[Beowulf] SGI and Sun: In Memoriam
Joe Landman
landman at scalableinformatics.com
Wed Apr 1 07:45:14 PDT 2009
Robert G. Brown wrote:
> Alas, Sun persisted in the blind view that PCs were never going to
> compete with Sparc, with MIPs, with DEC Ultrix boxes, with IBM AIX in
> the workstation world. Even the Roadrunner was an afterthought,
s/persisted/persists/
This is a current religious mantra within Sun, that Solaris/Sparc will
(eventually) kill Linux and x86/x64. Um. No. That game has been over
for a while now.
[...]
> Sun thus stood on the top of the mountain in 1990 -- the overwhelmingly
> dominant workstation manufacturer, with the world's hands down best Unix
> -- nobody who worked with a mix of the Unices then available would ever
> argue with this, as AIX sucked, Ultrix sucked less but still sucked (and
> the DEC workstations sucked), Irix sucked (although the SGI workstations
> still didn't suck), and then where do you go? NeXT OS had potential but
Hmm... I take issue with "Irix sucked" ... then again I am biased as I
learned Irix right after Unicos and Sunos. Compared to either of those,
Irix (from a user perspective) definitely did not suck.
[...]
> At this point the writing was oh-so-clearly on the wall. The highest
> end Intel OTC systems were maybe 1/3 of the price of the mainline Sun
> Sparc boxes. The latter still had an edge in price performance --
> seriously, right up to somewhere in the 1993-1995 range -- but for
Hmmm.... I was running MD on a desktop 486 machine that outpaced the Sun
unit (supposedly a faster box) in 93 or so. Sun has rarely if ever had
a fast chip/box.
[...]
> So let us all bid adieu to two more of the ancient giants, killed by
> their own lack of perception and market vision more than anything else,
> killed by a refusal to see the world as it is and adapt to it unstead of
> holding onto a broken dream of enormous profits not backed by the
> delivery of anything like competitive or comparable value as the world
> changed faster than they could.
Spot on. A toast to two fallen giants. I raise my cup of coffee to
them both.
> rgb
--
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
phone: +1 734 786 8423
fax : +1 734 786 8452
cell : +1 734 612 4615
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