Starfire

I once wrote about the Enterprise 4500. Above it sat something far more monstrous.

Sun Enterprise 10000. Codename Starfire. Not a quarter-rack affair. The chassis itself was the rack. Up to sixty-four UltraSPARC processors and sixty-four gigabytes of memory. You could dynamically partition it into domains and run multiple Solaris instances inside a single enclosure. What VMware does in software, this thing did in hardware. Fully loaded, it cost over a million dollars.

Like the 4500, you could yank a CPU board out while the system was running and swap it. Hot swap. Unthinkable on commodity x86 gear. No need to power down. A part fails, you replace it live. For systems that could never stop, they built hardware that never had to. Today you just add redundancy in the cloud. Back then, everything rode on the reliability of a single machine.

I saw one for sale once. A corner of a UNIX specialty shop in Akihabara.

Ten thousand dollars. Absurd. New, this thing cost over a million. Used, ten thousand. I seriously considered scraping together every dollar I had. Then I looked at the chassis. Thought about how to get it through the door. Thought about the floor load rating. Realized it wouldn't run on single-phase 100V household power. Gave up. Electrical work, floor reinforcement, a moving crew. The costs around the machine would exceed the machine itself.

A quarter century has passed. The MacBook I ordered last week is far cheaper and far faster than a Starfire. No installation work required. Moore's Law kept delivering, bending its own rules through multicore. Of course, what I do with all that computational power is open a browser and an editor and let AI write my code.

That machine I encountered in that Akihabara corner has probably been melted down for scrap by now. Maybe it lives on as parts inside someone's smartphone. Silicon and copper once valued at a million dollars, reborn as fragments of a device worth a few hundred dollars. The machine itself probably doesn't know.