I love my ultra 45, it’s certainly the best looking of the early 2000s unix workstations!
I lucked out and got a system with 16GB And 2x procs, added in the XVR-2500 and PcPro to play with. It’s also ex-Lockheed Martin which is fun/mildly alarming!
Since this thread is likely to draw knowledgable sparc people, there’s a totally unrelated question I have - I have a sun blade 150, and was looking around on the motherboard. There are few jumpers that say things like “x86 debug” or x86 rom something - and the socket is technically 378… and from what I can research, the chipset worked with x86… Was there a point at which the sun blade motherboard was setup to work with either sparc or x86?!
Not so crazy given AMD made a chipset that worked for both alpha and x86, and HP had the zx1 chipset that worked on itanium and hp-parisc?
Note that the rise of Linux was caused by the rise of low cost, high performance x86 CPUs. There was a period of time when it was obvious you could get much more bang for the buck from x86, but there wasn't a viable OS to use (for servers). Yes NT existed, and we shipped binaries for NT but it was always an awkward fit to run server software on NT. So Linux, which at the time was kind of crappy (unreliable, didn't have threading) was improved by various vendors' efforts to the point where they could re-target their server products into PC-class hardware. Sun was sunk by the people who were downstream in the value chain leading back to Sun's revenue working hard to design Sun out of the loop, by means of PC-class hardware and the Linux OS.
I worked in EDA while the transition happened. We and our customers had been big buyers of Sun and/or HP workstations. The switch happened several years after Linux was released. When x86 performance started to look competitive, there was a lot of interest in switching to NT, and very little interest in paying for SCO Linux etc. It wasn't until RedHat came out with an enterprisey amount of support that companies started to switch en masse.
"If 386BSD had been available before I created Linux, then Linux might not have been born" - Linus
My impression is that there was also a bit of a culture clash. BSD was the white coat academic world and not very welcoming to outsiders. Linux was the dirty hacker style at a time where online collab became a thing.
And then there was the lawsuit that held back BSD at a crucial time in history.
> My impression is that there was also a bit of a culture clash.
Agreed, but my impression was of a more complex one than you imply.
There were a whole bunch of competing commercial Unix-like OSes in the 1980s.
But there were other prejudices as well.
In Proper Grown-Up Unix terms, PCs were toys, poorly-made weird little things that were no more than office equipment. So nothing worth using ran on the 386.
There was no local bus yet, no IDE or EIDE, slow AT expansion bus, no processor cache, and so on -- meaning a forest of proprietary or semi-proprietary extensions and buses and special slots. This opened up a market for a vendor to port to Brand X PCs and Brand X's own weird storage and display.
Enter Interactive Corp, which tried to combat this, and worked on Unix ports for various vendors' hardware. Expensive OS for expensive machines.
And there was SCO which wasn't proud, wasn't fancy, ran on commodity kit, and didn't try to be a general purpose OS like that white lab-coat brigade expected. So SCO Xenix worked, and you could run apps on it, but in the box there was no C compiler, no networking, no X11, nothing. It was a runtime-only OS and it was still expensive.
Everyone sneered at it but it did the job. I put in a lot of it.
Then if you weren't paying, someone else was who would never see the word "Unix", there were all the vastly expensive RISC boxes with their vastly expensive expansions and vastly expensive -- well, everything. Sun, HP, DEC, IBM, SGI, loads of company would sell you rooms full of workstations, single-user minicomputers with big screens. They cost as much as a house.
Actual BSD ran on actual minicomputers that cost as much as a small street of houses and those dudes wouldn't even look at PCs.
Which left a market for enterprising vendors squeezing Unix-like things onto low end kit.
Various flavours of BSD, including BSD/OS; SCO Xenix in both 286 and 386 versions; Interactive 386ix; several vendors' own-brand licensed Unixes, including Dell, later, an official Intel one that mainly ran on Intel's own pizza-box workstations.
And all the proprietary computer vendors entered the game too. Commodore did Unix for high-end Amigas; Atari did Unix for high-end STs; Acorn did Unix for high-end Archimedes; Apple did Unix for high-end Macs, allegedly originally just to get a US military deal; etc. etc.
All these are still $1000 per instance OSes though.
