Debian Drops SPARC Platform Support

jones_supa writes: SPARC isn't exactly a highly-used architecture anymore, so the Debian operating system is dropping support for the platform, according to Joerg Jaspert last week in the "debian-sparc" mailing list. He noted that this does not block a later comeback as "sparc64." Following that announcement, a new post today tells us that SPARC support was just removed from the unstable, experimental and jessie-updates channels.

Comments

Wow, end of an era.

[aussersterne]

For more than just a couple of us here, I suspect, there was a time when "Sparc," "UNIX," "graphics," "Internet," and "science" were all nearly synonymous terms.

Simpler times. Boy did that hardware last and last and last in comparison to the hardware of today.

Well, I suppose it can finally no longer be said that the Sparcstation 10 I keep here just for old times' sake can still run "current Linux distributions." But it's still fun to pull it out for people, show them hundreds of megabytes of RAM, 1152x900 24-bit graphics, gigabytes of storage, multiple ethernet channels, and multiple processors, running Firefox happily, and tell them it dates to 1992, when high-end PCs were shipping with mayyybe 16-32GB RAM, a single 486 processor, 640x480x16 graphics, a few dozen megabytes of storage, and no networking.

It helps people to get a handle on how it was possible to develop the internet and do so much of the science that came out of that period—and why even though I don't know every latest hot language, the late '80s/early '90s computer science program that I went to (entirely UNIX-based, all homework done using the CLI, vi, and gcc, emphasis on theory, classic data structures, and variously networked/parallelized environments, with labs of Sparc and 88k hardware all on a massive campus network) seems to have prepared me for today's real-world needs better than the programs they went to, with lots of Dell boxes running Windows-based Java IDEs.