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

[Larry McVoy]

Wow, those came out when I was there, I've done a ton of work on those
machines.  The first Sun cluster was built from them.  But I've never
seen that ad before, it's classic Sun.

On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 11:36:43PM +0800, Jason Stevens wrote:
> Funny you mention that, I recently pulled this ad from SUN:
> 
> https://books.google.com.hk/books/content?id=GTwEAAAAMBAJ&hl=en-US&rview=1&pg=PT8&img=1&zoom=3&sig=ACfU3U0g2GS1KStkA6HXup3UG31UQdNcwg&w=1280
> 
> These days, there???s absolutely no limit to the things you can add to your PCs. Coprocessors. VGA cards. Large scale monitors. Network cards.
> But no matter how many thousands of dollars you pour into your PCs, they still can???t give you what you get with every Sun workstation. The screaming-hot performance. The multi-tasking. The high-resolution graphics. And the built-in networking.
> And now, we???re introducing a new workstation that makes all the shortcomings of your PCs even more obvious.
> SPARCstation??? IPC.
> At $8,995*, it???s the lowest cost, full-color RISC workstation in the world. By far. In fact, it???s about the same price as a high-performance 386 PC. But just look at the difference???.
> 
> 
> Sent from Mail for Windows 10
> 
> From: Larry McVoy
> Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2019 11:11 PM
> To: arnold at skeeve.com
> Cc: tuhs at tuhs.org
> Subject: Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386
> 
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 02:10:14AM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> > emanuel stiebler <emu at e-bbes.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > On 2019-07-11 18:50, A. P. Garcia wrote:
> > > > On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:31 PM Clem cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Did Sun have anything to do with that? I seem to recall something
> > > > called "Interactive Unix" for the 386, possibly marketed by Sun...
> > >
> > > "Interactive Unix" was pretty nice back than.
> > > Anybody remembers ESIX? Still have the document wall for that ...
> > >
> > > Cheers
> > >
> > 
> > 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.  Which was sort of silly,
> a 386 was nowhere near as fast as the SPARC chips of the day, that was
> when RISC actually made sense.  But perhaps they had a crystal ball
> and could see that x86 was going to be as fast or faster down the
> road?  I tend to doubt it, they really looked down on the 386.
> 

-- 
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Larry McVoy            	     lm at mcvoy.com             http://www.mcvoy.com/lm