Hello world!

Tap tap tap… Is this thing on?

Ah yes. Welcome to “Solarizer”, a blog I’m beginning which will document my journey into the world of OpenSolaris.

It is a really a return journey in many ways, because I’ve been using Suns for a long time. A surprisingly long time, thinking back!

I think my first real exposure was at university, where we had Sun 3/50s and 3/60s, and I think a bigger 3/something too. Some of them had the most enormous colour screens, and they ran SunView instead of X11, and then NeWS. SunOS 3.5!

Then I had to join the dreaded Real World. But Suns popped up there too, at which point they were running Solaris 2 and I ran a little network of them using NIS+. I managed to survive that while remaining sort of sane.

Then I joined a relatively small software house called Isode, writing mail and directory server software on (mainly) Solaris 2.5.1. We even had our stuff on some little Gateway laptops running Solaris x86, which was amazingly cool.

Then… well, Linux became an acceptable platform to sell software on, and mostly the company changed to working on Linux. And our Linux boxes were great, vastly faster than our old Sun workstations.

Solaris 7 came and went. We made sure our stuff still worked.

Solaris 8 came and went. Ditto.

Solaris 9 too. Ditto.

Then Solaris 10 happened, and things started to get much more interesting!