Dear List, Long since barely even a shadow of what it once was, but it seems Oracle has finally officially killed off Sun. Particularly saddening is the decision to not open source Solaris. RIP Sun Microsystems.... https://meshedinsights.com/2017/09/03/oracle-finally-killed-sun/ -Adam
On 09/03/2017 06:06 PM, Adam Michlin via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
Long since barely even a shadow of what it once was, but it seems Oracle has finally officially killed off Sun. Particularly saddening is the decision to not open source Solaris.
RIP Sun Microsystems....
https://meshedinsights.com/2017/09/03/oracle-finally-killed-sun/
Yup. Damn suits. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
To be fair, they were kinda dead man walking when Oracle acquired them in 2010.. Sun built their business around the workstation market, and that market went x86 in the late 90s / early 2000s due to the x86 chip wars. After that, it looked like they had a vision for the cloud of some kind "the dot in dot.com", but it never seemed like they could get it together. The geek side of me really enjoyed learning/understanding the SPARC back in the day, but unfortunately.. it's gone. On Sun, Sep 3, 2017 at 6:06 PM, Adam Michlin via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Dear List,
Long since barely even a shadow of what it once was, but it seems Oracle has finally officially killed off Sun. Particularly saddening is the decision to not open source Solaris.
RIP Sun Microsystems....
https://meshedinsights.com/2017/09/03/oracle-finally-killed-sun/
-Adam
The geek side of me really enjoyed learning/understanding the SPARC back in the day, but unfortunately.. it's gone.
How many $150,000 servers did the gov't buy that could of been handled by $5000 PC boxes. Although Linux wasn't quite as mature. Same fate of Silicon Graphics tho. - Ethan
On Sep 11, 2017, at 9:34 PM, Ethan via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
The geek side of me really enjoyed learning/understanding the SPARC back in the day, but unfortunately.. it's gone.
How many $150,000 servers did the gov't buy that could of been handled by $5000 PC boxes. Although Linux wasn't quite as mature.
Same fate of Silicon Graphics tho.
Sun was extremely well embedded in other markets that people don’t really know about, but even those markets were slowly moving to PC hardware and Linux once they matured. I worked in the telco business and our customers (makers of the central office switches) had zero interest in any computing environment that wasn’t from Sun. We had one customer quite enraged when they saw development on Linux systems in our lab and made it very clear they never wanted the sales department to pitch any products that weren’t available on Sun hardware. This particular market also had a LOT of money and didn’t quibble about prices as long as they got exactly what they wanted. Sun also had a very good QA process with lots of traceability which is extremely important for applications that were expected to run for years non-stop. Sun offered on-site maintenance that could get to any site anywhere in the world on short notice; Oracle is probably still providing that service until all the old switches get powered down. Bob
Bob... What company? Regards, Bob On Sep 12, 2017 12:25, "Bob Applegate via vcf-midatlantic" < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On Sep 11, 2017, at 9:34 PM, Ethan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
The geek side of me really enjoyed learning/understanding the SPARC back in the day, but unfortunately.. it's gone.
How many $150,000 servers did the gov't buy that could of been handled by $5000 PC boxes. Although Linux wasn't quite as mature.
Same fate of Silicon Graphics tho.
Sun was extremely well embedded in other markets that people don’t really know about, but even those markets were slowly moving to PC hardware and Linux once they matured. I worked in the telco business and our customers (makers of the central office switches) had zero interest in any computing environment that wasn’t from Sun. We had one customer quite enraged when they saw development on Linux systems in our lab and made it very clear they never wanted the sales department to pitch any products that weren’t available on Sun hardware.
This particular market also had a LOT of money and didn’t quibble about prices as long as they got exactly what they wanted. Sun also had a very good QA process with lots of traceability which is extremely important for applications that were expected to run for years non-stop. Sun offered on-site maintenance that could get to any site anywhere in the world on short notice; Oracle is probably still providing that service until all the old switches get powered down.
Bob
On 09/12/2017 06:25 AM, Bob Applegate via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
On Sep 11, 2017, at 9:34 PM, Ethan via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
The geek side of me really enjoyed learning/understanding the SPARC back in the day, but unfortunately.. it's gone.
How many $150,000 servers did the gov't buy that could of been handled by $5000 PC boxes. Although Linux wasn't quite as mature.
Same fate of Silicon Graphics tho.
Sun was extremely well embedded in other markets that people don’t really know about, but even those markets were slowly moving to PC hardware and Linux once they matured. I worked in the telco business and our customers (makers of the central office switches) had zero interest in any computing environment that wasn’t from Sun. We had one customer quite enraged when they saw development on Linux systems in our lab and made it very clear they never wanted the sales department to pitch any products that weren’t available on Sun hardware.
This particular market also had a LOT of money and didn’t quibble about prices as long as they got exactly what they wanted. Sun also had a very good QA process with lots of traceability which is extremely important for applications that were expected to run for years non-stop. Sun offered on-site maintenance that could get to any site anywhere in the world on short notice; Oracle is probably still providing that service until all the old switches get powered down.
Was this Summa, by chance? I know the VCO-4K switch uses SPARC processors. I don't know if they changed that after the Cisco acquisition. Cisco is very big on MIPS and PPC for embedded applications. -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA
On Sep 12, 2017, at 16:38, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
This particular market also had a LOT of money and didn’t quibble about prices as long as they got exactly what they wanted. Sun also had a very good QA process with lots of traceability which is extremely important for applications that were expected to run for years non-stop. Sun offered on-site maintenance that could get to any site anywhere in the world on short notice; Oracle is probably still providing that service until all the old switches get powered down.
Was this Summa, by chance? I know the VCO-4K switch uses SPARC processors. I don't know if they changed that after the Cisco acquisition. Cisco is very big on MIPS and PPC for embedded applications.
Telcos, most likely. I had a friend who worked for Verizon in ops; he said the reason they stuck with Sun despite the cheap availability of Linux hardware was the ironclad, no-questions-asked SLAs. If your hardware went down, they paid you money equivalent to the business lost, right away. And they obviously had the service resources available to make that time as short as possible. - Dave
participants (7)
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Adam Michlin -
Bob Applegate -
Bob Flanders -
Dave McGuire -
David Riley -
Ethan -
John Heritage