Sun and the CPU Wars (was Re: NeXT cubes or slabs.)

William Donzelli <william(a)ans.net> wrote: I gather that is what Sun feels these days too. A while back I asked a friend within Sun who has been able to find interesting stuff for me 386i[1], and that is about the answer I got: don't ask about the 386i, no-one wants to remember. Well, one view is that they were thinking with a different brain -- the 386i was a somewhere-in-Massachusetts creation, while the rest of Sun is in (or slightly north of) Sillycon Valley and I've gathered didn't pay much attention to the 386i. Also (from looking at the manuals) I gather it would have made a pretty nifty MS-DOS development environment for its day, being able to boot MS-DOS in several independent virtual machines. I'll have to play with that someday and see how well it really works. I don't think so. In fact I think it came out pretty much concurrently with, or maybe even shortly after the early Sun-4s -- it only ever ran its peculiar version of SunOS 4.0.x. That's why I used to think of it as Sun hedging its bets on the future. -Frank McConnell [1] Someone wanted to port Linux to it. No, I don't understand why, there are plenty of i386s in the world to run Linux, and besides the Sun 386i and the appropriate SunOS really sort of go together IMO. But I figured I would inquire anyway, one can never have too much documentation.