On 9/11/2019 5:57 PM, Clem Cole wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 2:54 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com 
> <mailto:lm@mcvoy.com>> wrote:
>
>     You're probably right but it wouldn't have mattered. SunOS was
>     very popular
>     and had a good VM system with a working mmap.  Once it became official
>     AT&T source everyone would have moved to it over time.
>
> But Sun would have to accept the economics of Intel processor sooner.  
> Which is funny because RoadRunner was a pretty neat machine.  They had 
> Solaris/386 but was way too little too late.   Sparc was a blind spot 
> I fear.
>

One of the reasons I went into Solaris whole-hog during the 
SunOS->Solaris thing was the availability of a version that ran on 
Intel. I ran an Intel SVR4.2 (Consensys) BBS in the early 90's, with 
USENET/NEWS, using a SunOS IPX as a back-end file server.

Of course, a few of my customers who did CAD were using Sun 
workstations, and everything moved to Solaris, so there was also that.

Once Solaris X86 came out, I jumped at the chance. I'm still 
administering PeopleSoft and Oracle on Solaris 11 X86. But sadly, time 
to move on.

Although, Oracle says Solaris support is continuing out until 2031, with 
extended support to 2034, with Solaris Cluster 4.x following suit. But 
at $1000/socket for support just for the OS, that pricing is a hard to 
take when it comes to CentOS/Redhat/Oracle Linux.

ak