End of an Era

Oracle has dropped Solaris 12 from their roadmap, and while the roadmap shows new SPARC models out to 2020, an acquaintance reports he and the hardware group has been laid off.  So that’s kind of the last active remnants of Sun Microsystems, one of the important companies in the history of the field.

It also knocks another processor architecture out of the ring (though I’m sure people will be patching boxes together to keep them running for years).  It’s now all Intel, except for phones where the power efficiency is just too important to mess around.  (Plus embedded devices, but that’s a different world.)