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After the Sun (Microsystems) Sets, the Real Stories Come Out
Tekla Perry (3034735) writes "Former Sun executives and employees gathered in Mountain View, Calif., in May, and out came the 'real' stories. Andy Bechtolsheim reports that Steve Jobs wasn't the only one who set out to copy the Xerox Parc Alto; John Gage wonders why so many smart engineers couldn't figure out that it would have been better to buy tables instead of kneepads for the folks doing computer assembly; Vinod Khosla recalls the plan to 'rip-off Sun technology,' and more."
See subject.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I thought the sun had already set on Sun long ago, when Oracle bought. Doesn't it still exist, though, to a degree, in the divisions and products that continue inside Oracle.
In its last days, the contributions of OpenOffice seem to have been most beneficial for providing real user control and freedom, hence not being locked into proprietary, centralized software development where users of software could not see or control any of the code that controls their computer.
Don't Read the Fine Article.
Very pointless and uninteresting.
Facebook intentionally left a few Sun signs up when it took over the former Sun campus in Menlo Park to remind people of what can happen to a company
Let's hope Facebook's successor doesn't bother doing them the courtesy. After all, at least Sun left a legacy of something tangible behind.
Better known as 318230.
So the Sun workstation being inspired by the Alto is "the real story coming out"? I'd rather call it "slow news".
Ezekiel 23:20
Unsurpassed.
I still use it, hooked up to a self made PS2 adapter, to my Intel box running Linux.
Why?
It has keybeep!
I know it's a security issue.
But what the heck.
I need the audible feedback.
Roger Gregory tells a good story of making the first private (non-government entity) order from Sun as COO of Project Xanadu (XOC).
In Palo Alto, Roger hears of the Sun 1 via word-of-mouth and trade journals, raises the cash, fills out the form and sends in his order. And invoice comes back, with instructions to pay via bank (wire) transfer and an estimated delivery date.
About a month after the date, Roger and others are eagerly awaiting the machine, which has not arrived.
Roger gets on the phone and calls the number for Sun in Berkeley. Bill Joy answers the phone and, after some back-and-forth, says he will need to transfer Roger to the “accounting department.”
Bill sets down the phone and it becomes clear to Roger, who can hear the background noise, that Sun likely only has *one* phone line at this point. Shortly, Vinod Khosla picks up the phone with a "Hey, Roger!"
After about three minutes of chat, Vinod explains “Oh! We were wondering where that $40,000 in our account came from!” and promises to get the machine to XOC ASAP.
The Sun 1 shows up at XOC’s offices about two weeks later, as I remember. The machine is still in Roger’s basement last I knew.
We attached it to the Internet and ran a simple webserver for a short period in mid-’99 or so. Around that time, Bill stopped by for breakfast and offered a six-figure sum to buy the machine back, which Roger declined.
We were well on the way to computerizing the planet and miniaturization was already begun before NASA was told to put a man on the Moon.
Deal with it.
Alan Butler, employee number 530, who at age 18 was once Sun’s youngest employee, mused somewhat wistfully: “We should have charged $1 a seat for every Java license” and that would have generated billions in cash annually, perhaps saving the company. “There's a fine line between doing good for the community and doing too good.”
I'm not sure how that would have worked.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Some additional nostalgia from 1997...
Escape from MicroSun (aka "Friday Afternoon") is a text adventure (written by a Sun Microsystems employee) where you play the part of a programmer for "MicroSun" and have to escape the office by 6pm for a date.
Facebook intentionally left a few Sun signs up when it took over the former Sun campus in Menlo Park to remind people of what can happen to a company) the people inside will still be working on cool technology.
Oh god! Comparing those two companies is like comparing McDonald's with a five star French restaurant.
SUN created cutting edge hardware. Invented new technologies. Actually added value to society, the economy and science.
Facebook is a dipshit consumer data pimping and advertising site that not only adds nothing to society but has actually hurting society by making its users even more isolated and keeping them in front of the modern Boob Toob. People are using Facebook as a substitute for real human interaction.
