On 8/30/2017 7:14 PM, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
On Aug 30, 2017, at 7:07 PM, jim stephens via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 8/30/2017 6:35 PM, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
I was looking up some data, and as a result was flipping through a copy of
Computerworld from ’93. In doing so, I was marveling at the amount of
Diversity we had in the Computer World at the time, but that’s not the point.
The point is that I found a advertisement for the PPC 601 chip. In it they
were advertising it running the Macintosh OS, OS/2, AIX, and interestingly Sun
Solaris. I was aware of the first three, but I don’t ever remember any mention
of Solaris running on PPC. Did that ever get off the ground?
Zane
I worked for Sun in the early 90's for the former Interactive Unix group. They
were still based here in Los Angeles in the round building over looking the 405
just south of the 90. At the time there just a coupe of Summa Corp buildings
on the last remaining Howard Hughes Summa corp asset there off the 405. Now
the Hughes Center shopping center long since sold off to developers.
They were the group inside Sun and did the port from the Solaris 2.4 source to
PPC open platforms. The effort I think was underwritten by IBM, but I might be
wrong. The entire effort was supported for maybe a year thru just shy of the
2.5. I don't know if it was ever released outside the building, much less any
public release.
This I think was when the Apple effort was underway, I think under Jobs to
allow the Mac system migrate to such hardware.
IIRC, the whole thing died more or less when Jobs pulled the plug on that, and
screwed everyone over. Very sad, as the open boot (Don't recall all the
details) was pretty nice, and I'd have bought into it had such options been
available.
I did some testing on that platform in a sealed room of some tools I had
developed for the x86 testing. The marketing department requested that my tool
kit be made available to certify platforms for Solaris HCL listing. None ever
happened however.
Had no use for Jobs before, still no use for him to now.
Thanks
jim
Steve Jobs would have been at NeXT at that time, he didn’t come back to Apple
until ’97.
Nearly 25 years later, my memory is pretty vague, however, around ’93 at the
FOSE trade show in Washington DC, IBM had a system running both OS/2 and AIX.
I want to say it was PPC, but it may have been x86.
Zane
IIRC Jobs killed the effort. Been a long time ago to recall. I don't
think it died before he was involved.
We had the x86 Solaris, and the office was there at least thru Solaris
2.7 days. I also know the kernel lint had been done by 2.3 time at
least, FWIW, which was pretty impressive. Made you up your game for
kernel mode modules. My unit had modules to run tests on all available
cores and on some programmable block of memory to certify that the
systems we were running on actually activated the cores and they were
available to the system.
thanks
Jim
