[alynn]

> My understanding is that Joyent is comprised primarily of Sun refugees

This is by far the best explanation I have heard. Suddenly Joyent makes sense to me after all these years. They have been continuing to do what Sun did.

In a very similar way to how Sun followed the fatal strategy of simultaneously trying to make money selling proprietary Unix hardware, while also making their software open source and porting it to more popular architectures, while simultaneously developing Java as a portable programming language intending to erase all differentiation in underlying architecture/OS differences …

Yes: Joyent is (was) a hosting company trying to compete with AWS, claiming technical superiority in the software stack. Yes they also make an OpenStack competitor. And had their own programming language runtime, node.js, which seemed to be an odd implementation choice for their classic old-school unix tech. All of the above.

[wahern]

Technically SPARC is an open standard, and importantly Fujitsu sells their own hardware. OpenBSD has done some pretty cool mitigations on SPARC. What killed SPARC was that there hasn't been entry-level hardware for over 15 years. ARM become popular because of things like the Beagleboard and later Raspberry Pi. Enthusiasts and developers could experiment and familiarize themselves with the ecosystem, building mindshare and expertise.

Sun would have done better to have made SPARC hardware more accessible than to have open sourced Solaris. Hindsight is 20/20, but now that we've reached the limits of single-threaded performance Sun's emphasis on multi-threading and specialized ISA extensions would have made both Solaris and SPARC competitive today.

Getting there would have required cannibalizing their enterprise income, though, and that's difficult if not impossible for any company to do. They made the gamble on Solaris because it was less risky--major enterprises were always going to stick to Sun's Solaris--but low-end SPARC hardware absolutely would have hurt their bottom line.

[hinkley]

Part of the overengineering in J2EE comes from essentially trying to make one app server be multitenant instead of just spinning up one process per tenant.

That this came from a company essentially selling mini computers.

In fact, we are trying to do multi-tenant all over again. To my mind, this cycle of containerization is still trying to fulfill all the promises we were given in the early 90's about memory protected, pre-emptive multitasking OSes that never came true. Which itself wasn't the first time (it's all copying mainframe ideas, badly). Given all of the problems coming out about speculative execution and data breaches, I'm already curious what the next set of promises will look like.

[snaky]

Didn't AS/400 fulfill the promise? OTOH it may been considered 'mini-mainframe'.

[unixhero]

Yes. And it was awesome.

[rhinoceraptor]

The original pitch of Node.js matched well with Unix, it was a simple programming model that exploited async I/O abstractions in Unix.