Intel sabotaged Solaris on Itanic – Sun
Sun has renewed its offensive blaming Intel for the abandonment of the Solaris OS for Itanic port. (Note to newer readers: Itanium is Intel's 64 bit chip, which was scheduled to revolutionise enterprise computing by 1998, and is apparently still in development somewhere at Zilla.)
Sun VP John Loiacono told The Register that Intel had withheld key technical information and resources from Sun engineers, forcing Sun to shelve the project.
He said that Sun was still sore that Intel had gone blabbing to the press with the news first, and spread the word that Sun was deliberately going slow because of its own interest in SPARC chips.
But surely, we asked, you just need a prototype IA-64 box and a compiler, and off you go? No said Loiacono, Sun's channel of documentation and errata had dried up, leaving the porting team flying blind.
Loiacono said Sun later surmised that Intel had made the strategic decision to bank on Linux as the Unix for the Itanic. Which, is what it is, after the parallel cancellation of the joint IBM/SCO Project Monterey to create a merged AIX/UnixWare for Itanic.
