Thursday, September 10, 2009

Wither Solaris x86 (again)?

So, there's a message to Sun's customer's in the Wall Street Journal, highlighting some of Oracle's plans should their acquisition of Sun be approved (at this writing, the deal is pending EU approval). The ad states that Oracle plans to:

1. Spend more money developing SPARC than Sun does now;

2. Spend more money developing Solaris than Sun does now;

3. Have more than twice as many hardware specialists selling and servicing SPARC/Solaris systems than Sun does now;

4. Dramatically improve Sun’s hardware performance by tightly integrating Oracle software with Sun hardware.

Notice that mention of Sun's AMD and Intel x86 systems is suspiciously absent (and has been absent from all public words I've seen from Oracle). Does this mean anything? Sun tried to can Solaris x86 (concentrating on big SPARC systems) a few years ago which resulted in a massive backlash which forced them to reverse their decision, so one would hope that Sun's new owners wouldn't duplicate that mistake...

Rhetorical questions are fine, but let me ask a direct question to those in the know: What are Oracle's plans for Sun's x86 hardware support if/when they take over? Given their silence on this issue (as far as I've seen, anyway), I don't think it's an unfair question.

If Oracle has no plans to drop support for x86 (hardware or software), perhaps they should be a bit more vociferous about it.

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Lots of old Sun stuff free or cheap to a good home!

Well, the time has come for a long-overdue clear out and tidy up of my office, and regretably some stuff has to go. :-( It would be much easier to just chuck this stuff away, but given that at least some of it might have some historical curiosity, I wanted to see if anyone was interested in it. I don't want much, if anything, for this stuff (although I ask that interested people pick up the tab for shipping), provided it's to a good home.

Here's a partial list of the stuff I'm disposing of (there are still boxes of stuff I need to sort through). If interested, drop me an email!

* Insignia Solutions SoftPC 1.1 for Sun 3 systems. Complete package as far as I can tell.

* Pretty much complete SunOS 3.5 manual set. No binders, and most of it is still shrink-wrapped. Still in it's original shipping carton!

* SunOS 3.5 Export for the 68020, on 5 QIC 24(?) tapes.

* UK Sun Express catalogues, Issue 2 to Issue 20.

* SunOS 4.0.3 Export Upgrade, on 2 QIC24 tapes.

* Various old SunSolve and Catalyst CD ware CDs.

* Various Solaris media kits (mostly different Solaris 9 releases IIRC).

I'd really like the SunOS 3.5 tapes and manuals to go to a Sun museum if at all possible. I'll be listing more stuff in the coming weeks/months, so stay tuned!