Odd vintage computer sellers

[Warner Losh]

On Sat, Jan 4, 2020, 4:32 AM Stefan Skoglund via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> tor 2020-01-02 klockan 11:36 -0800 skrev Cameron Kaiser via cctalk:
> > >
> >
> > It's really rather ludicrous, given how even the IDT Solbournes
> > really only
> > run OS/MP. My affection for them is largely nostalgia; as SPARC
> > systems they
> > are quite finicky and the later SPARCstations surpassed even the
> > S4100 in
> > performance. It's really the S3000 that's the gem because of that
> > wacky
> > plasma display.
> >
>
> Solbourne positioned the later multi-processor MP systems against
> the Ultra 1 and Ultra 2 as long as the software mix gained from
> multiprocessing were they a potent method of getting more CPU
> especially if your app sw was dependent on SunOS 4.
>
> When Solaris 2.5 came out or more properly when SunOS 5 with its
> mp support became stable enough and more vendors ported their
> software to SunOS 5 solbourne lost their edge against Sun.
>

Solbourne never had a working SunOS 5 port. We had Solaris 2.0 alpha and
beta CDs in house, but never really has Solaris going. By that time, sales
were too low to sustain a porting effort. IIRC, the first big round of
layoffs was before Solaris 2.0 was released, though they fumbled on a bit
on support contracts for a decade before dropping them all in 1999 because
the y2k bugs were too big an effort to fix.

Warner

>