Then, universally scorned, MWC Coherent, a real Unix-like OS for $99... and QNX, which was apparently good but mainly focused on real-time stuff, and cost more than the casual could afford.
(As a European I never saw this but it was in all the ads in all the US mags. There was a lot of "cheap" American stuff we didn't get over here, like paid-for shareware. We had metered phone calls so no BBS scene. Only rich Americans got that stuff.)
Coherent was so good that AT&T accused them of theft and sent Dennis Ritchie around to check. He came back and said, no, it's legit.
And Andy Tanenbaum's Minix, a toy for students, not for real work, but essentially free with a book.
These latter indirectly showed that you _could_ copy AT&T's holy grail and make it work, so while Richard Stallman was building all the tools but choosing the wrong kernel and sabotaging the whole thing, along came this Finnish kid with his learning exercise, and excited beardies on Usenet said that it actually worked and it was at least as good as Minix and was getting to Coherent levels.
So the point is, there was a spectrum, from legendary machines made from purest unobtainium, to ludicrously expensive x86 stuff for very specific (and ludicrously expensive models) of PC kit, to the still ludicrously expensive SCO that got no respect, to "cheap" stuff that nobody had in Europe because it had no business purpose. There was legendary free stuff in America but it only ran on room sized computers that cost as much as a lottery win, so I never saw it. "Free" as in "it's free if you're so rich it doesn't matter."
And "free" shareware that was "free" as in "the phone bill to get it will cost more than just buying a commercial version in a shiny box".
But there _was_ a spectrum, from vastly expensive to "a small business will pay for this", down to theoretical stuff in America that you could dream about... which paved the way until the point where an ordinary PC was a 32-bit machine with a memory management unit and hundreds of megs of disk and several megs of RAM, and suddenly, this Lin-Min-Gnu-ix thing was doable, if you had a beard and a checked shirt with black jeans and wore hiking boots every day.
I sold an old Ultra45 from my lab on eBay rather than letting the university people scrap it.
It went for the equivalent of $2000 (which I later donated to a charity) and attracted quite a bidding war. Apparently at least one major airport (I won't say where or in which bit of the world) used one to control its landing light system and were, through a weird network of contractors, looking to buy more hardware for redundancy...
I have also put an IndyO2 SGI machine on eBay that similarly found a repurposed fate. We are now finally at the point where the machines I held on to as a teenager much to my mum's chagrin are now becoming highly valuable again!
Yup, the most desirable RISC systems are in the four figure range these days. SGIs have a zealous collector community and a long tail of applications like simulators keeping up demand.
I would love to hear counterpoints -- The Sun Ray thin client experience seems interesting, but the modern version of that seems to be the web/app/cloud ecosystem we have now (where the load and storage of your interaction are resident on some other system, potentially freeing up your local device from resource needs). Specifically, a self-hosted collaborative model with Nextcloud + Collabora or similar. I do wonder what workloads or designs would be fit for a more "time-sharing" approach.
I used a Sun Ray for two summers when interning at Sun Labs in 2002 and 2003. They were kind of awesome and kind of sucked at the same time. First, the display wasn't that great for the time, and they were expensive for what you got. Second, we had ours hooked up to (one of) the labs' E10ks. Because it was shared amongst many users, some things could get janky under load. One thing in particular is that certain image formats were heavier than others, and the crappy Firefox at the time could cause jank for multiple users when processing image-heavy webpages.
It was a neat party trick to take your ID card out of your terminal and walk down the hall, put it into someone else's and boom, have your session, but that was more rare than you might think.
All in all I think I would prefer a workstation.
Admins on the other hand, probably preferred these. If the thin clients were more like $100-200, this would have taken over the world. But they were more like $1000+. Sun considered that a bargain. Which shows you what Sun thought consumers.
I do wonder if a lot of the stuff that Google has worked on Google Docs, Chromebook were inspired by Sun. Eric Schmidt was a VP at Sun and Novell before joining Google.
Nowadays instead of carrying a smartcard you carry a slim 13" laptop and plug in a single USB-C cable from the docking station. Much better, yes. But just being able to plug in a smart card in a meeting room and get going instantly would be appreciated even today.
