Oracle exhumes ‘Older, Still Useful Content’ penned by Solaris and SPARC veterans

Oracle has done something a little odd: exhuming ancient blog posts about Solaris and SPARC by former Sun luminaries that have moved on to other things. The company released one batch in December 2020 when it announced the restoration of 13 articles, dating back to 2006, by former Senior Principal Software Engineer Darryl Gove …

[Spaller]

Oh, how I miss register window traps!

[jake]

If anyone's wondering ...

No, that's not what EReg used to call the trolling of Redmond fanbois.

[sw guy]

Maybe still possible

Given the lengthy life-time of space projects, it is possible some LEON using projects are still alive.

I do not have such feeling for OpenSparc, though.

[jake]

The only thing I miss about Solaris support ...

... is Nancy.

[Danny 2]

Re: The only thing I miss about Solaris support ...

Nancy wore green stockings and she slept with everyone.

I was quite chuffed with Solaris on my CV until someone 'complimented' me, "Really? Solaris 2.7? You don't look that old."

[Mike 16]

Re: Old stuff un ones CV

I included IBM 1401 on mine until 1995 or so. I figured I'd save some time for myself and some interviewers. You know the sort, "guy looked good on paper and has done some impressive work but he probably still has a blunderbuss for hunting pterandons in his desk drawer. No hire" after wasting our time.

Turned out sort of counter-productive when the Y2K effort started heating up.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The only thing I miss about Solaris support ...

[ quietly erases SunOS 4.1.3 from CV .... ]

[karlkarl]

This is great. Some of the Solaris stuff has some great UNIX roots / history and should ideally be preserved.

Is that a hint of passion I see from Oracle? Or was it just a bit of trapped gas?

[stiine]

RE: where did that article go

Nah, it was probably their Solaris support team asking where those URLS went that they've been sending to customers for decades.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: RE: where did that article go

While I applaud Oracle for doing this, I think you're right about it being self serving.

I wish they had gone further. Like transmitting some cash and documents to the Internet Archive's Bitsavers.org document library.

[weyhey]

Re: RE: where did that article go

An officially sponsored open-source release of SunOS 4.x, with their ancient compilers & NeWS etc. would do a lot to mend old wounds and do good in the view of posterity.

But, that's like trying to reason with a lawn mower, and would likely cost millions in lawyer fees to figure out who owns ThE iNtElEkShUl PrOpArTaY.

[Brad Ackerman]

Re: RE: where did that article go

That ship sailed a long time ago, when they broke docs.sun.com (sometime between 2010 and 2013) and anyone with half their sanity remaining decided to start moving everything off Solaris ASAP.

[HCV]

"... a bit of trapped gas?"

Wooooo!

[Anonymous Coward]

sudo?!

Since when is sudo even shipped in Solaris? One should be using the native pfexec instead.

[Missing Semicolon]

Archive for patents

It is entirely possible that some of the technology discussed was new and novel at the time. There's too much stuff that's been around for so long that people are "inventing" it again, and patenting it,

[Blank Reg]

Re: Archive for patents

Yup, I've seen a number of patent applications for things I did decades ago. They weren't patentable then and they shouldn't be patentable now.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Which sounds like once Oracle staff leave the building

Hey boss you know when bob retired last week ?

yes

Well he setup the original master CVS (*) repository for Oracle

yes

Well all his stuff got auto-deleted when his account was closed

* They are planning migrating to SVN any day now

** Seriously we have a vital service account that was registered with an email address for our initial company name, we don't own that domain anymore. If we ever need to reset that password we are fscked.

[sebacoustic]

Fyo point

Does this include the useful article about the economics of software pricing?

[Grunchy]

Oh? Bring back Vans Hardware

He still remembers Ole Reg! But nobody mentions him no more.

VansHardware.com, come on now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Darryl noted this in his blog

For those who are interested: http://www.darrylgove.com/2021/02/featured-in-theregister.html