I started using M68K based Sun 3 machines in high school in 1991. In college from 1993-97 we had thousands of Suns, HP-UX, DEC Ultrix, Unix RISC workstations on campus.
I joined the semiconductor industry in 1997 and all of of chip design EDA software ran on Suns. Everyone had a Sun on their desk and some people also had a Windows PC for MS-Office. We had big 14 CPU Suns in the server room with 16GB RAM for big jobs and would remotely display to our local Sun machines via X11.
I convinced my manager to let me install Linux on a PC and we got a 21" monitor running beyond 1600x1200 (1800x1440 I think) and everyone thought was much nicer, quieter, and most importantly far cheaper than the Sun on their desk.
Then everyone decided to switch and we stacked all the Suns in the server room.
In 1999 we were trying a new chip synthesis tool from a startup called Ambit (later acquired by Cadence) I submitted a bug report with a crash dump showing "Sun4u SPARC Solaris 2.5" and got a reply back from the support showing they replicated the crash and it had "i686 Linux 2.0 GCC" or something in the log.
I was surprised to see that the developers were running it on Linux. You could only buy this software for Solaris / HP-UX / IBM AIX. I asked for the Linux version and the developer said "We don't sell the Linux version, we're a startup that doesn't have money to buy a Sun for every developer so we use Linux x86 and then compile for Sun/HP/IBM at the very end"
Around 2002 the Linux / x86 machines had gotten so fast and cheap that the EDA companies started releasing their software for Linux and we started buying Linux machines. I remember recompiling a custom Linux kernel to change the user / kernel memory split for 2GB / 2GB to 3GB user / 1GB kernel and then 3.75GB user / 250MB kernel. We had some programs that needed over 4GB RAM so we kept a few 64-bit Suns for those.
Then the AMD 64-bit Opteron came out and it was all over. We never bought a Sun after that.
I'm still in the semiconductor industry and everything still runs on Linux. We have clusters with tens of thousands of Linux machines and access them via a remote X11 desktop session (Exceed, NoMachine, X2Go)
> Then the AMD 64-bit Opteron came out and it was all over. We never bought a Sun after that.
Sun actually sold an Opteron based workstation, reusing the 'Ultra' name, for a quite reasonable price then. A buddy of mine, interested in Java development, bought it (and a few years later gifted it to me). It was a well engineered PC (could run MS Windows), with Solaris installed (I only ever used it with Linux).
I joined the semiconductor industry in 1997 and all of of chip design EDA software ran on Suns. Everyone had a Sun on their desk and some people also had a Windows PC for MS-Office. We had big 14 CPU Suns in the server room with 16GB RAM for big jobs and would remotely display to our local Sun machines via X11.
I convinced my manager to let me install Linux on a PC and we got a 21" monitor running beyond 1600x1200 (1800x1440 I think) and everyone thought was much nicer, quieter, and most importantly far cheaper than the Sun on their desk.
Then everyone decided to switch and we stacked all the Suns in the server room.
In 1999 we were trying a new chip synthesis tool from a startup called Ambit (later acquired by Cadence) I submitted a bug report with a crash dump showing "Sun4u SPARC Solaris 2.5" and got a reply back from the support showing they replicated the crash and it had "i686 Linux 2.0 GCC" or something in the log.
I was surprised to see that the developers were running it on Linux. You could only buy this software for Solaris / HP-UX / IBM AIX. I asked for the Linux version and the developer said "We don't sell the Linux version, we're a startup that doesn't have money to buy a Sun for every developer so we use Linux x86 and then compile for Sun/HP/IBM at the very end"
Around 2002 the Linux / x86 machines had gotten so fast and cheap that the EDA companies started releasing their software for Linux and we started buying Linux machines. I remember recompiling a custom Linux kernel to change the user / kernel memory split for 2GB / 2GB to 3GB user / 1GB kernel and then 3.75GB user / 250MB kernel. We had some programs that needed over 4GB RAM so we kept a few 64-bit Suns for those.
Then the AMD 64-bit Opteron came out and it was all over. We never bought a Sun after that.
I'm still in the semiconductor industry and everything still runs on Linux. We have clusters with tens of thousands of Linux machines and access them via a remote X11 desktop session (Exceed, NoMachine, X2Go)