All of those use the same nVidia chip and the same nVidia provided Linux distro. Personally I'd be wary of spending $3500+ on a system that relies on nVidia support. They previously released an AI focused SBC, the Jetson Nano, that shipped with a custom distro based on the already aging Ubuntu 18.04, then abandoned support for it after a few years. All the dependencies required to run ML/AI stuff became outdated, and the hardware is now basically useless. It's possible to run mainline Linux on it, but you can't do anything with the GPU since that requires a special one-off driver that never got upstreamed.
Thanks for pointing that out, I must have skipped over the system76 link. You're right that besides Apple, nVidia and Ampere also make viable ARM workstation chips.
You can get ARM-based PCs and laptops. Thing is so far they all suck except for Apple right now.
I sure as hell hope that if Qualcomm even comes close to parity with other platforms they change their name because I'm going to have a hard time associated Snapdragon and their other products with anything that is quality. So far these are for desktop CPUs what
> You can get ARM-based PCs and laptops. Thing is so far they all suck except for Apple right now.
This is true, but there's a consolation -- they suck much much less than RISC-V kit.
I run a bunch of nearly 15 year old laptops. I am not a performance addict. But I have not laid fingers on a RISC-V box I'd be willing to spend a morning on.
There are Qualcomm laptops now I believe (at least that's what I heard when I was last working for them).
NXP also made some boxes (I own a bunch of them).
The server market is also growing with Ampere and Cavium (now Novell) which I have both.
> Solaris, meanwhile, which had long been available on x86, saw its “own” ISA SPARC live on in the server space until roughly 2017 or so, and was even briefly available as open source until Oracle did its thing.
Maybe worth noting that SPARC was (is?) licensable:
The closest I came to a SPARC lifestyle was booting Solaris 2.6 in qemu, so that I could emulate logging in to my university's EECS department's SPARC server way back when.
Nice to see someone with the geekiness and wherewithal to really commit to the bit.
> No “AI” writing aids, no “AI” summaries, no ChatGPT, no Gemini search nonsense, nothing. I take pride in doing research and writing properly, without the “aid” of digital parrots with brain damage, and if there’s any errors, they’re mine and mine alone. Take pride in your work and reject “AI”.
This guy better not be using spell check with a tantrum like that tagged to his opening line.
I like it. Remember when people used to have badges on their sites? Like HTML5 or XHTML or Apache or whatever. Maybe we could bring back one for "made by humans".
I love my ultra 45, it’s certainly the best looking of the early 2000s unix workstations!
I lucked out and got a system with 16GB And 2x procs, added in the XVR-2500 and PcPro to play with. It’s also ex-Lockheed Martin which is fun/mildly alarming!
Since this thread is likely to draw knowledgable sparc people, there’s a totally unrelated question I have - I have a sun blade 150, and was looking around on the motherboard. There are few jumpers that say things like “x86 debug” or x86 rom something - and the socket is technically 378… and from what I can research, the chipset worked with x86… Was there a point at which the sun blade motherboard was setup to work with either sparc or x86?!
Not so crazy given AMD made a chipset that worked for both alpha and x86, and HP had the zx1 chipset that worked on itanium and hp-parisc?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_chipsets 750/760 both work for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_21264 https://www.openpa.net/pa-risc_chipsets_zx1.html
Note that the rise of Linux was caused by the rise of low cost, high performance x86 CPUs. There was a period of time when it was obvious you could get much more bang for the buck from x86, but there wasn't a viable OS to use (for servers). Yes NT existed, and we shipped binaries for NT but it was always an awkward fit to run server software on NT. So Linux, which at the time was kind of crappy (unreliable, didn't have threading) was improved by various vendors' efforts to the point where they could re-target their server products into PC-class hardware. Sun was sunk by the people who were downstream in the value chain leading back to Sun's revenue working hard to design Sun out of the loop, by means of PC-class hardware and the Linux OS.
UNIX was available for x86 systems for several years before Linux was released.
"Several years"?
Try "a decade and a half".
AT&T itself ported UNIX™ to the Intel 8086 in 1978:
https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/other...
The 8086 was the first ever microprocessor to run Unix – before 68000 or anything.
