from Hacker News

Scenes from the Solbourne Computer corporate video, March 1992

by goldenskye on 8/27/23, 2:22 AM with 9 comments

• by johndoe0815 on 8/27/23, 2:43 AM

  I would have loved to see an alternative future in which the open SPARC architecture (you can still get a license to build your own SPARC chips at sparc.org) kickstarted a similar development as the IBM PC did (unintentionally) a decade earlier.

  Ideally this would have coincided with a Sun/Apple/NeXT merger so we would all use OpenSTEP for Solaris on open SPARC systems today :).

  Well, we got something similar with the ARM Macs - though not really open for other manufacturers (at least you can install other OSes on the ARM Macs). The ARM Macs could be considered the last remaining Unix workstations - though Apple unfortunately tries really hard to hide more and more of macOS' Unix roots.

• by neilv on 8/27/23, 2:56 AM

  > Solbourne was the first to market in 1989 with multiprocessing SPARC servers

  Soon after was the Cray S-MP multiprocessing SPARC server: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_S-MP

  (I was lucky to get to use the S-MP to "port" some product to it. They also had the matrix coprocessor there, which was much more parallel.)

  Both Solbourne's and Cray's multiprocessing SPARC servers were before Sun's own `sun4m` products, IIRC.

• by ttul on 8/27/23, 4:46 AM

  It’s easy to criticize these guys in hindsight. Survivorship bias makes failed companies seem way worse than the success stories, most of whom just got lucky. Even great companies were horror shows at various times.

• by leetrout on 8/27/23, 2:58 AM

  Would be nice to have the actual video in addition to these screen caps.