Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

Curious quote, "When will Scott McNealy realise that OSF is the best thing that ever happened to him and cease offering it [sic] technology?"

What was unique or interesting about OSF? There's quite limited resources online.

Sun was an exciting company with its own vertical technology stack, and I was always surprised that they never made a serious attempt at making Solaris the developer workstation of choice. To do this they would have needed to (1) maintain a first class web browser environment; (2) provide a less sucky window manager; (3) multi-monitor support; (4) something that handled PDFs nicely; (5) an adequate non-console email client. Something like Java but with a better GUI layer would have been nice too. They bought the Lighthouse guys but then didn't use them.

Solaris had a significant technology advantage over NeXT, an established base in enterprise (a lucrative marketplace and much more forgiving than home desktop).

Ironically, while Sun were busy burning their OpenStep stack, NeXT were embracing Java and that kind of saved NeXT. It allowed independent NeXT developers to ride forward on a maintained technology stack (WO/Java) while Apple retooled.

Would be interested to know anything at all about OSF, and what distinguished it from SVR5.

I don't think that OSF had anything special at all. At the time, it looked like HP and DEC (especially DEC) trying to keep Sun and AT&T from steamrollering everything else. Bear in mind that in the mid-to-late 90s, there were a bunch of commercial Unix variants (HP-UX, Mips, SGI, DG-UX, Convergent, Pyramid, Dynix, DEC, Mt Xinu, etc etc). Each of them was holding on by their fingernails, more or less. The OSF was self-appointed to anoint the successor to BSD that was supposed to become The Unix next, as opposed to letting AT&T and Sun figure that out. The more cynical also believed that DEC was sowing chaos to give itself more time to either conquer the world with VMS, or figure out what to follow-up VMS with.

> (1) maintain a first class web browser environment;

The web didn't exist at the time this memo was written. Microsoft only noticed it existed about 6 years after that.

> (2) provide a less sucky window manager;

Less sucky than what? Windows 3? OS/2 v1? Motif WM? twm?

> (3) multi-monitor support;

Mostly nobody had dual-head workstations at that time. Most PCs had 14-inch SVGA screens. 1024x768 8-bit color was a luxury.

> (4) something that handled PDFs nicely;

PDFs didn't exist until 93. Sun had excellent Display PostScript support.

> (5) an adequate non-console email client.

I liked the one in OpenWindows.

> Solaris had a significant technology advantage over NeXT

Sun had faster hardware. NeXT was much nicer to use.

> NeXT were embracing Java and that kind of saved NeXT.

Hardly. NeXT was doomed. Apple's "reverse acquisition" saved NeXT.

PDFs did not even exist at that time, postscript was the document format of choice, you are also placing undue importance on web browsing, it really didn't explode till windows 95 came out.

NeXT was based on Objective-C. No Java there.

webobjects was a rebranding of openstep + some new tools. The last version lived on java.

Some people started with next, branched to wo, survived on it for six or seven years and then migrated back to cocoa/iphone. Similar API through

Not directly in response to you but a couple of others - I was rambling on a diversion, and when doing that need to explain the new point more clearly than I did. Sun seemed to have been well-positioned for building a good developer desktop platform for a window of about fifteen years but seemed to never attempt it. The fact that next bounced their ecosystem off Java while they were building a platform partly demonstrates the strong position Sun had.

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