21 Jan
2023
21 Jan
'23
12:57 a.m.
On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 1:39 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote:
[snip]
Would Open Solaris been flexible enough to fit on
wrist watches and handheld phones? It's definitely an interesting
question, especially, given Linux would have a head start in those
worlds.
Given that those phones and wrist watches are orders of magnitude more
powerful in just about every way than the SPARC machines Solaris had
been running on at the time, I'd guess the answer to this would be
"yes". Whether that would have been the right call from a commercial
perspective is the more interesting question. It could certainly have
cleared the technology hurdles, though.
- Dan C.
Last summer, still recovering from the after-effects of a bout of
COVID and jetlagged from our last trip to India, we took our kids
swimming. I very carefully put my keys and wallet into my bag, and
jumped into the deep end of the pool with my older kid...only to
almost immediately remember that my phone was in the pocket of my swim
trunks. Oops. My trusty Pixel 5 (which I liked very much!) did not
survive. A new Pixel 6 came a few days later. It struck me, looking at
its specs, that it was more powerful in every dimension than the IBM
ES/3090-600S I used briefly in the early 1990s...and that machine
routinely supported 1,000 interactive timesharing users under VM/ESA!
It certainly blew the few UltraSPARC machines I still have down in the
basement away. I haven't benchmarked it, but I imagine even the IO
performance is better.