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Comment by mad_vill | Hacker News Reader

Curious if oxide is considering a 1-2U product.

Feel like there is a larger potential customer base there but it also seems like they would lose the edge they built by owning the full rack. (I.e. integrating with customer TORs and network fabric is a nightmare.)

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Not at the moment, but never say never.

OxidePad Laptop product based on Helios with NeWS Window System. When?

That would be kind of cool.

I know Don Hopkins hangs out here sometimes, but the big question is did NeWS source code ever get liberated from the depths of Mordoracle?

I don't really know. I was just trying to come up with some obscure references. Solaris on desktop wasn't crazy enough.

I think a modern take on NeWS style system would use Webassembly style system with capability based access rather then PostScript and no security. Basically a modern browser with Canves/WebGL and without a lot of other stuff a browser does.

Would have been a interesting alternative to the Wayland approach.

Kind of sad that Scott McNealy didn't have the balls to open it up. Having some real competition to X in the 90s would have been a cool. Specially if Sun had pushed it at least somewhat.

Naw, Sun never liberated it.

Sun did announced "NeWS is Free (only $1000)" which was kind of a kick in the balls and abuse of the word "free".

"Free (only $1000)" discussion on usenet:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.windows.news/c/-G1l_372AP8/...

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.windows.news/c/YtZzYMZ587M/...

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.org.sug/c/IXcXK7hKgUQ/m/nf8...

A couple of my flames about the situation:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/Explanation.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/sevans.txt

And to cleanse the palette, DSRH's epic "Sun Deskset == Roy Lichtenstein Painting on your Bedroom Wall" flame (David SH Rosenthal was one of the original authors of NeWS, with James Gosling, and also wrote the X11 ICCCM):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38768724

There needs to be a dev kit of sorts. I’d be happy to recommend Oxide to some of our customers but not before I try it first. And I’m not buying a whole data centre just to play around?

Yeah definitely. I used to work for an AI hardware company that only sold $150k systems to "POA" customers. I think part of the reason they didn't do very well is it was completely inaccessible to normal people.

Maybe they could rent a rack with a somewhat direct access on a per-month basis or something so we can POC around, but that could turn them into a cloud company which is probably not what they want.

It's still early days for us obviously, but we have some of our equipment in a cage in a regular colocation facility, on the Internet. We're generally able to provide access to systems there so that folks can kick the tyres as part of a pre-sales engagement. If you or your customers are interested, you're always welcome to reach out to our sales folks and have a chat!

I hear you. We currently have space on a rack allocated for potential customers to kick the tires, but it's not more broadly available than that.

A 6U product kind of like the blade server enclosures could be interesting too. That said, I haven't worked in a datacenter for 14 years, so don't listen to me too seriously...

I'd love a homelab sized version of the oxide system. Just looks so amazing

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