I'd be proud to have worked for SUN and I'd be ashamed to work for Facebook.
I hope every programmer, developer or JavaScript "engineer" that walks past that sign looks at it and asks themselves, "Why the fuck am I wasting my life at this worthless place contributing nothing of value to the World?"
Most of that was Scott McNealy's poor direction and his ego.
Standing on stage and comparing his dog to Gates - adding absolutely nothing to the presentation - doesn't exactly instill confidence or give one a sense of professionalism.
Another great keyboard. When someone pissed me off or says or does something stupid, I just smack them with the Sun 4 keyboard, then hit the caps lock key to fix it. A great keyboard.
Shortly after the user authentication problem I got stuck behind a group of their engineers walking to the cafeteria, having a loud discussion about the poor quality of the Linux kernel code. Having just seen some of the coding going in in Sun, it was pretty hard not to tell them scornfully that I'd seen Sun code and they didn't have any room to be talking about anyone else's. Admittedly our project was after Sun was hacking up blood. They sold a few months after I left.
It was interesting to see the difference between IBM and Sun. IBM had process, but they didn't let it get in the way of their work. At IBM you always felt like someone actually knew the big picture and every product was made to be sold to customers. Sun had more of a underwear gnome business plan of making cool stuff and somehow money would magically appear.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
New for 800.00 From a TRW screw up.
It was awesome to be me for awhile.
Their contributions to modern society can never fully be comprehended.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There were a lot of Sun people who celebrated the demise of Digital Equipment Corporation.
Well, what goes around comes around eventually. Sun got theirs, let them rot in pieces. They never made the impact that Digital did.
(and no, I'm not bitter about Sun. I'm waiting for HP's turn. It's coming...)
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
:D -ober
It's the no good deed goes unpunished file. Sun does a bunch more for open source than any other major public for profit company at the time. Geeks shit all over them for not doing everything up to a Communist-sympathizing FSF thinks is necessary.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and Oracle act like asses and thrive on aggressively proprietary and expensive software.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and Oracle act like asses and thrive on aggressively proprietary and expensive software.
There are hundreds, even thousands of other companies which are taking the proprietary additude and not getting far. Most of them simply fail. The Microsoft, Oracle and SAP spaces are taken. Sun could never have beaten Microsoft in the "be evil" category.
SUN had a real chance to take RedHat's space from a much stronger base with Oracle's hardware business and Microsoft's government business. They could even have taken part of Google's space. This needed active and open cooperation.
Came into Sun through the MySQL acquisition. Working out of a country Sun was not legally present into. They decided to make me a contractor !! Because they couldn't just assign me to one of the other EU countries offices ! And as a "contractor" I was managing employees ! Not to mention that I had to beg for my salary each month because of my status ! What a royal mess! :) I almost got lynched in one of the Sun UK offices because of this.
And this setup was invented by people flying to all mysql offices in a private jet!
Not to mention how other "classic" Sun people hated us because their beloved management spent a cool $1b on us instead of giving it to them
So glad Oracle stepped in and disposed of our little pony and co !
These guys were capable of getting a perfectly working business and screwing it up in a very short time!
RIP Sun ! You WILL NOT be missed !
And it's a good thing fb keeps few Sun signs as a warning of believing you're something you're not!
I'm going to have a go at explaining to readers how it 'felt' to use a workstation. I have a friend who experienced the same thing working on Apollo workstations too.
There was this feeling - I can best describe as being like what many people report they had as kids with home micros. You woke up and here was this awesome machine that just begged to be played with, have hardware added to etc. It's an awesome feeling of discovery and exploration and possibilities. It's like the feeling you can have if you grab a nice big piece of blank paper and a pen. You can write whatever you want on it, draw on it, calculate something on it...
For me - and other folks who had access to workstations it was just like that feeling. Suddenly you had this machine that was fast, had a great display, a great operating system - SunOS 4.1.3 . the machine was there and all that compute + display + disk was there for YOU. It wasn't locked up in some server some other place and you weren't competing with everyone else.
