Sun

Hi everyone,

Kind of slightly strange question for you: could anyone suggest me a sort of guide on Sun Solaris proprietary software? Yup, I'm already aware of Blastwave.org, Sunfreeware site et cetera, but keyword is 'proprietary' — is there a way to eye-embrace online most of Solaris shareware range?

Any link? Any hint? Any clue?

Proprietry means commercial. Just a reminder....



For commercial packages, it depends on what you are looking for. I worked on extensions to "Risk Vision" which was run on an SUN e25000 for Basel compliance for managing banks spread of risk. I suspect that is not what you are interested in. The list of commercial software for Solaris is as long as you arm.

I have no idea what you mean by eye-embrace and normally people just choose one or the other software repo like blastwave, CSW, etc..and stick with what is in that.

R.

There's such a list of IRIX ISV products on this site so I doubt it's against the rules. If you wanted to run stuff from repos like blastware or nekoware, you'd get a much better experience from something like FreeBSD or Linux on your system or even PC anyway.

Guessing the poster wants to know what the machines were "really" used for. Sure, plenty of people bought Suns to run a Emacs and a compiler.. FOSS and UNIX have long been close to one in the same and now mostly are. But a lot of the workstation boom was about single task engineering computers. Think products like CATIA.

Seems like sun was commonly used with heavy-duty EDA tools. anybody have an example of such software (i.e. screenshot) they could share? I've never needed anything more than Eagle...

No, but the OP was "aware" of blastwave, etc and talking about "shareware", which if you never saw shareware (Commander Keen, etc) you might associate with sharing and the whole confusion about "proprietary"... Best to cut it off at the pass before the moderators have to get involved.

R.

Ah yes.. stupid me, I worked in this industry . Cadence was definitely big on Sun. We had an Ultra 5 with IC 5.x for compatibility testing. The CEO of our company was in charge of methodologies at Motorola at the turn of the millennium and always claimed to me he was the catalyst for moving the EDA industry to Linux . Tangential, man that kind of propriety software sucks. The atrocities these people put out.. funky shell scripts, environment vars, weird ass installers, directory structures, core dumps... *shudder*. Typical license costs might be around $100k for the honor of enduring all that.

Here's an off topic. My IBM RS/6000 7012-397 ($80k desktop with 1GB RAM) came out of Intel on a skid of about 30 other RS/6000 workstations. I speculated the only need would've been EDA but it's pretty damn ironic to me? I think Intel was in bed with HP by the time these came to market though so it seems like a pretty big competitor order.

I think we're all aware of the rules, and the OP definitely should be now so lets leave it at that. It's an interesting topic for war stories if we could try and pinpoint interesting proprietary software.

I had a tape of Cadkey 6 for Sun at one time. So there's one .....

ComputerGraphics ran on Suns for a while, but that might have predated Solaris. The CADDstation that passed through my hands was based on a OEMed 3/160.

Wasn't Mentor Graphics Sun for quite a while?

FrameMaker was big on Sun as well, better than the Island ports (SunPaint, SunWrite, SunDraw) for big projects (though it didn't do the graphics).

For a while Apple had their Macintosh Application Environment (System 7 emulator) for Solaris.

Here's a quick list of the "Third Party" disks from the UltraPack v.2 (sort of a Hot Mix for Solaris)

Camelo (Caldera Imaging), HyperWave (Graz University), PolyTrans (Okino Computer Systems), WorkXPert (Mentor Graphics), EarthVision (Dynamic Graphics), EZ3D, ILOG Vision, Stampeder (Facet Decision Systems). Note that this was the time that Sun and HP were trying to go head-to-head with SGI, so there was some things on there that probably were not big on Sun (the 3-D software for one).

I remember that Nendo from Nichimen (a polygon modeler for games and simulations) was released on Solaris. There was also a period when some companies were making digital video capture and editing products for Sparc, and Evans and Sutherland sold 3D graphics hardware for them.

Also don't forget HyperLook , a NeWS framework that was used for some commercial apps.

I dug around the 'net and found mention of the following:

Adobe: Photoshop, Illustrator, Framemaker, Acrobat
Matlab
Mathematica
Dassault Catia
Houdini
MentalRay
Electric Image Universe
Nendo
Lightwave
Alias Studiotools
Prman
ProE
SolidEdge

Obviously Oracle is available too..


Other than that, I'm struggling - I never really got to use Solaris at the time - uni had already moved over to 95% windows come 1998..

I think Electric Image should say EI Universe, as that was the only version that was ported to Unix.

It would be nice to categorize them by what hardware they ran on as well. I know there was some TGS software (OpenInventor) than ran os 32bit SPARCstations and later 64bit they even provided their own direct opengl implementation for ZX TGX SX etc.... I think the ZX was actually accelerated.

Also the graphics tower not long ago was most likely used for early 3D cad/cam which then moved striaght to the ZX as it worked better... going from some of the developers remarks the GT wasn't very good.

Sun Doom
Hot Java
Star Office

(Edit: Oops already mentioned...)

Possibly the best program to run on Solaris:

Macintosh Application Environment (MAE)
http://www.aux-penelope.com/mae/index.htm

Corel WordPerfect 6 GUI and/or 5.2 CLI.
Picked up an old school boxed version off Ebay UK a month ago... works great under Solaris 7.

CDE, nice! No Java Desktop System for you?

The only reason I've still got my Blade 2500 is for two programs: Rational Rose 2002 and Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 4-point-something-or-other.

I know; a coder and a CAD monkee, I'm weird...

As an aside, last time I checked (fairly recently) IBM was still selling Rose for Unix. Single seat licenses were in the neighborhood of $10,000 US.

Rational Rose? Never could get on with it. Seemed to be an extension of the bloat ware that was J2EE at the time.

No way man, Rose is the source, it'll change your life...