Back then I was on Windows and everything I saw on Sun systems looked weird, laggy and just super obscure to me. The whole UI felt like a mix of enterprise and neckbeard charme despite being non-open. It did not seem to run none any of the things I cared about back then. Later on I remembered Sun mainly in context of their stewardship of Java which also didn't help connecting any good feelings to it.
So maybe in 2022 someone could enlighten me about what exactly was so cool about Sun?
To me this describes what it’s like trying to develop software for Windows vs Unix
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 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.
Also being different ?
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.
Most of the deployments were naturally Solaris based.
(I still remember when Sun introduced color systems, and they were such status symbols that they went mostly to managers, including one who was color-blind. A warning sign in retrospect, I suppose.)