The sun sets on Sun. A sad day here.
Heater.
Posts: 21,230
Sun Microsystems is no more. Taken over by Oracle (spit) a while back.
Outside the old Sun office in Finland I found this put out for the trash:
So one minutes silence for the late Sun and a moment to think about all the great things that organization brought us: NFS, Java, OpenOffice etc etc.
Outside the old Sun office in Finland I found this put out for the trash:
So one minutes silence for the late Sun and a moment to think about all the great things that organization brought us: NFS, Java, OpenOffice etc etc.
1024 x 768 - 288K
Comments
Did you save the sign? If you don't want to keep it that would be a great item to post on ebay....
When I think of Sun, I think of a VME board I once designed. I tested it on a Sun machine. Boy, did I get tired of waiting for it to reboot!
Thank goodness for plug-n-play.
It did occur to me to save the sign but I have no way to move it and no where to keep it if I could. I'd really like to save the Sun logo part.
K2,
Yep genuine Finnish dirt, mostly granite dust. This place is a mess outside as it's just been under some remodeling and there is road works everywhere.
Not sure I could hold any of that sign over my head, it's a lot of metal work.
I spent 7 years on Sparc 1 systems running some form of Unix while working at Philips Semi.
Here in Silicon Valley, Sun was a huge employer. And the funny (sad?) thing is that the building I now work in was part of the Sun's Milipitas campus. We're even using the existing office cube furniture.
DJ
That's because your company is too cheap to buy anything new ;-)...
Jim....
That's too bad. I'm sure somebody, somewhere would have paid a lot for those.
...now, now Jim. Let us not speak ill of our Overlord Benefactors!!!
DJ
Please save the sign if at all possible. Heck if the shipping wasn't crazy I ask you to ship it over.
I have a Sun Sparc10 -- Time to boot it today in honor of Sun. Bummer...
OBC
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/04/oracle-gives-up-on-ooo-after-community-forks-the-project.ars
And Apache Software Foundation has picked up OpenOffice.org, so it still lives!
http://incubator.apache.org/projects/openofficeorg.html
I hadn't heard about that. Any word on whether LibreOffice is going to get folded back into OpenOffice or will continue on as a separate project?
It would appear that LibreOffice is alive on its own:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
I've pretty much committed to abandoning MSOffice and have all my tax records for the last 3 years in Open Office spreadsheets.
Sun's support of OpenOffice was part of bitter battles with M$ and I guess Oracle sees no reason to carry on skirmishes from an acquired asset.
It didn't start out as a fork, it was just that when Oracle took over Sun the OpenOffice.org project deciced to restructure itself as a standalone organisation instead of being tied into a single company.[1]
Then Oracle went into adversary mode and started to throw people off the OpenOffice.org Community Council.[2] It was only at that point that LibreOffice truly became a fork, and developers from OpenOffice.org (still owned by Oracle then) left in large numbers and joined LibreOffice.[3]
-Tor
References:
[1]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/28/openoffice_independence_from_oracle/
[2]http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/10/17/0210209/Oracle-Asks-OpenOffice-Community-Members-To-Leave
[3]http://digitizor.com/2010/11/01/and-so-the-exodus-begins-33-developers-leave-openoffice-org/
That said, the end of SUN is the end of a era, long, slow, but done. A good friend of mine was a SUN systems engineer, and he's been out of the scene for about 3 years. Very hard for him to come back, and enjoy things after going so far with SUN.
I would deffo capture the sign, if you can. That's really gonna be worth it to somebody. I've sold off, given away, or traded off my SGI stuff, and it all found very happy homes. Heck, I've got one nice polo shirt from the good era, and I get offers on it every time I wear it!
As for SGI, back in 1993 we checked out all the big ones (HP, DEC, IBM etc.) and only SGI could provide what we needed, including scalability: at the time they were the only ones where you could scale up from a cheaper system to a big very expensive one and still use exactly the same tech. DEC, for example, would force you to change to a different hardware bus if you upgraded. We weren't into graphics at all, but it looked like SGI's focus on high-end graphics had a nice side-effect of providing us with a high-bandwidth, high-I/O, load-efficient system.
I installed the final descendant of that system for a customer in May this year. SGI machine and all.
I've got to hold on to the Indy which sits in a corner in my office.. and there are some O2's around which I should also hold on to I think.. and Octanes are great, but incredibly noisy and generates a lot of heat (as I found out when I dragged one into a small office.. had to move it out, just couldn't keep the room cool enough!). If I can, I will try to hold on to a Sun Ultrasparc system too, but it's hard to find room.
So many of those old systems went to the dump over the years.. and now I see e.g. those early "laptops" on Ebay! And terminals, and 486 computers. We had all of that stuff, and just threw it away..
-Tor
Could totally see Prop development on a IRIX desktop. Who knows? If we see the cross-platform tools happen, I may get one, just for that purpose! Of all the things I miss, it's the desktop and that excellent terminal font...
You know, I developed a VCS (Atari 2600) game on one. Was beautiful, capturing the VCS output in the Indy VINO window, running Stella and some cross-assembly tools in a few other windows. Awesome retro-experience I am glad I entertained.
If it were me, I would snag a R5K Indy, and the R5K O2, so it can be clocked up with a RM7200 CPU. Be sure and get the ICE board for the O2, and as much RAM as you can stuff into it. If I had to pick, I think I would pick the O2, just because a lot is still possible on one. Love the form factor of the Indy though, and the video capture rocks for our kind of stuff here in Propeller land.
