On 8/30/2017 7:41 PM, Lyndon Nerenberg via cctalk wrote:
On Aug 30, 2017, at 7:30 PM, jim stephens via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org>
wrote:
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.
I don't think Sun was really interested in pushing the OS on anything other
than Sparc. I remember hitting the Sun booth at Interop (IIRC) in 1993 and
pushing them hard for licensing and pricing for the then new 386 release. I
was looking for a campus-wide license (300+ 386 workstations) for a new
university I was helping spin up. Over the course of the conference (several
days) I hit up at least four sales critters at the booth trying to get some
hard info on licensing and pricing. Not one of them gave a sweet flying fsck.
So I dumped a couple of $million into SGI Indy workstations and Challenge
servers, instead.
--lyndon
noone said that Sun had clever salesmen. The group I was in was
obviously very interested, as they were still more or less Interactive
running inside of Sun.
I do know that they didn't have a lot of enthusiasm for the platform on
the PC due to the need to support peripherals. All of that work was
done by very senior consultants out of our facility, and was not cheap.
And the system needed a lot of work as it was a server which needed to
support high performance operation.
Disk controller vendors had spotty records for support. Adaptec didn't
give a crap, which was sad as they had a lot of hardware. The work was
done despite their cooperation, for example.
The Power version as i said was financed outside Sun, so had zero chance
of success unless that company made it go. And it did not.
thanks
Jim
