The original Internet was more VAX based than Sun based. Sun set the
record for startup to $1 billion in annual sales (4 years) by providing
low cost, high performance RISC based Unix boxes. They were really
very 'Open'..published the dies for the SPARC processors and dared
anyone else to make them better. Developed and gave away the specs
for NFS, NIS (Yellow Pages) and several other standards. They really
did to IBM/Digital/Unisys/Bull what the PC's almost did to them and what
Linux is now trying to do to MS. Of the computing giants in place at
the 'dawn' of the Internet, only IBM is still flourishing (restrict that
to USA based). Sun was a major player in opening standards and pushing
competition.
Oh, and Bill Joy is the author of vi.
HP-UX scales into tens of thousands of users nicely as well, as do IBM
mainframes.
I really don't think you can support tens of thousands of interactive
users (not just email) on Intel hardware yet. Least not on a single box
like a Sun E10000 or HP V-class or SuperDome. Would love to hear
differently.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wildman jim@rossberry.com
On Tue, 2 Oct 2001, Bryan-TheBS-Smith wrote:
> Of course, as does UCF, UF, FSU, etc... SUN originally stood for
> "Standard University Network". The original Internet was almost
> totally Sun-based, and Sun's BSD-based SunOS ruled the campus
> backbone. You'll find Solaris throughout most universities
> everywhere, at least large ones. Most universities run Solaris
> because it is one of the few platforms that can support tens of
> thousands of users. When you have that many users, you cannot have
> "active" networking going on like Novell and Windows.
>
> Until recently, the only way to scale to that many users was c/o Sun
> hardware and OSes. Now that BSD/Intel and Linux/Intel has become a
> half-way scalable solution (on the tens of thousands of users
> level), it is getting more popular at the campus-wide level as
> well. Windows still seems limited to departments although Microsoft
> is trying to change this with XP and AD.
>
> -- TheBS
>
>
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