I still think the Sun 4 series of machines are still very handsome machines.
@craigmaloney Good <diety of choice here/>, that's a TINY rig for the day.
How'd they manage to cram real compute into that size at the time?
@kemonine That's the power of the Pizzabox. :)
Actually it was a little slow near the end of its life. I remember when the Sparc 10 was released; everyone in the lab started using that machine via telnet because it was so much faster.
@craigmaloney Yeah, but the pizza boxes held their own for a long time (in tech terms).
I'll always remember my time with various SPARC machines fondly.
Sun really know their stuff. It's a shame they were snatched up by Oracle.
I was really hoping they'd go to IBM, Microsoft or another company that would do right by what they had/have.
@craigmaloney That's not a heck of a lot different than the POWER line from IBM. I love our mainframe POWER CPU but at the same time my work PC can dance circles around it for raw CPU performance.
SPARC always felt that way to me: lots of periphery stuff that's big time value add if you know what the hell you're doing. ESP for serial transactions (think medical billing for example).
Sun was definitely a poster child of good corporate citizen. Too bad zfs and Java are now Oracle 😢
@kemonine Unfortunately Sun outlived their usefulness in the hardware arena. When a PC could run circles around your hardware for a fraction of the cost there was no reason to buy Sun anymore.
They did amazing things though. I wish they would have figured out how to stay alive. I still think Jonathan Schwartz was a decent CEO simply because he understood what he had and tried to be a good corporate citizen.