Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386

Funny you mention that, I recently pulled this ad from SUN: https://books.google.com.hk/books/content?id=GTwEAAAAMBAJ&hl=en-US&… These days, there’s absolutely no limit to the things you can add to your PCs. Coprocessors. VGA cards. Large scale monitors. Network cards. But no matter how many thousands of dollars you pour into your PCs, they still can’t give you what you get with every Sun workstation. The screaming-hot performance. The multi-tasking. The high-resolution graphics. And the built-in networking. And now, we’re introducing a new workstation that makes all the shortcomings of your PCs even more obvious. SPARCstation™ IPC. At $8,995*, it’s the lowest cost, full-color RISC workstation in the world. By far. In fact, it’s about the same price as a high-performance 386 PC. But just look at the difference…. Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Larry McVoy Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2019 11:11 PM To: arnold(a)skeeve.com Cc: tuhs(a)tuhs.org Subject: Re: [TUHS] Old 386 Unix Versions, was: Re: PCC for the i386 On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 02:10:14AM -0600, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote: Yep, can confirm. I was a fan but the powers that were at Sun at the time just didn't want competition for SPARC. Which was sort of silly, a 386 was nowhere near as fast as the SPARC chips of the day, that was when RISC actually made sense. But perhaps they had a crystal ball and could see that x86 was going to be as fast or faster down the road? I tend to doubt it, they really looked down on the 386.