On Feb 17, 9:40 am, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> Sun Aims To Outdo Linux
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Many companies prototype their projects using available LAMP
> | (Linux/AMP) technology and commodity PCs, says Juan Carlos Soto,
> | Sun's VP of marketing. "It's certainly understandable why that
> | would be the start, but we also want to make sure they have a
> | chance to look at what Sun has to offer," Soto says.
> `----
> http://www.informationweek.com/industries/showArticle.jhtml?articleID...
Sun has been really frustrating. Back in 1991, Sun had almost 15% of
the corporate desktop market. Their them as "The Network is the
Mainframe", and many companies would put Sun workstations on the desks
of their staff, and while they were away, would farm out work using
RPC, rsh, or even installing specialized servers on each of the
desktop machines. The insurance company I worked for at the time,
Great West Life, did all of their 401K calculations on special servers
installed on 500 desktop machines. It really was amazing, and fast.
The problem was that Sun never could get the hang of device drivers
for PCs. There were just so many devices, so many different
combinations of interrupts, ports, driver types, and potential
conflicts, that Sun's only support for Intel was for the Sun386. Sun
never even tried to address the retail market, and Solborne computers
in Denver Colorado collapsed and was merged with Sun when Microsoft
made their Vaporware announcement of NT.
The big shift now is virtualization. Using a lightweight Linux system
with Xen or VMWare virtualization, it's now possible for Sun to create
a version of Solaris that doesn't have to concern itself with drivers
and device types. The result is that users can get the best of both
worlds. This means that users who want to use Solaris applications
could do so, on Solarise.
Keep in mind that Sun was a major early contributor to Linux. They
contributed the OpenLook Window Manager and toolkits. They
contributed NFS, NIS, and RPC. They even provided support for kaffe -
the first Linux VM for Java. Later, Sun provided support for Java on
Linux.
It's possible that Sun could also find a nice market for a "Sun
Implementation Library" similar to the WINE library. Users could
purchase the library (or the library could be included with Sun
applications).
I was really pissed when Sun decided to drop out of the desktop
market. They had a really great project manager that actually did
proper load levelling. They had a really great statistics display
tool that could display any kind of statistics in real time. We even
used it to keep track of financial transactions and could display
"dollars in" and "dollars out" in real-time.
Lotus 1-2-3 for Sun was also amazing. Instead of the Microsoft MDI,
the Sun version supported multiple interlinked spreadsheets which
could be displayed or hidden using thumbtack and traditional X11
controls. The Sun version also supported the use of pipes and
parsers. You could feed a stock ticker feed into the parser and
update every element of the S&P 500, S&P Midcap, and Russel 2000 small-
cap on a tick-by-tick basis. Standard and Poor's was still using this
technology for their real-time update of their average as well as
several MarketScope applications.
Back when Word was still "text only" and didn't support embedded
spreadsheets or charts, Sun had an application called Applix Asterix
which supported most of the features we not associate with MS-Office.
A single document could contain Word document, Spreadsheets (wth hot
cells updated in real-time from named pipes), Charts (also updated in
real time), and drafting quality illustrations comparable to those
created by Visio, were all integrated into a single WYSIWYG document.
Sun also had a tool called FrameMaker. This was an editor that would
let you compose any X11 Window into a "Frame" of a document. You
could mix almost any combination of real-time, animations, charting,
pictures, strip-charts, anything else you could think of, into a
single document that might actually be collecting content from 10
different servers. Adobe eventually purchased FrameMaker and still
offers a crippled version for Windows.
Sun was also famous for their very large high resolution CRT
displays. Some workstations had 25 inch diagonal monitors, and some
of the monochrome displays could support 4000x3000 pixel graphics in
grey scales. Color monitors were lower resolution - usually 2560 x
1920 in 16 million colors with 256 levels of transparency. Compared
to the 640x480x16 color displays of Windows 3.0 or the 640x480x256
color displays of Windows 3.1, Solaris was almost like science
fiction. Unfortunately, at up to $15,000 or a top-of-the-line
workstation, most people could only look at them from afar.
Of course, because SunOS-4 and Solaris supported X11, it wasnt' hard
to take a single workstation and attach several X11 terminals to it.
Wyse had several Xterminals that could lower the "per user" cost of
Sun/X11 to less that that of Windows 3.1, with much higher
productivity. Even when Sun lost "The Desktop" to Sun, hummingbird
X11 made it possible to turn an older Windows 3.1 workstation into an
X11 Display - turning the Sun Server into a Sun Desktop.
The thing to remember is that there were a huge number of commercial
applications created for Solaris, that could easily be used in a
virtualized Linux/Solaris system. Even more important, these
applications would be hundreds of times faster than they were when
they were first released on SparcStations 15 years ago. A
SparcStation/20 ran at about 20 Mips and used a 10 megabit ethernet
and a 4500 RPM SCSI drive.
A virtualized Solaris box would run at 10,000 MIPs, communicate over a
4 gigabyte/second "virtual" ethernet, and would be connected to 7200
RPM "cylinder at a time" SATA drives with 100 megabyte/second peak
throughput speeds connected to the hosting Linux system which provides
up to 4 gigabytes of read-ahead/write-behind cache. That virtualized
Solaris machine would run faster than most SparcStations ever did.
Keep in mind that if Sun really decided to support any form of
"Solaris compatibility" on Linux - it really could be a "death blow"
to Windows.
SGI has already blessed Linux, and today, nearly all of their OpenGL
applications, ranging from simulators used by the Military (some still
classified) to training simulators for everything from airline
cockpits to construction equipment such as cranes, back-hoes, and
forklifts.
Even the movie business has gotten into the act. Video editing and
mixing have been available for Linux for years, much of it also used
in projects ranging from "Titanic" and "Shrek" to Lord of the Rings
and Star Wars III.
Microsoft wants everyone to think that Windows is the only operating
system that has support for commercial applications. They even try to
allude to the command line interface, claiming that that is the Linux
end-user interface.
The problem is that so many companies, and so many employees of those
companies, have been displaced by Microsoft "shovelware" that many of
the best commercial applications may not even be available for Windows
in the very near future.
I guess Windows still has some life left in it - as a GAME MACHINE!!
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