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A comment on The Helios microkernel. Parent comment

Re:The Helios microkernel by jacquesm on Thursday June 16, 2022 @04:35PM (#31770667)
I think that the 'big names' that threw their weight behind it mostly did so because they realized that (1) they'd never manage to get a community like that going and (2) because it did not seem to compete with their core business.

SUN, DEC, SGI and many others besides that aimed to dominate the server market were left by the wayside, and even Microsoft was running (very) scared. If not for their illegal behavior they too would have lost the server market.

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Re:The Helios microkernel by cmrdporcupine on Thursday June 16, 2022 @04:48PM (#31770793)
Yeah it was a crazy time to watch the whole bottom of the workstation market fall out. Solaris managed to hold on in datacentres for a while, but the others not as much. And a 486 or Pentium running Linux was just as good as most proprietary Unix at the time, or was well on its way to getting there.

I did a summer contract job at an IBM subsidiary in summer 98 or so, and I had a manager there fight me on installing Linux on some spare PCs, because he thought they should be running, y'know, SCO. A Real Unix. It already looked preposterous by then.

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Re:The Helios microkernel by jacquesm on Friday June 17, 2022 @09:27AM (#31777818)
One of those SUN pizza boxes held out so long that the bearings on the drives were completely worn out, everything was moved onto a different machine and when it was powered down you could hear the harddrives have a most horrible crash. The drives would not even spin when powered up again.
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