Yeah, that was amazing. And so, I learned how to provide LILO + agetty on COM1 on every server I was admining :) So, unless there was HW fault, I could just connect to server via serial to check things out.
replyWhy is that a property of the ISA?
replyIt's path dependence. If you built a Sun-syle x86 server with a serial console and inserted a random Linux installer CD, the installer would probably only output VGA and thus it wouldn't work.
reply> You seem to be focusing strictly on performance,
replyJust like the vast majority of buyers do. SPARC was abandoned by customers due to poor performance.
> but there were other factors: e.g., remote management is still a bit of a mess with x86
That's a property of the systems integrator, not the ISA. Dell's iDRAC works quite well.