His ideas about supporting working memory and tuning up operations such as "dragging and dropping from one window to another" are profound.
As a software develop I have numerous web browser windows with tabs, numerous IDE instances with tabs, numerous terminal windows (I avoid tabs but other people love 'em), Slack, Outlook and a few other things. I really want a system-scope panoptic view of all this stuff and a system that has a strong statistical tendency to put the next thing I'm interested in my face and not the opposite tendency which has been the dominant paradigm since GNU emacs and is just as bad in current IDEs.
I dunno. One of my pet peeves of the last few months is that somebody posts an AI generated blog post and it's not good enough that we can click on it to read it so they also post an AI summary as a comment. Like... we can click on the link and read your post. Haven't you ever used HN before... Oh, I see, you created this account six hours ago.
I think they might have tuned up the heuristics to suppress that kind of thing but that's not what is going on there... like these are real replies in a real conversation. I don't like it that I can't upvote or vouch for them.
Everyone should own at least one book of Bukowski poetry: in addition to computers he wrote about cats, going to the track, drinking and other things his life. I remember riding the train from Dresden to Prague and the person next to us was reading his novel Post Office which is a wonderful story of irresponsibility.
Reading Bukowski often makes me yearn for a life that could have been. An often miserable, always irresponsible, but often wonderful life. Of course, his real life was probably far less glamorous than he makes it sound, but, man, did he have a way with words.
The iron law is that vendors want to become like the old Sun. The only reason they don't is if they are trying to compete their way up the hill. Take away the old Sun and SGI and IBM and now Dell is Sun.
Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps. All that Dell does is assembling standard, commoditized parts and putting a free OS on it. Dell's business is incredibly easy to replicate, while Sun's business is extremely hard to replicate. Of course, Sun's competitive advantage turned into a curse when the components of that vertical integration become uncompetitive both features and price wise vs. the GNU/Linux-on-Intel stack. But regardless, Dell could never replicate the vertical integration Sun had.
> Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps.
Can you get an x86_64 CPU from someone other than Intel or AMD? x86 is much more proprietary than SPARC ever was.
Sun used the non-proprietary Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) for booting (also used by Apple with PowerPC), and SBus (IEEE 1496) for cards before moving to PCI. SCSI and Ethernet/IP were there since forever as well.
The "proprietary" label on Sun, at least when it came to hardware, was always a mystery to me.
Sun used a lot of open parts, but they had absolute control over the platform. Everything in your solution came from Sun or a Sun partner. Fujitsu doing weird stuff with Japanese mainframes was an interesting fact but irrelevant to 99% of Sun's user base.
Intel/AMD combined with EFI or IBM-compatible BIOS? You can get that from anybody. An HP server is basically interchangeable with a Dell.
> SPARC has been licensed to several manufacturers, including Atmel, Bipolar Integrated Technology, Cypress Semiconductor, Fujitsu, Matsushita and Texas Instruments.
Fujitsu was selling Solaris-compatible systems (as were many others). Linux and BSDs also ran on them.
There were a number of x86 makers up until the 1990s or so, but who is left of them? Can you still license x86(_x64) to fab your own CPUs? You can with SPARC:
It wasn't just the chip, it was the whole ecosystem.
Could an every day consumer buy a Sparc motherboard, chip, and build their own system? No. There may have been one or two vendors that did that late in the 90's, but they didn't stick around.
Yes you could do this, from Sun Microelectronics back in the 1990's.
We purchased an Ultra-10 motherboard with 250 MHz Ultrasparc II in 1998/1999, fitted it out with compatible third party SVGA, Ethernet and SCSI adapters and ran Solaris on it. Was our production LDAP, Mail and database server for a small ISP for many years.
I later worked for a systems builder that built and sold Sparc/Ultrasparc systems for government (eg. Hong Kong Mass Transit). We were the only vendor in the Southern Hemisphere doing it. So it wasn't common. But yes you could order parts from Sun Microelectronics and build your own systems, and it became easier use certain standard PC compatible parts once they standardised on PCI. We had shelves full of the older incompatible MBus compatible systems and boards as well.
