking at Solaris with the latest build of Ubuntu or whatever in mind, yeah, it's gonna look neckbeardy and hokey. But that's not the world Solaris was the king of. Back then, using a commercial Unix meant you got a LOT of shit that Just Worked out of the box, and generally an easier time getting your shit running.

I probably spent most of a week building stuff from source and customizing my system. If you wanted a "Unix workstation", Sun was the best. SGI looked cooler but often getting open source stuff built on it was a PITA.

This was during the Windows 95 / NT 4.0 era, so it was definitely a step up on Windows.

Workstations typically came with fast SCSI disks. Once I wanted to find a file after a failed install and used `find`. The search came back immediately, empty. I concluded I was doing something wrong, did `man find` to confirm there wasn't any Sun-specific oddity. Then I tried with `find / -name passwd` because I knew that file existed. Result came back immediately. It was probably caching the whole directory structure in RAM, but the instantaneous response really impressed me back then.

Mouse was laggy, because, IIRC, it communicated at 9600 bps or something like that. Macs and SGIs were much smoother.

> So maybe in 2022 someone could enlighten me about what exactly was so cool about Sun?

The one thing I loved was X and its network transparency. I often run NetScape on a beefier box and it was just like having it running on my workstation. Same with software development and engineering tools. I could reach out to multiple computers (and not only Solaris ones, but any Unix) from my desktop easily.

The same could be said about any other Unix-based workstation with X (NeXT didn't come with it).

The PCs of now-a-days are light-years ahead of what PCs were available in the Workstation era, so much beyond that time, that nobody can think back to that time. This comparision kind of smears some time frames together..

So, in the early 90's , Sun was starting to ship 4-way MP, and 8-way MP. In 95, they introduced 64-bit CPUs just as PCs were really starting to use 32-bit computing. Typical speeds were from 50MHz - 400MHz in this time frame. At the high end you could get up to 256MB of RAM.

Sun Frame buffers at the time were doing 1920x1080 resolutions. (or slightly higher, but granted, a lot of these high-res were black & white in the earlier time frames).

They came with multiple fast/wide SCSI drives, tape drives, etc.

They all came with the vendor's unix. System uptime was usually quite good, months to over a year.

You did have some vendor lock with what software was available, but generally Sun was top of the heap, every vendor had something available for Sun.

Contrast this with PCs at the time.

State of the art PCs were 486 running 50MHz-75MHz, with 8MB of RAM. Maybe 32MB if you wanted to get Windows 95 going.

Video was VGA at 640x480, again not much need for more until after Win95 launched.

Hard drives were IDE, a whopping two if you were lucky. While SCSI existed on PC, it wasn't very common.

Linux and *BSD didn't come out until 1992-93 Even then, uptime of DOS systems or PC unix at the earliest time frame could be measured in days. You had to get _just the right_ hardware to make things work together.

By the end of the '90s. Workstations hadn't progressed very far. PC's grew by leaps and bounds, catching up and surpassing workstations handily.

PCs were actually fairly stable and the PC unix could give you really decent uptime.

But in the before the explosion of PCs, if you wanted power or uptime, or graphics, or disk speed, etc. etc. compared to what else was there, Workstations were the way to go.

The other thing is that OSS databases mostly weren’t a thing, and commercial database platforms like Oracle or Informix were released for Solaris/SPARC first. I worked for a .gov client that was all about RS/6000 and AIX, and it was painful - you’d wait 3-6 months for some patches.

Linux really broke the workstation market circa 1998, and the cracks in the server platform were sort of hidden after the dotcom implosion put lots of gently used gear on the market.

To me this describes what it’s like trying to develop software for Windows vs Unix

Also being different ?

However, Linux (and containers running on Linux) ate everyone's lunch.

Samsung wanted to enter the Public Cloud Space, ( The kind of business they would be interested in ), but their NAND and DRAM division would suffer order reduction from hyper scalers. In the end they sort of back off this segment of business.

The fact remains: it was widely deployed, and we are still catching up to certain components of the operating system.

Dtrace, ZFS and SMF are examples.

Calling it dead only tells me that you weren’t in an industry that used it. It would be like claiming windows is dead because most things these days are cloud hosted and windows is very expensive there. It’s true in some sense but extremely blind to the rest of the industry.

