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Comment by throw0101a

8 hours ago

> Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps.

SPARC was not proprietary, buy fully licensable:

* https://sparc.org

Fujitsu sold their own SPARC servers for many years with their own CPUs, and many third-parties put Fujitsu SPARC CPUs into (e.g.) laptops:

* https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...

Can you get an x86_64 CPU from someone other than Intel or AMD? x86 is much more proprietary than SPARC ever was.

Sun used the non-proprietary Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) for booting (also used by Apple with PowerPC), and SBus (IEEE 1496) for cards before moving to PCI. SCSI and Ethernet/IP were there since forever as well.

The "proprietary" label on Sun, at least when it came to hardware, was always a mystery to me.

9 comments

throw0101a

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spauldo  6 hours ago

It's the platform that's proprietary.

Sun used a lot of open parts, but they had absolute control over the platform. Everything in your solution came from Sun or a Sun partner. Fujitsu doing weird stuff with Japanese mainframes was an interesting fact but irrelevant to 99% of Sun's user base.

Intel/AMD combined with EFI or IBM-compatible BIOS? You can get that from anybody. An HP server is basically interchangeable with a Dell.

Sun was proprietary in the same way Apple is.

  • throw0101a  4 hours ago

    > SPARC has been licensed to several manufacturers, including Atmel, Bipolar Integrated Technology, Cypress Semiconductor, Fujitsu, Matsushita and Texas Instruments.

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC

    Fujitsu was selling Solaris-compatible systems (as were many others). Linux and BSDs also ran on them.

    There were a number of x86 makers up until the 1990s or so, but who is left of them? Can you still license x86(_x64) to fab your own CPUs? You can with SPARC:

    * https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr765

icedchai  5 hours ago

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.