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0 pointsgaius8y ago0 comments

Not really. Sun would have survived and thrived if it had thrown its weight behind Solaris x86. But they were too worried about cannibalising SPARC and when commodity kit started to beat them on price/performance they had nowhere to go.

I remember when we ripped out our 3 6800s and replaced them with 9 Dells, for way more power at a fraction of the price. Would have loved to recompile on Solaris, but the hardware savings easily covered the cost of a port...

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binarycrusader8y ago· 3 in thread

Not really. Sun would have survived and thrived if it had thrown its weight behind Solaris x86.

Except they did; anyone working in Solaris engineering at that time or even now could tell you that x86 was just as important as SPARC. From a technological perspective, they are completely equivalent.

For example, the ZFS Storage Appliance is x86-based, not SPARC-based.

justin668y ago

From the end user point of view, Sun recommitted (and later lessened their commitment) to Solaris x86 support so many times over the years that it's hard to imagine what would convince a user that they were really "throwing their weight behind it." We really mean it this time... wait, where are you going???

Annatar8y ago

But it is true. For a while, AMD based Acer Ferrari laptops were the primary development hardware for Solaris, SPARC or otherwise. It showed up on i86pc first, then it would be built on sparc during the night.

SmartOS for example only supports i86pc; there is no sparc port.

binarycrusader8y ago

The hardest software to change is in people's heads.

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