Sun introduces first Intel workstation in two decades Common knowledge dictates that fashion comes in cycles. That rule applies inside Sun Microsystems, although one could argue they're spinning in their own separate mobius when it comes to workstations. Hey, remember Intel? Sun just did. Sun announced today it will release its first Intel-based workstation since the late 1980s …
The 386i was something of a revelation for its day. It was wicked fast for a 386 workstation when it first appeared and had the cleanest design I'd seen to that point: a bare minimum of cables, even the chips were arranged in a visually pleasing manner and not a patch wire in sight.
The Sun 386i (apart from sounding like one seriously fast BMW 3-series) looked like a bog-standard beige tower PC, if I remember correctly. Except with lots of lovely full-length vertical ventilation slots on the front for that "go faster" look. No blue neon tubes or furry dice, though. I thought that Google would be able to dig up a picture from the dusty archives of yore but it has failed me.
No the Sun 386i (aka Roadrunner) was not a pizza box rather a mini tower. They were designed by the Sun "East Coast Division" to be easy to configure out of the box. ECD did a great job and came out with what they called Plug and Play which meant you took one out of the box, stuck it on a network with other Roadrunners and they all justed worked together. No Unix command lines needed to manage them just a set of gui tools - way ahead of their time in a lot of ways.
Sadly ECD were out on a limb in Sun and all the great stuff they did worked well between Roadrunners but they did not play well with other Suns (or other Unix workstations for that matter) and most of the stuff they did got lost in Sun politics. A real shame as the dynamic configuration stuff they did was very innovative.
My problem with Sun's AMD & Intel offerings is that they do not offer a writable optical drive as a build-to-order option. Your choices are DVD-ROM & DVD-Dual, and as far as I can tell the DVD-Dual is not writable. Sun's standard way of distributing Solaris x86 is for you to download & burn ISO images, yet they don't sell workstations that come with a way to burn the images.
What has made Sun drop the beautiful Sun w1100z / 2100z cases in favor of these white, blocky things with the sexyness of a truck radiator?.
See the Uglification of Sun Workstations
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2339/1031/1600/the-evolution-of-the-sun-workstation-cases.jpg
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