[http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/paulhu/Weblog/what_would_have_happened_if?] Paul Humphrey Sunday, October 31,2004 What would have happened if Sun had ported Sun unix to the early intel platforms.. I remember well when I had a Sun 2 running Sun Unix 2.0 when an early IBM PC landed on my bosses desk. It had no window system and was pretty basic. Even then the Sun had sunview windowing , networking, NFS, NIS and more. We all know what happened next the PC nearly grew up and got Windows on it. Even then it was not a truly multi tasking environment. Sun sold a x86 box - the Roadrunner and put Sun Unix 4.x on it. The question is what would have happened if when PC's came out Sun had done a port of Sun Unix to the x86 platform ? It is a moot point and the important thing is we sell Opteron desktops and and servers and an operating system with features in it to impress all I reckon. Add to this the JDS productivity enviroment and its game over ! COMMENT: Port SunOS to the x86? We did,of course. The first x86 that was really capable of supporting Unix was the 80386 (yes, I know about the 286 hacks - don't go there), and the 386i (Roadrunner) was not that far behind the Compaq Deskpro 386. We used the Deskpro as our development platform while we got the 386i hardware debugged, which meant that we did have SunOS on the x86. Could we have released a generic "SunOS for the x86"? Of course not. Perhaps you have forgotten the chaotic state of the PC graphics hardware market back in the late 80s. The first EGA cards were becoming available, but they were so buggy that it was impossible to read data reliably from their status registers. Various companies sold proprietary graphics boards targeted at particular markets, including a lot of hi-res monochrome which was much better for CAD than the crude color systems. And everyone was scrambling to figure out how to create device drivers to support the various DOS-based graphical environments such as Windows 1.x, DESQview, Gem, and so forth. The upshot was that high-end PC applications were all written to a few popular products, such as the DeskPro with Compaq's own graphics board. Faced with this, and with the support of ISVs like Autodesk and Mentor, Sun quite reasonably decided that if it wanted to get into this market the only thing that would make sense would be an integrated system: the 386i. And so we did. In retrospect, the problem was that Sun was still too small to support multiple architectures, and with the Motorola to SPARC transition taking place there was no room for an x86. C'est la vie. Posted by Geoff Arnold on October 31, 2004 at 10:59 AM PST Website: http://geoffarnold.com