The first release of MS, later SCO, Xenix was 1981.
https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-xenix
It was later ported to the 8086 in 1983 and 80286 by 1985.
https://landley.net/history/mirror/unix/scohistory.html
So Unix was running some 4 years before IBM launched the PC and Xenix was on the market by 2 years after launch.
That was a full 8 years before Linus got Linux 0.01 out in 1991.
UNIX is a 1970s OS; x86 PC Unix was a commercial 1980s product; Linux is a 1990s thing.
I worked in EDA while the transition happened. We and our customers had been big buyers of Sun and/or HP workstations. The switch happened several years after Linux was released. When x86 performance started to look competitive, there was a lot of interest in switching to NT, and very little interest in paying for SCO Linux etc. It wasn't until RedHat came out with an enterprisey amount of support that companies started to switch en masse.
And what about *BSD?
Came along later.
386BSD was 1992:
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.bsd/c/TZ-gIRRHiXA/m/eA...
BSD/386, later BSD/OS, was 1993:
https://www.krsaborio.net/bsd/research/1993/0411.htm
A pic of a contemporary advert:
https://gunkies.org/wiki/BSD/386
"If 386BSD had been available before I created Linux, then Linux might not have been born" - Linus
My impression is that there was also a bit of a culture clash. BSD was the white coat academic world and not very welcoming to outsiders. Linux was the dirty hacker style at a time where online collab became a thing.
And then there was the lawsuit that held back BSD at a crucial time in history.
> My impression is that there was also a bit of a culture clash.
Agreed, but my impression was of a more complex one than you imply.
There were a whole bunch of competing commercial Unix-like OSes in the 1980s.
But there were other prejudices as well.
In Proper Grown-Up Unix terms, PCs were toys, poorly-made weird little things that were no more than office equipment. So nothing worth using ran on the 386.
There was no local bus yet, no IDE or EIDE, slow AT expansion bus, no processor cache, and so on -- meaning a forest of proprietary or semi-proprietary extensions and buses and special slots. This opened up a market for a vendor to port to Brand X PCs and Brand X's own weird storage and display.
Enter Interactive Corp, which tried to combat this, and worked on Unix ports for various vendors' hardware. Expensive OS for expensive machines.
And there was SCO which wasn't proud, wasn't fancy, ran on commodity kit, and didn't try to be a general purpose OS like that white lab-coat brigade expected. So SCO Xenix worked, and you could run apps on it, but in the box there was no C compiler, no networking, no X11, nothing. It was a runtime-only OS and it was still expensive.
Everyone sneered at it but it did the job. I put in a lot of it.
Then if you weren't paying, someone else was who would never see the word "Unix", there were all the vastly expensive RISC boxes with their vastly expensive expansions and vastly expensive -- well, everything. Sun, HP, DEC, IBM, SGI, loads of company would sell you rooms full of workstations, single-user minicomputers with big screens. They cost as much as a house.
Actual BSD ran on actual minicomputers that cost as much as a small street of houses and those dudes wouldn't even look at PCs.
Which left a market for enterprising vendors squeezing Unix-like things onto low end kit.
Various flavours of BSD, including BSD/OS; SCO Xenix in both 286 and 386 versions; Interactive 386ix; several vendors' own-brand licensed Unixes, including Dell, later, an official Intel one that mainly ran on Intel's own pizza-box workstations.
And all the proprietary computer vendors entered the game too. Commodore did Unix for high-end Amigas; Atari did Unix for high-end STs; Acorn did Unix for high-end Archimedes; Apple did Unix for high-end Macs, allegedly originally just to get a US military deal; etc. etc.
All these are still $1000 per instance OSes though.
Then, universally scorned, MWC Coherent, a real Unix-like OS for $99... and QNX, which was apparently good but mainly focused on real-time stuff, and cost more than the casual could afford.
(As a European I never saw this but it was in all the ads in all the US mags. There was a lot of "cheap" American stuff we didn't get over here, like paid-for shareware. We had metered phone calls so no BBS scene. Only rich Americans got that stuff.)
Coherent was so good that AT&T accused them of theft and sent Dennis Ritchie around to check. He came back and said, no, it's legit.
And Andy Tanenbaum's Minix, a toy for students, not for real work, but essentially free with a book.
