Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xyzzy3000 301 days ago
The various Sun 'JavaStation' NC models retain the SPARC CPUs of their workstation line - they definitely do not use ARM.

JavaOS was in ROM, on a module that can be removed (SIMM-style form factor). At one point people started to use BOOTP to run Linux compiled for SPARC as a replacement, as JavaOS was unpleasantly slow on JavaStation hardware.

1 comments

Thanks, I stand corrected about the CPU

So Sun Network Computers were JavaOS on SPARC, Oracle were NCOS (Acorn RiscOS derivative) on ARM – and I think IBM's had a similar tech stack to Oracle's...

were there any others?

Correcting myself:

IBM Network Station used PPC

And although its OS was called “NCOS”, it was completely different from Oracle’s NCOS. It was apparently a closed source derivative of NetBSD