Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

[Lyndon Nerenberg <lyndon@orthanc.ca>]

>> Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
>> I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
>> time Solaris 2.x came along.

>Yep, can confirm.  I was a fan but the powers that were at Sun at the
>time just didn't want competition for SPARC.

I have vague memories of the Road Runner.  But I also recall, circa
1993, Sun was trying very hard not to sell a '386 port of Solaris that
I wanted to get my hands on.

At the time I was spinning up a brand new university campus.  We
were, as all academia were, $$$ constrained.  Windows was starting
to roll out, but the incoming academics wanted UNIX to run their
code on.  Sun had just leaked out a 386-based release, but was
hiding it from everyone.  At the front-end of the campus build, my
thoughts were to get this Intel version of SunOS running on the
Intel boxes that we knew we had to buy, anyway, because MSDOS and
Windows.

At the '93 Interop I quickly tracked down the Sun booth and started
nailing down all the booth critters to set up a conversation about
doing a campus-wide binary license of the 386 port.  Both booth
shitheads could not be bothered.  They only wanted to SPARC the
booth babes across the aisle.

Does anyone remember the name of that Sun release?  I've forgotten now.
Meanwhile, we signed up for a BSDi academic source license, and deployed
UNIX on every PC that hit the campus.

Sun did eventually show up, many months after the campus opening.  With a
"million dollar" donation.  It was a heap of mostly broken workstations
that they piled on the floor in the agora for a photo-op.  Same gig that
AT&T tried when they dumped the 3B4000 on us in Athabasca in 1990 ;-)

--lyndon