[rescue] UnOracle patches for Solaris

[Jerry Kemp]

When Sun started releasing the Creator series frame buffers, that is 
when I personally started to go head-to-head with SGI.

Sun did several very smart, IMHO, things that SGI didn't do.

1. Solaris was free, or darn close to it, for hobbyist use.

I purchased Solaris 2.4 x86 used for next to nothing.
I purchased Solaris 2.5 and 2.5.1 for $99.00 USD under the educational 
pricing.  I believe that I purchased 2.6 the same way, but I am not for 
certain.  If SGI had any type of educational or discount available for 
IRIX, I never found it.  A set of OS CD's were $650.00 US.

2. release of the Ultra 5/Ultra 10 at just under a grand.

  If you needed/wanted a RISC chip, you could have a new system at home 
at a wintel price point. It wasn't a great system, but the Ultra 5/Ultra 
10 systems worked pretty good given their price point for the time.  SGI 
never came close to that.

3. Release of Solaris on X86 hardware.

  Sun's support for x86 varied through out the years, but it was there, 
and Solaris x86 worked well if you had the right hardware.  I never 
understood why Sun always got singled out for driver support on x86, but 
if you are sticking with x86 and are NOT running windows, rule #1 is to 
figure out what OS you are going to run, then purchase hardware from the 
HCL for that OS.  I don't know how difficult it would have been for SGI 
to release IRIX on x86, but to the best of my knowledge, I was not aware 
of an IRIX x86 release.  Sun always stated that Solaris Sparc and x86 
were created from the same code base.

Jerry


On 05/19/10 15:19, Dave Fischer wrote:
> andrew at jones.ec writes:
>
STUFF DELETED HERE
>
> So the question is, coming out of the late-90s, why didn't SGI crush
> Sun in the high-end server niche?
>
> I think it was largely the popularity of Solaris versus IRIX.
>
> And some of that can be traced to Sun being hobbyist-friendly.