You kind of proved my point: that's an embedded platform. No consumer is going to be running it. The last link indicates "VxWorks, PikeOS, and RTEMS operating systems available."
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you can load a Linux distro on there. You have a couple other problems: there's no ethernet or wifi, and you only have 512 megs of RAM.
> You kind of proved my point: that's an embedded platform. No consumer is going to be running it. The last link indicates "VxWorks, PikeOS, and RTEMS operating systems available."
"Consumers" can be running it just as much as "consumers" could be running Raspberry Pis, which could also be considered 'embedded' by some. SPARC is no less (or more) proprietary than ARM: you can license the ISA, fab a CPU, and sell some kind of hardware stack.
Do you think it would be more or less difficult to get a license from Intel/AMD for x86(_X64) than ARM and/or SPARC so you could fab your own chips?
So you don't think the complete lack of connectivity (video, networking, and storage) is going to be a problem for a normal person? There is absolutely no comparison with a Raspberry Pi. It has all those things and great software support. That Sparc platform is for a satellite!
But yes, you are correct, it's much easier to get a SPARC license.
Dell puts a fair amount of engineering into their servers (as do other main brands like HPE and Lenovo) so it's unfortunate they've lost their roots from the old mail order sales company.
If someone else is paying I'd prefer one of these big OEMs for established firmware lifecycle, spare parts and long gray market availability, shock (shipping) and thermodynamics engineering. If I'm paying, Asus or MiTAC (Tyan) are good enough.
I was fortunate enough to work with a fair bit of sun gear (3/260, 4/670, enterprise 250/450 and even some big iron 6500s) back in the day.
These days, I've got several Dell 5820 style workstations and I'm pretty sure someone who interned at sun in the 1990s is now running dell's workstation division. The medium sized dell deskside towers have nearly identical vibes as those old workstations, and are a pleasure to work with.
Your sentence is a tacit admission that you don't have a very deep understanding of logistics and integration and what it has taken for Dell to build the deep supply chain they have. Yes, it's a commodity system; that's the point; but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right? Think about the difference there and why people still shell out for a Dell instead of a Supermicro or Exxact or plain whitebox hardware. There's a lot to a solid Dell server that you might not realize, from disk controllers to iDRAC....
>but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right?
We didn't think so.
I mean, if you have no knowledgable people, maybe, but for about 10 years we've found it a better use of time & treasure to buy generic servers and consumer laptops, and just have spares. We found Dell's support so costly and so ineffective that just buying extras turned out to be a better move.
Dell is at a sweet spot for many organizations where you can get hardware support from dell, or not.
You can (with dell) just buy used junk and use that, and you can still access their support library for firmware updates.
I did a lot of work with storage with dell stuff and I found it far simpler to "outsource" the storage integration to dell than to do it myself -- they make sure that all "2tb disks" are the same (exact!) size, they all use the same mechanism for firmware updates, etc.
A much larger org could have saved some money doing that integration and testing internally; a much smaller organization could save money just buying stuff from wherever and not worrying.
I personally haven't used dell support in over a decade, but I have found that their "look up the serial number" web site has been invaluable; I've found the fact that they publish firmware for all their stuff and let anyone install it valuable; the huge secondary market for dell is helpful, etc. And, if you care, you can even give them more money to directly support you, instead of just doing it yourself.
HPE, on the other hand, locks their stuff down super hard; I assume there are reasons to go with HPE, but I'd rather get clocked on my superdome with an HPUXy stick than ever touch that stuff again.
>I personally haven't used dell support in over a decade,
We used to buy the top-tier support plans for our laptops and servers, and we found they just consistently could NOT meet their obligations. Laptops stayed broken and nonfunctional for weeks and weeks.
