On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 9:11 AM Larry McVoy <
lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 02:10:14AM -0600, arnold@skeeve.com wrote:
> emanuel stiebler <emu@e-bbes.com> wrote:
>
> > On 2019-07-11 18:50, A. P. Garcia wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jul 11, 2019 at 12:31 PM Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Did Sun have anything to do with that? I seem to recall something
> > > called "Interactive Unix" for the 386, possibly marketed by Sun...
> >
> > "Interactive Unix" was pretty nice back than.
> > Anybody remembers ESIX? Still have the document wall for that ...
> >
> > Cheers
> >
>
> Sun had a '386 based system in early 90s-ish called the Road Runner.
> I never saw it. It ran SunOS 4.x and I think was discontinued by the
> time Solaris 2.x came along.
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.
And wasn't it a weird version of SunOS? Support for the Roadrunners was only in a couple of releases too (4.0, 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 only). Most of the sunos sources that have fallen off a truck on the internet are 4.0.3 and newer, so there's no i386 support in them. I used a Sun386/250 at Wollongong to do testing. Mostly it ran X and was one of the available X workstations in the testing lab since it was weird enough people didn't want to use it (though the Sony News box next to it might also have come in a close second for weird).
The wikipedia page says there was a Sun486 (code named apache) that was designed and a few built, but that was then cancelled before release.
Warner