End the line: The last Sun SPARC workstation [video]

The big vendors used to be differentiated on how they communicated on a network, shared files, type of bus architecture, and workloads, and so each company or unit would choose a vendor and rely on them for solutions, and the staff had specialized expertise in those systems.

But all those vendors found themselves adopting TCP/IP and Ethernet. And Sun's NFS was widely adopted. X11 also became standard. The BSDs already had a wide hardware compatibility list, so that spare machine with no OS license could be returned to service. A few generations of college grads had direct experience with Unix and building PCs. Once Linux on PC-compatibles began showing up in the server room, Windows NT was mature, and software vendors were porting to Linux, it was a fait accompli.

I have plenty of fond memories about the stability of Spark Stations but none as fun as that.

Thanks for sharing.

I did once have a Bullfrog TSS that survived a literal explosion. They certainly don’t build hardware like they used to.

Granted, the Intel CPU at the high end is pulling 250W+ (or was it 300W+?).

There are places for both architectures. I don't see x86 going anywhere unless Intel folds and ceases to design chips. Not sure AMD could power on alone given their current market share, though I certainly hope they could as a user of their chips in the desktop (and conversely, an M2 Air for my laptop).

I was specifically talking about the corporate experiment of deciding to go that hard for open sourcing your crown jewels, and Oracle has notably discontinued their participation in that experiment.

sun's pivot from bsd to at&t was a very nice and clean change (I was the one who ended up upgrading our sunos servers to solaris when the time came in the 90's), sequent's switch was a nightmare.

I still miss my e4500, though, but not the noise or electric bill.

oh gosh, I always forget about those, thanks! around here, it was mostly the 68k suns, followed by sparc. the 386 unix variants were mostly sequent.

I remember one fun job interview in the 90's, where before we went to grab beer the interviewer (my future boss) stopped in the office and said "and this will be your sparc" - to be quite honest, that was such a huge perk!

It really is an incredibly important part of Unix history, not just Sun. It basically really started the outright Unix wars. Had Sun just gone with BSD and tried to create that as a standard, they could have taken most of the world with them without creating a massive blowback counter-reaction that their alliance with AT&T provoked.

And AT&T would have been dead in the water, they might have tried with somebody else, but that would have just cast Sun as the good guys and AT&T and whoever as the bad guys and with Sun already being the market leader, that standard would have been pretty dominant I would think.

I think it was mostly that he liked the bsd tooling over the at&t tooling, but it instilled so much in me that I still have a hard time remembering the gnu command line options: I tend to default to svr4, then to bsd, and finally to gnu. probably one of the reasons I still feel at home on macOS.