. * crys *
Peter
Shamefully with all my Propeller stuff now, I'm afraid I'd only keep them to add to items that I need to dust from time to time. My poor retro collection has suffered from neglect this year..
OBC
Interesting. As I mentioned earlier, at work we didn't move to SGI due to the graphics, so I've never pursued that direction. Haven't really thought of what could be possible, just noticed that _huge_ set of video/audio/LCD-stereo inputs/outputs these boxes came with, every one of them.
Right now I do have a couple of R5K O2 systems that noone else would want. I'm going to send off an email or two to see if I can get my hands on an R12000 O2 as well, they are very nice (and full of memory - I filled them up myself). The R12K versions only have room for a single disk though, but as it's 73GB (on the latest ones I set up) it's not bad at all.
-Tor
When you get setup, download the last IRIX 6.5.22 (I think) that was available to the general SGI owning public, or better, if they have media. On that note, if they have media, be sure and snag the compiler SGI did, along with gcc ported to the machines. With one or the other, you are set, and can run a lot of stuff! Visit http://www.nekochan.net for a great set of OSS ported to IRIX, and say hello to the last of the last, and probably best of the best still jamming on those old boxes.
Edit: If you ask around nicely, media can usually be had. Sometimes there are machines with compiler licenses on them too. The earlier SGI compiler would operate without a license, just dumping sales calls into your output, but not the program. A wrapper script filters those. Later ones do require the license. I think IRIX 6.5.10 or so, maybe .12 was the era of the "free" compiler. That said, gcc is available for free, so long as you install the development headers from the base OS media. The SGI MIPS compiler is out of this world good at optimization, but gcc got most of that right over time, and is a great option these days.
Built XMame once on a R5K Indy. The GCC build would not run some of the more intense games, but the MIPS Pro would. So it used to matter. That was early on though. I think that mostly changed after the early '00's. That build took the better part of a day, BTW. A O2 / Octane machine would complete it in a few hours.
Re: Linux, yeah I've done similar things too. Happy fun stuff!
If you want, you can have 4DWM manage your Linux box! Did that for a while, just for kicks. Have the SGI in the corner somewhere, networked, and use rsh to launch 4DWM with your Linux display as local. It will happily manage your desktop, after you kill off your existing window manager, or just don't start it in the first place. It can serve up it's fonts too. X is a network aware beautiful thing. Fonts from one machine, local root window from your localhost, apps from another, window manager from yet another, etc...
That might not work so well today, depending on what the Linux crew has done to X. Might still work though, if whatever they've done is XR5 or XR6 compliant. Used to do Gnome on my SGI too, operating in reverse, with applications served from both boxes, depending on which one had it, or would perform better.
Fair warning to all who read this SGI stuff: IRIX itself is as big of a hobby as the Prop is. Not a small, nor subtle OS. X is the same, with all it can do. Crazy good, powerful, way under utilized since it's debut in, what? 84? To this day, I don't think most people really understand the gift that X was, and still is. Multi-user graphical computing, Who woulda thought? Read about it in BYTE magazine, when they published an overview. Was in High School at the time and could not wait to get to run the *real* computers, which meant both SGI and SUN, though KDE was kind of crappy compared to 4DWM, and the Interactive Desktop. Still, they ran X, and X was the ahem... stuff! Managed to jump on in the early 90's, and rocked hard until early '00's Don't regret a minute of it.
Anyway, have fun! Miss those things big, but I'm not going back. Can't afford the head space right now, but if I could...
Yeah, IRIX was a real heavy-duty operating system - and still is. A 2 CPU SGI Octane or Octane 2 can sustain a fantastic load of competing processes, unlike e.g. any AIX system (which will simply go into "batch mode" when you increase the load - each process will hold on to the CPU for longer and longer intervals). Linux is still struggling to support the load IRIX on SGI hardware could do, although it's quite good now - when we moved away from IRIX we moved to Linux, mostly, and those two operating systems are not unlike each other. It's much easier to jump between those two than between e.g. Solaris and IRIX or Solaris and Linux. Or HPUX. Yuck. And not only because IRIX used GNU versions of some standard tools, e.g. 'diff'.
-Tor
And an SGI Indigo2.
Nice kit. Really need to get them fixed up properly.
(Read: reinstall the OS. The SUNs have borked installs and even a broken HDD in one, on the SGI the OS is OK... I think... bl**dy passwod protection... )
I'd love to add a couple of other models to my collection, but very few of them show up on auction sites here, and having them shipped internationally is too expensive.
To clear the password, you need to mount the disk, and edit /etc/passwd and remove the hash from the root account. This can be done in Linux these days, but you need to fetch a XFS filesystem driver.
If you have installation media, you can boot the IRIX base OS CD into "mini root", where you can then mount the system disk and use vi to edit the /etc/passwd file.
got any I can borrow? Or an .iso file?
Vi?
The only editor that makes Edlin look good?
// Flame On! //
I could try the whole setup when I get back to work after the holidays, i.e. in a few weeks. In the meantime, if you want to follow up on this, please tell me which version of IRIX you have installed (if you know the details). I have several, e.g.. 6.5.12, and some later versions (unless they were thrown away). I also have some which only exists as files (downloaded from SGI at the time).
-Tor