I often wonder what would have happened if Sun hadn't been bought by Oracle and innovation had continued. They were very far ahead. They invented things like containers in Solaris way before Kubernetes and Docker popularised them on Linux.
However, I do remember buying an Opteron-based Ultra 20 because it was cheaper from Sun than anyone else and had 100% Linux support, which everyone seemed to be migrating to from Solaris. By that time, I'm sure there was no clear market direction for Sun software- or hardware-wise, and everything was too little too late.
Sun's problem's happened long before they were purchased. Their number one problem is that they were a hardware company and never figured out how to be a software company. It was Linux and cheap Intel hardware combined Sun's lackluster support for x86 Solaris that doomed them.
They weren't, though, not really. The tech industry just moves too fast for that kind of pronouncement. It's absolutely true that a Sun-3/75 in 1986 was a revelation[1], but every one of those features was cloned as free software and running on sub-$1000 hardware by 1994. They likewise had a brief moment with SPARC in the early 90's where their machines were the fastest you could buy, but Intel demolished those hopes too[4]. Their swan song was the early dot com boom, where they still held onto the reputation as "The Best Unix" and sold a ton of web server hardware to the more conservative outfits. But we could all see the writing on the wall even then.
I mean, it's true they had some great stuff toward the end. But not that great, and generally not marketed in a way that would help them. Containers are actually a good example. Solaris Zones were... just a weird circus act[2]. I don't know any major players who made bets on the technology. And, again, within 2-3 years Linux had cgroups and LXC running[3] in a more performant (and much cheaper to deploy) environment and that's what Docker picked.
[1] Faster than a VAX, which was still the reference Unix box. Megapixel framebuffer with windowing and competent terminal emulation. Every box was on the Internet. Every box could see the rest of its network over NFS (and most were deployed diskless). FWIW: anyone know where I can get one? Would love one for the collection, but most seem to have disappeared (government and university equipment tends not to end up on eBay...)
[2] Edit because this was misunderstood: I'm saying it was an oddity with minimal uptake, not that it was chaotic or bad as a matter of design.
[3] This too got misunderstood, though I don't see how. I'm really not interested in a flame war about whose container technology is better. I'm just saying that to Sun in the early/mid 00's, it wasn't much of a competetive advantage (as evidenced by the fact that it lost to Docker).
[4] Ooph, this one too. I'm saying that in the early 90's SPARC was dancing with MIPS for the fastest CPUs on the planet, but by the release of the P6 core that was over and Intel had essentially won (though DEC kept the dance going a while longer with Alpha). I'm just amazed at the propensity for folks here to jump in to argue stuff that in my mind was settled decades ago.
?
Zones weren’t released until nearly 10 years after 1994. Same for dtrace and zfs. Solaris was embryonic in 1994. Linux existed but wouldn’t take over servers until c2000-1 (as evidenced by Sun’s massive profits through the end of 1999).
What features are you referring to?
Solaris 10 vs contemporary Linux 2.6-era kernels handled memory-pressure situations so much better, that you essentially needed more RAM on the Linux system just to avoid low-memory situations to begin with. Been there, done that :)
Linux won because it was a) free and b) aligned (simply because so many had and were using Linux) with Intel x86, and Intel's fabrication technology is/was world-leading. SPARC CPUs on the same fabrication node would still be amazing - but it isn't on the same node...
> Solaris Zones were... just a weird circus act. I don't know any major players who made bets on the technology.
Joyent [1] readily comes to mind. IIRC, that kind of isolation was one of the selling points of their hosting service before they eventually shut it down.
(Of course I'm fully aware that one of Joyent's founders was ex-Sun and comments around here too :) )
[0] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/30/hello-joyent/
[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/
[2] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/07/31/ex-joyeur/
[3] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-com...
Thanks for swinging by to make the correction!
Jails: Confining the omnipotent root (2000): <https://people.freebsd.org/~bapt/pdfdocs/papers/jail.pdf>
Solaris Zones: Operating System Support for Consolidating Commercial Workloads (2004): <https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/lisa04/tech/full_papers/...>
Originally, jails didn't virtualise the network stack. That was added later, in FreeBSD 8.0 with VNETs, which were buggy for a long time, but went through extensive testing and are enabled by default since FreeBSD 12.0 (quite recently). Solaris Zones went a step further than the original design, and run a separate network stack for each zone from the start, years before FreeBSD did.
BTW, recommended talk about those topics:
Papers We Love: Jails and Zones: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX
https://community.hpe.com/t5/security/hp-virtual-vault/td-p/...
Intel was slow in the early 90s. Intel (or more specifically amd64) started to become competitive on the lower end in the early 2000s when the Itanium hype reached its maximum. If you look at SpecInt 2000 an 1.4 GHz Intel is equivalent with a 500 MHz PA-RISC.
By the way what are you looking for? A VAX or a SPARCstation? VAXes are indeed very hard to come by, and I didn't realise they were ever the "reference unix box" - weren't they more common for VMS? But somehow I never came across them back in the day. I think part of the reason is that they mainly sold servers, they weren't that big on the workstation market.
Sun, SGI and HP-UX I used a lot, HP-UX the most. I still have two HP-UX workstations at home.
And yeah, the desktop VAXen were almost exclusively for VMS. But the standard Unix box in the early-mid 80's that everyone talked about when they discussed/benchmarked/whatever the platform was a 11/780 running 4.2BSD. Those aren't meaningfully collectible for an individual, obviously.
But indeed the servers are really hard for collectors because of the size. Similarly with the real PDP's of the day. We had a real PDP-11 at the computer museum where we volunteered though we never turned it on. Too afraid of a cap blowing and damaging more.
HP had some nice small servers later on, but they were not very influential so like you I don't really see a benefit in collecting them.
From before, we had a VAX 11/750. It, too, was a freestanding box in the computer room, possibly close to a cubic meter in volume. Not something I would want at home! It ran VMS, which I found clunky and difficult to work with. But we got a Unix emulation layer called Eunice installed on it, which made it more bearable.
The problem here is the confusion between the wonder of late 80s workstation computing and the harsh realities after the Internet Boom.
Sun did not sue as they were already out of cash after Google screwed them over.
Not only did Google contribute to Sun's downfall, they didn't even bother to buy Sun afterwards.
They only have themselves to thank for the lawsuit.