I would expect something truly intelligent to be able to communicate well, if nothing else. That means knowing your audience, using plain language where it makes sense. Also, it yaps on and on, babbles endlessly when it a human would likely express something in a much shorter concise way. This is especially obvious when you generate project READMEs or technical docs. I find them borderline unreadable.
It smells of corporate speak, a total nonsense phrase. Even by your own admission, it is essentially meaningless. If I release a model an hour late, I'm "pacing the frontier."
This sounds right. There was a "dark ages" in the early 2000's, where Unix/Linux browser support was terrible. You were either stuck with old Netscape 4.x, which crashed every half hour, or you had to work with half baked, almost unusable beta builds of Mozilla (pre-Firefox). Because of this, I actually ran Windows on my desktop for a while!
It wasn't just the chip, it was the whole ecosystem.
Could an every day consumer buy a Sparc motherboard, chip, and build their own system? No. There may have been one or two vendors that did that late in the 90's, but they didn't stick around.
Yes you could do this, from Sun Microelectronics back in the 1990's.
We purchased an Ultra-10 motherboard with 250 MHz Ultrasparc II in 1998/1999, fitted it out with compatible third party SVGA, Ethernet and SCSI adapters and ran Solaris on it. Was our production LDAP, Mail and database server for a small ISP for many years.
I later worked for a systems builder that built and sold Sparc/Ultrasparc systems for government (eg. Hong Kong Mass Transit). We were the only vendor in the Southern Hemisphere doing it. So it wasn't common. But yes you could order parts from Sun Microelectronics and build your own systems, and it became easier use certain standard PC compatible parts once they standardised on PCI. We had shelves full of the older incompatible MBus compatible systems and boards as well.
You kind of proved my point: that's an embedded platform. No consumer is going to be running it. The last link indicates "VxWorks, PikeOS, and RTEMS operating systems available."
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you can load a Linux distro on there. You have a couple other problems: there's no ethernet or wifi, and you only have 512 megs of RAM.
> You kind of proved my point: that's an embedded platform. No consumer is going to be running it. The last link indicates "VxWorks, PikeOS, and RTEMS operating systems available."
"Consumers" can be running it just as much as "consumers" could be running Raspberry Pis, which could also be considered 'embedded' by some. SPARC is no less (or more) proprietary than ARM: you can license the ISA, fab a CPU, and sell some kind of hardware stack.
Do you think it would be more or less difficult to get a license from Intel/AMD for x86(_X64) than ARM and/or SPARC so you could fab your own chips?
So you don't think the complete lack of connectivity (video, networking, and storage) is going to be a problem for a normal person? There is absolutely no comparison with a Raspberry Pi. It has all those things and great software support. That Sparc platform is for a satellite!
But yes, you are correct, it's much easier to get a SPARC license.
Solaris 2.4 and earlier was a little rough. I no longer remember the exact details, but 2.5.1 was the first release I felt comfortable running instead of SunOS 4.x.
I'm willing to bet they couldn't have done that because of the mind-boggling array of 1990s UNIX standards Solaris seemed to support. By the mid 1990s it was clear that the (platform-independent) GNU command line tools were generally superior to what was on Solaris, but presumably they had to keep all the old fossils around to satisfy their long-standing supply / support contracts with industry, defence, and government.
That was my guess back then, and it's my guess now. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong and you know for certain why.
I'm not saying it would've been easy. They could've installed the GNU tools in a different path and left it up to the user to change their preference. They did something similar with putting the BSD tools in "/usr/ucb" (I may have that path wrong.)
They could've also just built a real package manager, left it up to the community to add GNU tools. I remember the Solaris package situation being annoying, having to download crap off FTP and install manually. Or often build from source.
Solaris was pretty bare bones, out of the box. I spent days customizing it. Even early Linux distros, like Slackware, were in better shape.
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