These latter indirectly showed that you _could_ copy AT&T's holy grail and make it work, so while Richard Stallman was building all the tools but choosing the wrong kernel and sabotaging the whole thing, along came this Finnish kid with his learning exercise, and excited beardies on Usenet said that it actually worked and it was at least as good as Minix and was getting to Coherent levels.
So the point is, there was a spectrum, from legendary machines made from purest unobtainium, to ludicrously expensive x86 stuff for very specific (and ludicrously expensive models) of PC kit, to the still ludicrously expensive SCO that got no respect, to "cheap" stuff that nobody had in Europe because it had no business purpose. There was legendary free stuff in America but it only ran on room sized computers that cost as much as a lottery win, so I never saw it. "Free" as in "it's free if you're so rich it doesn't matter."
And "free" shareware that was "free" as in "the phone bill to get it will cost more than just buying a commercial version in a shiny box".
But there _was_ a spectrum, from vastly expensive to "a small business will pay for this", down to theoretical stuff in America that you could dream about... which paved the way until the point where an ordinary PC was a 32-bit machine with a memory management unit and hundreds of megs of disk and several megs of RAM, and suddenly, this Lin-Min-Gnu-ix thing was doable, if you had a beard and a checked shirt with black jeans and wore hiking boots every day.
Thanks for the effort, that was an interesting read.
1988: Sun Roadrunner (368i), SunOS 4.0 (before it got polluted with all that System V crap):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun386i
I installed 386BSD 0.1 pretty soon after it was released in mid 1992.
This replaced Interactive Systems 386/ix that I had been using on the same PC since 1987.
I sold an old Ultra45 from my lab on eBay rather than letting the university people scrap it.
It went for the equivalent of $2000 (which I later donated to a charity) and attracted quite a bidding war. Apparently at least one major airport (I won't say where or in which bit of the world) used one to control its landing light system and were, through a weird network of contractors, looking to buy more hardware for redundancy...
I have also put an IndyO2 SGI machine on eBay that similarly found a repurposed fate. We are now finally at the point where the machines I held on to as a teenager much to my mum's chagrin are now becoming highly valuable again!
Yup, the most desirable RISC systems are in the four figure range these days. SGIs have a zealous collector community and a long tail of applications like simulators keeping up demand.
I would love to hear counterpoints -- The Sun Ray thin client experience seems interesting, but the modern version of that seems to be the web/app/cloud ecosystem we have now (where the load and storage of your interaction are resident on some other system, potentially freeing up your local device from resource needs). Specifically, a self-hosted collaborative model with Nextcloud + Collabora or similar. I do wonder what workloads or designs would be fit for a more "time-sharing" approach.
I used a Sun Ray for two summers when interning at Sun Labs in 2002 and 2003. They were kind of awesome and kind of sucked at the same time. First, the display wasn't that great for the time, and they were expensive for what you got. Second, we had ours hooked up to (one of) the labs' E10ks. Because it was shared amongst many users, some things could get janky under load. One thing in particular is that certain image formats were heavier than others, and the crappy Firefox at the time could cause jank for multiple users when processing image-heavy webpages.
It was a neat party trick to take your ID card out of your terminal and walk down the hall, put it into someone else's and boom, have your session, but that was more rare than you might think.
All in all I think I would prefer a workstation.
Admins on the other hand, probably preferred these. If the thin clients were more like $100-200, this would have taken over the world. But they were more like $1000+. Sun considered that a bargain. Which shows you what Sun thought consumers.
> But they were more like $1000+. Sun considered that a bargain. Which shows you what Sun thought consumers.
For Sun hardware? I'm pretty sure that was a bargin
Umm - there was a network capable computer and a display.
There was no way to build that for $100 to $200 at that time.
Our Cobalt Networks boxes were about $1k.
Take out the disk, add the display.
Just because the software makes it a thin client doesn't make the hardware cheaper.
Low end 2000 Celeron, 32MB ram, 6GB, 15 CRT systems were selling for $500 at a profit. Could probably hit $400 by cutting hdd.
I do wonder if a lot of the stuff that Google has worked on Google Docs, Chromebook were inspired by Sun. Eric Schmidt was a VP at Sun and Novell before joining Google.
"Hot desking like it's 2007"...