Later on Sun came out with some really cool things too. Anyone else remember NeWS? That was pretty cool....NFS for as many problems as it has is still actively used all over the place.
Why did Sun die? They died because they stopped doing what they started doing. The actual model for Sun in the early days was they would take a standard Unix and build a workstation (or server) wrapped around it. They actually used to say that they weren't going to lock people into their system - they would make their system open - and compete based on having the best product. Think about that for a minute. They were saying 'We wil build the best damn workstation, and you will buy it because it's the best damn workstation'. Now you can argue if the SPARCStation 1+ was better than an Apollo or a MIPS but as a business strategy it's hard as a consumer to complain about it. It was a massive departure from what DEC did.
Bullshit. Sun started by making BSD proprietary. Then they tried to kill X11 and replace it with their proprietary crap. Then they promised to make Java a free and open standard, which turned out to be a lie. And when Java was failing, they tried to pull another fast one with the GPL/JCP crap.
Sun was arrogant and evil from beginning to end. Microsoft and Oracle at least didn't pretend to be anything other than what they were: companies making proprietary software.
Opensource GNU/Linux software emulated much of the fabulous SunOS. Sun could not compete in hardware price.
My current company has always used the UNIX platform sinc eits start in thel late 80s First we used IBM PowerPC, then that plus Sun, then Sun plus Linex, and finallung Linux64 alone.
Borland might still exist and sell a cross-platform variant of Delphi/Pascal, because developers had not been led into the shitpile of "free development tools".
Actually, Java was an excellent sales tool for all hardware makers from Micron to IBM. Java wastes voracious amounts of memory. In many ways it is a regression relative to C++ and Pascal. The omission of destructors alone is a massive regression. The inability to allocate on the stack (except for primitive variables) is also a massive, idiotic waste.
Finally, the SPARC processor was shit relative to x86, at least performance-wise. Good riddance, SUN.
Open source did destroy Sun. But not with criticism. Sun failed to recognize the threat from Linux until well after Linux's performance and reliability had achieved parity with Solaris.
That Java ran very poorly on Solaris also did not help.
The match between Sun and Oracle still strikes me as bizarre. Oracle software favoring Sun workstations can only hurt Oracle. And the only synergy between the two is that a lot of Oracle software can run on Sun equipment.
IBM would have been a much better match. Owning Sun's IP would have allowed IBM to incorporate the best remaining pieces of Solaris into Linux, cementing IBM as THE vendor for large-scale Linux equipment. And Java would have put IBM back on the general computing map without the risk inherent to the PC hardware business they sold off.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
That feeling you describe about using a workstation? That was the feeling I got from using a PC. Workstations were far out of reach for me at that time.
I was at Sun from 1997 to 2004 and there were good and bad times. I saw my first Sun 3 in 1988 thereaboouts and did some development work. C and shell, and then system admin of small LANs for a couple of start-ups and research operations and a couple of tech support roles. It was tech support I did at Sun mostly supporting Solaris and later legacy compilers. I left Sun because the emphasis had moved away from Solaris and on to Java and related tools. I felt that the APIs were poorly designed, too big, and complex. For me, as a visually impaired person the coding conventions in Java were hard to deal with and the language hard to use from a support role. I had been supporting the OS and legacy compilers and found Java to be an annoyance. I also felt that Sun was playing catch-up to other IDEs at the time and not doing too well. Later, Netbeans would look competitive to me, but not back in 2004. I think that the shift after 2003 and the emphasis on Java was what killed Sun. I think that Sun could have made more revenue from the FORTRAN compiler and legacy tools than it ever did from Java and that it mstepped and paid the price. I never liked Oracle and Larry Ellison and wonder how the HW guys are faring in that scam. Sun might have prospered if it pushed Solaris more on X86 and it failed because it let technology beat performance of its SPARC platform. I am not sure that Oracle can do better.
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