That is what made Sun, Digital, and SGI loss hurt even more. Dell is nothing in comparison, just a bargain box maker with no ambitions beyond. Losing those other companies hurt because when you control the hardware and the operating system software, you potentially can build anything.
Look no further than Apple computer. I must admit, back in the day I wanted a Next computer or an SGI computer because of the graphics and sound capability, but the only thing I could afford at the time was an Amiga computer later on, I had to settle for a work related Microsoft computer using AutoCAD, Revit, Navis and a few other graphics programs.
Really? When I first met Sun machines they were selling 68k-based Sun machines that were better specced than Apple and Amiga and such but left them dependent on Motorola’s architecture that had indirect address and thus no future.
Sure they had an in house chip development ARM team right at the time when RISC economics looked good but CPU architecture had to work harder and harder to beat the memory wall and SPARC was not competitive by 2005 and “Hail Mary” projects like CoolThreads were difficult and expensive but did not deliver for customers.
Hypothetically customers could benefit from that proprietary stuff but they benefit even more from rapid progress is competitive, commodity markets.
When I was working at the library circa 2005 we were thinking about replacing all the Windows computers that patrons used to access the online catalog (and other services) with a web browser with Sun Rays, we probably would have bought a few hundred of them and we would have bought some SPARC servers to back them up.
We could have gotten Netscape to run under Solaris but after a week of effort I wasn't able to get Mozilla to build, so no modern web browser. So no Sun Rays. No servers. DTrace and ZFS were great innovations but without the magic of "can run the software you need to run" they are just Blub. Had Sun done the work to get Mozilla running on their machines and forgotten about DTrace and ZFS people might still be using Solaris... but instead DTrace and ZFS found an audience by supporting... the commodity OS!
(arguably at that time supporting a web browser was the #1, #2 and all the way through #99 task that the Solaris team should have been working on at that time and everything else from Java to Tcl to ZFS was a dangerous distraction... and that's how companies in a position like Sun die)
You must be misremembering something. Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox had always tier one support on Solaris. You had nothing to build, just download and run, with perfect compatibility.
I only ever ran Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox browser (and still today in 2026). My desktops and servers were all Solaris from mid-90s to 2012 or so. Never a hiccup running the Netscape family browsers (and servers too).
There was Netscape support, but then there was that crisis when it seemed that IE would be the only viable web browser, the realization that the Netscape was too FUBAR to build on, and then Mozilla got rebranded as Firefox.
They probably had an official Solaris build of Mozilla later on but if one had been available at that point in time I would have installed it on the SPARC machine I had under my desk. The ship had sailed in terms of the organization's capital planning.
If you were happy running Netscape later than I was you might have felt supported.
This sounds right. There was a "dark ages" in the early 2000's, where Unix/Linux browser support was terrible. You were either stuck with old Netscape 4.x, which crashed every half hour, or you had to work with half baked, almost unusable beta builds of Mozilla (pre-Firefox). Because of this, I actually ran Windows on my desktop for a while!
There was never a time when Netscape Navigator, Mozilla or Firefox were not fully supported on Solaris (earlier, also SunOS).
When Netscape Navigator first came out eary/mid-90s I ran it on SunOS while working at a Sun shop, it always worked perfectly.
By the time the Netscape browser was open sourced in 1998 I was working at Sun and running it on Solaris, always worked perfectly. I attended the open sourcing party Netscape held in San Francisco, still have the autographed CD with the very first open source release source code. Netscape paid for buses from Silicon Valley to SF for people to attend the party. Fun times!!
In 1999 the Sun|Netscape alliance happened, AOL took the consumer software part including the browser and Sun continued the server product development under iPlanet brand. For a while I worked in the Netscape campus that year, and I continued working on iPlanet servers for years after that. Since the browser code had been open sourced, development continued outside AOL becoming Mozilla and later Firefox. Always first class on Solaris.
