Sun and the CPU Wars (was Re: NeXT cubes or slabs.)

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Fri Jun 26 19:16:35 1998

William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net> wrote:
> > So...how did/do you read the 386i?
>
> A bad mistake.

I gather that is what Sun feels these days too. A while back I asked
a friend within Sun who has been able to find interesting stuff for me
from time to time whether he could get certain information about the
386i[1], and that is about the answer I got: don't ask about the 386i,
no-one wants to remember.

> God only knows what they were thinking - the 68020 and 68030 machines were
> quite capable at the time.

Well, one view is that they were thinking with a different brain --
the 386i was a somewhere-in-Massachusetts creation, while the rest of
Sun is in (or slightly north of) Sillycon Valley and I've gathered
didn't pay much attention to the 386i.

Also (from looking at the manuals) I gather it would have made a
pretty nifty MS-DOS development environment for its day, being able to
boot MS-DOS in several independent virtual machines. I'll have to
play with that someday and see how well it really works.

> Wasn't the i386 pretty much a failure by the time the Sun-4s came out.

I don't think so. In fact I think it came out pretty much
concurrently with, or maybe even shortly after the early Sun-4s -- it
only ever ran its peculiar version of SunOS 4.0.x. That's why I used
to think of it as Sun hedging its bets on the future.

-Frank McConnell

[1] Someone wanted to port Linux to it. No, I don't understand why,
there are plenty of i386s in the world to run Linux, and besides the
Sun 386i and the appropriate SunOS really sort of go together IMO.
But I figured I would inquire anyway, one can never have too much
documentation.
Received on Fri Jun 26 1998 - 19:16:35 BST