Solaris fans (yours truly included) saw it just fine. But Oracle has been a poor steward, and if it had any chance of being rescued, well, they gave it none. And their fame for suing and squeezing their own customers didn't help... every company ran away from it once it was an Oracle property, and suddenly there was no way to run most commercial software on it (My employer was impacted for example).

Sun was killing Solaris way before Oracle acquired it. Because Sun was at the beginning of that era, people look at it with rosy colored glasses.

It had terrible leadership and didn't understand how to fully embrace open source (speaking strictly about OpenSolaris, they never really wanted share control of anything, form a community, etc).

What is Solaris without SPARC? A somewhat slower and not-very-compatible OS for apps that are perfectly content with an x86?

Oracle killed it by stopping development of new SPARC systems. Linux is a much better fit for x86 boxes than Solaris ever was. Solaris for x86 was not a revenue driver or should never be considered that, but a gateway drug to SPARC workstations and servers. Java was the same - a programming environment where you could develop on Windows and deploy on Solaris. Unfortunately, for them, you could deploy to Linux as easily.

> This was just as obvious then as it is now. It is just that Solaris fans refused to see it.

Sun was having trouble funding their chip development operation because they tried to be an everything company.

To be fair, from my casual observations it didn't seem there was that much inertia around the system, and Oracle killed OpenSolaris before I had a chance to put it on any servers, but I definitely think there was some potential there.

I worked in the Solaris engineering org. We had new customers at least as late as 2017.

I know some disagree but I maintain that the key factor to Sun decline was the unbundling of the compiler when Solaris came out (vs. SunOS where it was included).

Stepping back to early 90s, open source was generally never packaged and prebuilt. You had to download the tarball and compile it locally. Installing a new machine meant spending a good while building all the tooling to make it useful.

Approximately all of academia and research labs were SunOS shops. All open source code built out of the box (tarball) with ease on SunOS since its developers were almost certainly on SunOS themselves, or at least used it as a primary testing platform given the popularity.

In the early days of Linux it was a lot of hard work to get open source to compile, since the code mostly assumed SunOS. As late as the late 90s, it was still easier to compile many things on SunOS than it was on Linux.

But with Solaris in the second half of the 90s[1] the compiler was unbundled. Suddenly it was impossible to build all the code you needed to make the system useful, without jumping through a buch of hoops. Either buy an expensive SunCC or go get and install the GNU compiler but then the makefiles tended to assume that if the OS was sunos the compiler was SunCC so you had to go resolve differences between Sun and GNU compilers. Meanwhile, compiling packages on Linux was steadily becoming easier.

[1] Well, Solaris came out in the early 90s but was pretty bad compared to SunOS initially. So most SunOS shops, like the research lab where I was, resisted migrating for many years. Solaris 2.5.1 in 1996 was generally considered the first version worth upgrading to from SunOS.

>>>I have a feeling that Solaris is a bit of a late bloomer.

Meaning it was not late but early.

>Thirty years have passed.

And yet you still use unix based systems....

https://lwn.net/Articles/678410/ is support for it in Linux.

AOSP's middle initials are Open Source, but I'm with you on the fridge

A perspective in large number of orgs I've seen (not claiming right or wrong) is that Linux is better at horizontal scaling while Unix is better at vertical scaling. Vertical scaling is out of fashion but still powerful for many scenarios. So I've been in many rooms where prevalent thought is "Linux is great we love Linux we want more Linux, but we want this database to run on 128 cores and we don't feel Linux is the right choice". So I've seen clean slate ERP implementations on Unix, not just legacy upgrades.

And I mean, what some of these things do in firmware is impressive. They do on firmware and hardware level what we're these days doing in software and software defined whatever.

Different worlds though :-)

Not in terms of total installations, momentum and exponential expansion of the entire industry distort that, but in terms of it's influence. This is also the exact same time that 386BSD/NetBSD/FreeBSD and Linux started releasing.

As others have pointed out BSD-based SunOS was the king of Unix-like operating systems in the late 80's to early 90's. Sys-V based Solaris (1992) was an immediate flop and quickly earned the nickname "Slowlaris". Only by version 2.4 was it even usable in production. By 2.6 it was a decent operating system but anyone who remembered using SunOS wished they had never switched.

4.2 > V:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ashaferian/Drive/master/Mt...

EDIT: WAIT...you are THAT Don Hopkins? An honor to hear from you!

let's see ;)