Nowadays instead of carrying a smartcard you carry a slim 13" laptop and plug in a single USB-C cable from the docking station. Much better, yes. But just being able to plug in a smart card in a meeting room and get going instantly would be appreciated even today.
It would be amazing to have SunRay style just-plugin-your-smartcard and done hot desking.
And in particular it would be amazing for that to work with a) huge monitors, b) audio and video.
(200x) "Never bet against x86" -> (202x) "Never bet against ARM"
> (200x) "Never bet against x86" -> (202x) "Never bet against ARM"
Citation needed. There is only 1 workstation maker with ARM: Apple.
nvidia dgx spark?
also, system76 has one: https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1.1-n1/configure
also, dell: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/desktop-computers/dell-pro-m...
HP is coming soon, will be called `ZGX Nano AI Station` apparently
Also lenovo: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/workstations/thinkstation-p-s...
All of those use the same nVidia chip and the same nVidia provided Linux distro. Personally I'd be wary of spending $3500+ on a system that relies on nVidia support. They previously released an AI focused SBC, the Jetson Nano, that shipped with a custom distro based on the already aging Ubuntu 18.04, then abandoned support for it after a few years. All the dependencies required to run ML/AI stuff became outdated, and the hardware is now basically useless. It's possible to run mainline Linux on it, but you can't do anything with the GPU since that requires a special one-off driver that never got upstreamed.
> All of those use the same nVidia chip and the same nVidia provided Linux distro
The system76 one uses an ampere chip, but a discrete nvidia card; so not quite the same.
Generally I agree, I do not mix nvidia/linux. The point is that arm workstations are clearly being produced by many different vendors at this point.
Thanks for pointing that out, I must have skipped over the system76 link. You're right that besides Apple, nVidia and Ampere also make viable ARM workstation chips.
You can get ARM-based PCs and laptops. Thing is so far they all suck except for Apple right now.
I sure as hell hope that if Qualcomm even comes close to parity with other platforms they change their name because I'm going to have a hard time associated Snapdragon and their other products with anything that is quality. So far these are for desktop CPUs what
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant
is for cars. On the other hand, Intel is doing everything it can to keep the x86 platform from advancing which will let even the laggards catch up.
> You can get ARM-based PCs and laptops. Thing is so far they all suck except for Apple right now.
This is true, but there's a consolation -- they suck much much less than RISC-V kit.
I run a bunch of nearly 15 year old laptops. I am not a performance addict. But I have not laid fingers on a RISC-V box I'd be willing to spend a morning on.
That'll be true for a few months at best.
The first RVA23 and development boards are coming.
Tenstorrent announced Atlantis in the RISC-V Summit, based on Ascalon microarchitecture and due 2026H1.
There are Qualcomm laptops now I believe (at least that's what I heard when I was last working for them). NXP also made some boxes (I own a bunch of them). The server market is also growing with Ampere and Cavium (now Novell) which I have both.
Also AWS Graviton and Google Axion servers & VMs on those clouds
"Never bet against Apple"
> Solaris, meanwhile, which had long been available on x86, saw its “own” ISA SPARC live on in the server space until roughly 2017 or so, and was even briefly available as open source until Oracle did its thing.
Maybe worth noting that SPARC was (is?) licensable:
* https://sparc.org
OpenSPARC is under GPL2.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12578083
Oh man, I miss SunRays!
The closest I came to a SPARC lifestyle was booting Solaris 2.6 in qemu, so that I could emulate logging in to my university's EECS department's SPARC server way back when.
Nice to see someone with the geekiness and wherewithal to really commit to the bit.
> No “AI” writing aids, no “AI” summaries, no ChatGPT, no Gemini search nonsense, nothing. I take pride in doing research and writing properly, without the “aid” of digital parrots with brain damage, and if there’s any errors, they’re mine and mine alone. Take pride in your work and reject “AI”.
This guy better not be using spell check with a tantrum like that tagged to his opening line.
I like it. Remember when people used to have badges on their sites? Like HTML5 or XHTML or Apache or whatever. Maybe we could bring back one for "made by humans".
I recently learned those have a name based on their dimensions:
https://88x31.nl/
If you think spell(1) is AI, you misunderstand at least one of them.
To be fair, I've seen definitions of AI so broad that they'd probably include the root finder on my HP-15C.