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Comment by somnium_sn | Hacker News Reader

For some Solaris has been one of the first UNIX experiences, as it was one of the most popular unices out there. Most university used it before Linux became popular.

For others, like me, who learned Solaris fairly late (2006), Solaris was a testbed for one of the best operating system technologies out there. Modern filesystem (ZFS), dynamic tracing (dtrace), containerization (zones), dependency management during boot (svc) and virtual network stack (crossbow), have been in solaris way before Linux. Most of modern Linux tools, such as eBPF, systap, btrfs, etc are a direct answer to the research done by Sun.

So some are nostalgic as it's their first experience, others, because it felt like a really good operating system a few years ago (despite it's quirks).

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> For some Solaris has been one of the first UNIX experiences, as it was one of the most popular unices out there. Most university used it before Linux became popular.

This was my case. I was playing around with Linux, both on my own machine at home as well as with a server at my high school (shell accounts being a perk of joining the computer club). While learning about Linux I also picked up some of the history of UNIX. At some point I learned that you could get a copy of x86 Solaris 7 for for < $50 (I can't remember if this was an educational offer or a developer network offer). But I ordered one and was really excited to get to use a real UNIX. I played with it for a while, but ended up going back to Linux for my own computers. Later, in the last year and a half of undergrad and my first year of grad school, I used a Sun Ultra 5 to do the work for and write my first published paper and do much of the work that would end up becoming my MS thesis and my second paper (with some of the heavy lifting outsourced to an Ultra 10 that a postdoc in the research group was using).

Every few months I browse ebay and look at SPARC machines. Though it's not really practically useful, I think it would be cool to have an Ultra 5 again.

> I think it would be cool to have an Ultra 5 again.

I have an ultra 5 in a closet that hasn't been powered on in the current decade. Was thinking of giving it a spin in light of recent news.

That would be fun. Now you have me wondering if I still have those Solaris 7 disks in a drawer somewhere...

If you do and you happen to be in the bay area, I may need to borrow them. :-)

I thought about that machine and I wondered which would be more interesting... Trying to get a recent OS on there or maintaining a more typical 90s setup? Somehow I think the latter is more fun.

I'd agree that the 90s setup would be more fun. Unfortunately I don't think my disks would help though – if I remember correctly, they only had the x86 version of Solaris 7.

I had an ultra 10 in my bedroom closet and it was impossible to sleep with that thing on. But I don't think it was much worse than HP 9000s or IIRC DEC alphas. Feeling nostalgic now.

My 90s university cohort became part of the dot.com boom, and thanks to their ubiquity in the CS labs, ordering Sun kit seemed like the familiar, natural, and obvious choice.

"Get 'em whilst they're young" - I doubt it was an intentional strategy for Sun, but it definitely helped their sales in the bubble.

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