[SunHELP] Sparc History

[James Lockwood]

On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, timuel-sunlist wrote:

> Does anyone out there know of any sites that record when Sun end-of-life`s their
> products? I`ve found lost of articles about my old TRS-80, but nothing on sun
> machines... Solely for my curiosity`s sake... now that we have to start planning
> for solaris 10`s non-support of the sun4m architechture.... ) after finally
> getting rid of our trusty/dusty-old sun4c boxes they stopped supporting in
> 2.8...)   =]

Typically, they support a machine and architecture a minimum of 5 years
past the last ship date.  Given that the last sun4m to ship was the
SS5/170 and that that shipped in 1998 (someone correct me if I'm wrong)
"Solaris 10" may well remove support.  If not then the release after most
likely will.

I will be surprised if Sun continues to ship the 32-bit UltraSparc kernel
much past that point.  Eliminating the "sparcv8plus" kernel arch would
mean removing a lot of extra testing/QA overhead, and the commercial
software world would probably be ready for it by then.

-James