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Comment by joshbaptiste | Hacker News Reader

The net result of all this is that we have data centres occupying many hectares, filled with computers that are architecturally identical to a Packard Bell 486 desktop running MS-DOS long enough to boot a crippled and amateurish clone of Unix circa 1987, and an endless array of complex, kludged-up hardware and software components intended to hide all of that. I would ask for a show of hands from those who consider this progress, but too many are happily riding the gravy train this abomination enables.

Woah.. that statement stung, mostly because I agree with it and realize that I'm one of the people that he refers to in his post.

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>data centres occupying many hectares, filled with computers that are architecturally identical to a Packard Bell 486 desktop running MS-DOS long enough to boot a crippled and amateurish clone of Unix circa 1987, and an endless array of complex, kludged-up hardware and software components intended to hide all of that. I would ask for a show of hands from those who consider this progress,

that's definitely a huge progress. Successfully building a coherent computer size of many hectares out of commodity components... And that it doesn't matter whether it is 486 desktop or something else is among the great of achievements of today. Keith and the likes are stuck in the past when the content/architecture of that single box was important and thus they (and all their ecosystem) have been limited physically and mentally by a biggest box one can build (like SunFire 10K). Network is the computer - Keith's and my common former employer was saying. While may be not there yet, today we already have "AWS is the computer", "private FB datacenters is the computer", etc...

Not everything Sun made was big iron; even their small soldiers (Netra, SunBlade etc) used many of the same technologies (Open Boot PROM, etc.) that made their big-iron great. And their hardware and software documentation was second to none.

A network of good boxes is still better than a network of IBM BIOS-booting junk with weak telemetry, non-ECC RAM, and hastily engineered I/O controllers.

>A network of good boxes is still better than a network of IBM BIOS-booting junk with weak telemetry, non-ECC RAM, and hastily engineered I/O controllers.

in a magic world of unlimited resources - yes. Unfortunately, engineering is a discipline dealing with constraints. Sun failed to get that. 20 boxes of that "junk" for the same amount of money as 1 "good" box - tough choice, isn't it? :)

And by the way, wrt. "good" vs "junk", 10 years ago Sun hardware, like motherboards, layout, soldiering, its architecture/buses was already worse/behind than commodity x86/64 stuff produced by second rate Taiwan manufacturers.

>Not everything Sun made was big iron; even their small soldiers (Netra, SunBlade etc) used many of the same technologies (Open Boot PROM, etc.) that made their big-iron great.

that is kind of at the root of the problem - even smaller stuff was as result priced toward big iron, i.e. bad price/performance.

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