Port SunOS to the x86? We did,of course. The first x86 that was really capable of supporting Unix was the 80386 (yes, I know about the 286 hacks - don't go there), and the 386i (Roadrunner) was not that far behind the Compaq Deskpro 386. We used the Deskpro as our development platform while we got the 386i hardware debugged, which meant that we did have SunOS on the x86.

Could we have released a generic "SunOS for the x86"? Of course not. Perhaps you have forgotten the chaotic state of the PC graphics hardware market back in the late 80s. The first EGA cards were becoming available, but they were so buggy that it was impossible to read data reliably from their status registers. Various companies sold proprietary graphics boards targeted at particular markets, including a lot of hi-res monochrome which was much better for CAD than the crude color systems. And everyone was scrambling to figure out how to create device drivers to support the various DOS-based graphical environments such as Windows 1.x, DESQview, Gem, and so forth. The upshot was that high-end PC applications were all written to a few popular products, such as the DeskPro with Compaq's own graphics board.

Faced with this, and with the support of ISVs like Autodesk and Mentor, Sun quite reasonably decided that if it wanted to get into this market the only thing that would make sense would be an integrated system: the 386i. And so we did. In retrospect, the problem was that Sun was still too small to support multiple architectures, and with the Motorola to SPARC transition taking place there was no room for an x86. C'est la vie.</p?

Posted by Geoff Arnold on October 31, 2004 at 10:59 AM PST #