[rescue] SunOS 4

[Alan Perry]

I worked at Sun on Solaris (on commands and libraries), starting during 2.4 development. Development builds were done on one’s desktop.

I started with a contractor using a SS1+ as my desktop and switched to a SS2 when I became an employee. IIRC, each had 32M. Desktop responsiveness was similar to other systems I used (I had a 386-16 or -20 running SVR3 at home). I recall build times being a bit slow but not crazy slow for what I was used to.

Having said that, by Solaris 7, Sun had moved on to sun4u. We all had Ultra 1s at a minimum. But that OS is too much for any sun4c machine. I have 2.6 on my IPX with the clock doubled processor and the expanded memory and that is still painfully slow.

alan

> On Jan 4, 2025, at 14:22, Alexander Jacocks via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:
> 
> I once installed Solaris 2.7/7 on an SS2 with 64mb and 2x 7200rpm 500mb HDDs. It took 2 days just to install, though part of that was the 2x Sun CD-ROM that I was installing it from.
> 
> I only did it to see if it was possible, and it was, but it was completely unusable.
> 
> Interestingly, as slow as the microSPARC II in the Classic/LX is, Solaris 7 and 8 runs at least acceptably on those. Obviously, NetBSD is a -lot- better.
> 
> - Alex
> 
>> On Jan 4, 2025, at 5:33 AM, Chris Hanson via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:
>> 
>> There’s a good reason Solaris was jokingly referred to as “Slowlaris.”
>> 
>> At least as of 7.x, NetBSD was within 10% of SunOS performance on Sun SPARC hardware with sufficient RAM. If only it had the window system device support, SunOS binary compatibility would effectively make NetBSD a *real* “SunOS 5."
>> 
>> -- Chris
>> 
>> 
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> 
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