21–30 of 211 posts
They shouldn't have killed an excellent processor (the Alpha) which already had tons of software and history and was already being used in the fastest supercomputers in the world for a product that was never (and still isn't) proven. The Itanic was never best in its class at anything.
The end of an era and one of the worst technology bets / choices. Every time I hear Itanium I think of SGI going under.
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Which of those proprietary systems were your favorite (or hated least) and why? Which did you dislike the most?
I liked pretty much anything in the early days because it felt something like a small exclusive club, and a global discussion network like Usenet was just so unique. That experience of helping someone across the globe while sitting at home was just really cool. The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it mu…
AIX, if I remember right - it could have been HP/UX, seemed to be the one with the most broken out as extra cost options, like cc etc.
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I liked pretty much anything in the early days because it felt something like a small exclusive club, and a global discussion network like Usenet was just so unique. That experience of helping someone across the globe while sitting at home was just really cool. The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it mu…
Oh, forgot to mention a funny thing about Sparc machines. It was trivially easy to accidentally halt the system by sending a break from the console. That's accidentally pressing one key on a serial console. I remember some company selling inline serial filters for $100 each.
Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance. On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started. Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe desi…
Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance. On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started. Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe desi…
I don't think it's fair to say Kernel research is a thing of the past.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I liked pretty much anything in the early days because it felt something like a small exclusive club, and a global discussion network like Usenet was just so unique. That experience of helping someone across the globe while sitting at home was just really cool. The sweet spot technically for me was probably later Solaris with things like zones and dtrace that nobody else had. The popularity of Solaris also made it mu…
My early career involved compiling a lot of software that would have been better run on Linux or some BSD variant for AIX. I can confirm that building stuff like a custom Apache stack on AIX (don’t ask) was like pulling teeth using XLC. I’m not really old enough to be an actual grey beard, but I got just enough hands-on experience with late-period Big Commercial Unix to feel like I at least swept floors and fetched c…
Edit: Well, also the security implications of the Linux/x86 monoculture.
Mixed feelings. On the one hand, Itanium (as a platform) was batshit insane, impossible to write good compilers for and the pinnacle of Intel overengineering. Good riddance. On the other hand, Itanium was ugly, but had its charm and uniqueness. Itanium is what EFI was first developed for. Itanium is where the C++ ABI got started. Itanium being discontinued further reduces mainstream CPUs to the most boring, safe desi…
The funniest part of Itanium for me was that it was supposedly helpful to compilers. Yet the compiler people I knew did not like to use the "helpful" parts of the ISA. The loop unrolling stuff got in the way of software pipelining, for example.
Mill is an example of a processor that's actually helpful to compilers, because its design is being led by an actual compiler person.
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Last I looked, they were porting HP/UX over to x86. The port came up in the whole HP vs Oracle lawsuit.
There was talk of this, but it went away. The last suggestion I’ve read about were some kind of ‘containers’ which emulate HP-UX https://www.pcworld.com/article/3196353/data-center/hpe-offe... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/08/hp_ux_on_x86_projec...