Firefox branding happened much later (wikipedia says 2004). Still working perfectly on Solaris. Only browser I ever ran, always on Solaris, until the bitter end (oracle lawnmower in 2010).
So yes I can confidently say it always ran perfectly on Solaris (SunOS in early years), having been there through all this and have fond memories of it all.
"When I was working at the library circa 2005 we were thinking about replacing all the Windows computers that patrons used to access the online catalog (and other services)"
why were you thinking of going Sun, as late as 2005? just easier to lock down, like kiosks?
We already had a big investment with Sun for back end systems like the library catalog. We perceived managing a big fleet of desktops as a hassle, it was worse then it is now.
I went to their server site and clicked “shop now.”
I picked a PowerEdge R360. It has the price right here at $5k and a big green “Add to Cart” button along with an incredibly long list of customization options just like I was buying a laptop or desktop. It doesn’t seem like I have to contact anyone to get an order in.
It can be that easy if you want a small number of servers and are willing to pay the outrageous sticker price. In reality, nobody pays $5k for that R360. You either play their game and deal with their insane sales team to get a big discount or you buy from a partner instead of Dell directly. We did the latter and it was just as easy as ordering from Dell online but also way cheaper.
Dell’s innovation to the computer industry was build to order, selling computers direct, and later online in short streamlining the buying process. IBM, Sun, Digital, and SGI we’re at a whole different level, and they were at that level because of their capabilities.
They could’ve have potentially changed the game (like Apple) and competed against Microsoft and Intel, but they were fixated on selling basically to the corporate level which was in hindsight not a good decision long-term, and eventually it cost them all, their loss was immeasurable because of the hardware and more importantly operating system capabilities they had in house.
Let organizations set the rules here and I think they are going to be too greedy and strict on the average but…
I did go to a pagan festival that had a very ordinary ritual and it bugged me that people were taking cellphone snaps of the ritual and even of the altar. There wasn’t any effort to enforce discipline because it is a large group of people from all over, many of whom have never stood in a circle, but I felt we should have been tougher.
On the other hand I know they’d try to turn off everyone’s cameras at a high school or college hockey game [1] to protect commercial game streaming and I think that’s totally unfair.
[1] the only college sport where I’ve had to use the methods from When I say no I feel guilty the get into the game with my camera.
Our Sun rep served us well at an academic library. I had no problems provisioning a server with a nice storage array. When things fell apart at Sun our sales engineer from Sun wound up working for us.
The funny thing is that efficient RETE engines only became widely available towards the end of "the golden age of AI" so that most of the seminal works of that period do not even use them.
I think though the intuition that practical knowledge has an if-then-else structure was right and I think people talk about "explainable AI" too much and not enough about "I just want to tell it specificially what to do"
It looks a lot like the kind of systems I envisioned 10 years ago there would have been some kind of rules and knowledge-graph system that could be lined up with classifiers and scorers and fact extractors and other machine learning models and there would be a system to collect training and test data, handle exceptions, etc. Think Palantir but for operations instead of analytics and a much bigger TAM.
A day in the jungle is easy to survive, a year less so.
I don’t know a lot about dogs but cats have specialized scent communication mechanisms that are entirely outside the human range. I mean they tend to leave a streak of ‘cat oil’ around their feeding areas when they rub their cheeks on corners. I stick my nose right into the gland and I sense nothing but the soft touch of fur.
On the other hand we do share many languages with cats including general mammal body language (“pointing” at things) as well as what we negotiate, like the yowling cats learn to get our attention.
As a software develop I have numerous web browser windows with tabs, numerous IDE instances with tabs, numerous terminal windows (I avoid tabs but other people love 'em), Slack, Outlook and a few other things. I really want a system-scope panoptic view of all this stuff and a system that has a strong statistical tendency to put the next thing I'm interested in my face and not the opposite tendency which has been the dominant paradigm since GNU emacs and is just as bad in current IDEs.
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