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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."
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.
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.
'' Alan Butler, employee number 530, who at age 18 was once Sunâ(TM)s youngest employee, mused somewhat wistfully: âoeWe should have charged $1 a seat for every Java licenseâ and that would have generated billions in cash annually, perhaps saving the company. âoe ''
Fool. You'd have made about $300. With all of Java's other early problems, a price tag would have ended it before it could gain any momentum.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
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.
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.
Fool. You'd have made about $300. With all of Java's other early problems, a price tag would have ended it before it could gain any momentum.
Pretty much the same thought I had -- I was wondering what technology would occupy java's current space if they had done that.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
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.
Well, $1 from every Android phone would have been a lot. But Google probably would have just used something else instead.
I can't say I ever really wanted Java for anything, once I got a feel for what it was - just plain terrible.
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?"
Fool. You'd have made about $300. With all of Java's other early problems, a price tag would have ended it before it could gain any momentum.
It's quite likely exactly this thinking that played a big part in killing Sun. They always made massive contributions and then screwed up saying something stupid against open source. Even with some of the most major FOSS packages coming from Sun they often achieved an image as a big corporate ant-freedom group. Microsoft, which is actively working to destroy open source all the time often comes across better. Look at the way they carefully licensed ZFS so it didn't go into Linux. Look at how they completely failed to get OpenSolaris to take off. A real shame.
Java: Why explain everything you need to know about what went wrong in a one line error message when a three page stack trace can leave you totally confused instead?
When Java started, it was competing against VisualBasic and a lousy version of Visual C++. And Microsoft looked like they were going to own both the server and the desktop, with UNIX and Linux effectively limited to plain C. Furthermore, most people who advocated Java at the time (including me) were fully aware of its numerous technical shortcomings. But Sun had promised to go through with ANSI/ISO standardization, and we had hoped we could fix many of its problems during that process, just like people had done for ANSI C. Since Sun had generally been decent about open source and community involvement, its withdrawal from the standards processes and subsequent proprietary stance on Java came as a complete surprise.
It's a shame that Java didn't turn out to be better. But Java has its uses, even if it is just keeping people who shouldn't be programming from interfering with people who do real work.
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?
Just $1? They should have asked $100 per license and they would have earned hundreds of billions in cash anually!
Heck, why not ask $1mln per license; they'd have more money than exists in the world.
Reminds me of something that happened while I was waiting in line at a DIY store. Some guy had two coupons for 20%-off, two for 15%-off and he was demanding 70% off in total. Why didn't he just wait until he had two more 15%-off coupons? I swear to this actually happened; I didn't even spice it up.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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
The difference between free and $1 is enormous. Not just to Linux users, to humans in general. Free is hypnotic. $1 is just a low price.
A good keyboard should be sturdy enough to beat a man to death with.
And then use to write his obituary.
Have gnu, will travel.
Reminds me of something that happened while I was waiting in line at a DIY store. Some guy had two coupons for 20%-off, two for 15%-off and he was demanding 70% off in total. Why didn't he just wait until he had two more 15%-off coupons? I swear to this actually happened; I didn't even spice it up.
The inability of a large part of the population to understand junior high maths and that ratios (like percentages) are multiplied instead of added is one of the reasons why so many coupons state "may not be combined with any other offer or coupon". It's not that they want to limit your savings, but because quite frankly, too many people should never have graduated from the primary school system, and are likely to throw a fit at the register, just like your guy did.
Another reason for the same common restriction is that even among those who do understand that percentages are multiplied there are a lot of people who didn't even learn the commutative laws in school.
I was in line behind a lady who complained that the clerk took the 10% off coupon off before the 40% off coupon, and demanded that they revert it and ring the purchase up again with the 40% first. The idiot behind the counter complied and then when the amount came to the same blamed the register and store policies.
I so wanted to put both of them out of my misery.
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.
Like they say about people telling Woodstock stories, you obviously weren't there...
I was at Sun doing market development in the healthcare and petroleum "verticals" when Java came out. I'm telling you, the interest was staggering. I once spoke on Java at a local JUNIOR college weekend CS/Internet interest forum to nearly a THOUSAND people, including top IT staff from NASA and all the major oil companies. I just broke the awesome oceangoing coffee mug they gave me about a year ago.
I can tell you that although we all realized Java was a good implementation of some great ideas, we were pretty much taken aback with the Java frenzy that ensued, and quickly moved to leverage it for all it was worth. (With a couple of decades in the rearview mirror, it's easy to forget how revolutionary Java really was at the time, and how hungry the world was for what it offered - namely the most open cross-platform platform and programming environment anyone had ever seen. It didn't hurt that the Java wave lined up really nicely with the 64-bit UltraSPARC architecture's amazing price/performance.)
It worked - Java was HUGE for both reestablishing Sun as a power player in technical and scientific computing, but also breaking into other lucrative markets we'd been frozen out of, including finance and healthcare - Before Java, Data General had far better name recognition than Sun - I literally met with a BIG heatlhcare CTO who's first question was, "So you're with Sun OIL?" He didn't even know there was a computer company called Sun. Shortly after, he was leading a transition to Sun hardware and software across his entire company. We got him hooked up with the right talent to integrate several critical Java-based products and he saved millions the first year, even after all the switching costs.
Trust me, we could have sold Java seats, no problem, although being free certainly helped its popularity and stood out from other "enterprise-capable" languages. The big mistake was when the programmers took over and turned a great system focused on cross-platform results and networked computing into something that tried in vain to check every box on the academic CS geeks' wet dream list, and the simple but vital stuff (like say, nailing down a single place where one could expect to FIND a JVM/JRE of a particular version on any given OS platform, to name one example of thousands) fell by the wayside.
Sadly, Java's never really recovered from the bloat it acquired in trying to be everything to everyone, but it did blaze the pathway for others, including what we called "Java with semicolons": the JavaScript that rules the web now and for the foreseeable future...
Sun was an amazing company with amazing people doing amazingly innovative things (NFS, YP/NIS/NIS+, Java, same binary desktop-to-supercomputer with transparent 64-bit support (compare Sun's 64-bit transition to IBM/HP/DEC's 64-bit cluster foxtrots - Sun's thinking here continues to fuel the current ARM revolution). There were some stinkers, but overall , we'd all be better off with Sun's innovation still pushing things forward. In a lot of ways, Sun was a better Apple than Apple when it came to "doing it right", especially back in the Java days, when we passed on actually buying Apple...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last