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The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

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Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

#11

Post by ggm »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #10

It is a good video but it isn't necessarily "accurate." (I worked at Sun from 1986 to 1995) Some things I would have said differently; Sun's biggest potential competitor early on was Digital Equipment Corp's VAXStation. It was only DECs unwillingness to cannibalize the sale of their larger minicomputers that prevented them from sucking a lot of oxygen out of the market. Sun invested heavily in the i86 architecture, c…

The sun crypto card which did blob in the host, super-enciphered key never leaves card en clair to perform sign.. that wound up running the ICANN dnssec root signing for a while. They also wound up moving to other HSM when spares became an issue IIRC, not wanting to be stranded in Oracle.

The E10k was interesting if you went with 'run this Java process and do millions of iops' non-stop. Like tandem/stratus type stuff, or even IBM. But.. sparc and solaris.

that's two innovative, "nobody else much had it" things.

And ZFS. A good legacy. I really regret sun and apple not getting IPR sorted there.

I liked sunview. The sun-1 was OK, the microvaxen we had was less polished physically but truth be told ran faster maybe. (Happy days in ucl-cs mid/late 80s)

Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

#13

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #10

It is a good video but it isn't necessarily "accurate." (I worked at Sun from 1986 to 1995) Some things I would have said differently; Sun's biggest potential competitor early on was Digital Equipment Corp's VAXStation. It was only DECs unwillingness to cannibalize the sale of their larger minicomputers that prevented them from sucking a lot of oxygen out of the market. Sun invested heavily in the i86 architecture, c…

> In the opinion of a LOT of my peers at Sun, THAT was the event that killed Sun. They had fully switched to the dark side of "not open" systems and proprietary everything.

At the time, sure, but surely OpenSolaris was a redemption arc before the end?

Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

#14

Post by throwawaylinux »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #10

It is a good video but it isn't necessarily "accurate." (I worked at Sun from 1986 to 1995) Some things I would have said differently; Sun's biggest potential competitor early on was Digital Equipment Corp's VAXStation. It was only DECs unwillingness to cannibalize the sale of their larger minicomputers that prevented them from sucking a lot of oxygen out of the market. Sun invested heavily in the i86 architecture, c…

Very interesting, thanks for the stories.

I think you were right to identify Opteron as a major threat. x86 had taken at lot of market from the UNIX/RISC vendors with Pentium Pro particularly before that, but Opteron really opened a new front in taking the fight beyond the low-end. There were of course big boutique x86 systems from Sequent and Unisys and the like, but those were more like the big UNIX systems -- expensive low volume custom parts. Opteron was the first x86 with scalable, glueless SMP that shared most IP with low end parts. It wasn't until Nehalem 5 years later that even Intel had a comprehensive answer to it either.

I think Scott was right about BSD being too late though. Linux just had the momentum at that point that the BSDs would never again match. Particularly in commerical and "enterprise" supported products. Oracle DB for Linux was available in 97 for example. Sun would have been pushing shit uphill to convince Oracle to support a new port for a BSD they would sell on x86 systems.

OpenSolaris was really the last straw response to Linux I guess, but that was entirely a case of trying to imitate competitors. Not that it may not have gone somewhere if it was opened earlier, but for a time they actually threw open a lot of their internal development forums and things I remember reading through some of them and their performance and scalability and feature targets for OpenSolaris were literally "try to close our gaps with Linux". It was too little too late.

OpenSolaris around Opteron timeframe might have been a little more interesting, although 2003 saw the release of Linux 2.6, at which point it had really built a good head of steam. So unlikely to have made much difference in the long term IMO. The iron would have been far hotter in the 10 or so years before that.

Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

#15

Post by p_l »

anyfactor wrote: post #2

I wonder how companies like IBM, Intel and Oracle were able to survive through the dotcom crash and 2008's financial recession, where Sun Microsystems essentially got obliterated. Did Sun Microsystems really had that bad of a management compared to them?

In addition to other events, Sun entered dotcom boom a bit from a wounded position due to high volume of recalls caused by radioactive cache in what was to be flagship processor. Meanwhile IBM had a lot more revenue streams (including still x86 machines on low end, AS/400 on middle size, and Mainframe and supercomputing business at the top) that weren't much impacted by fickle nature of dotcom.

Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

#16

Post by neilv »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #10

It is a good video but it isn't necessarily "accurate." (I worked at Sun from 1986 to 1995) Some things I would have said differently; Sun's biggest potential competitor early on was Digital Equipment Corp's VAXStation. It was only DECs unwillingness to cannibalize the sale of their larger minicomputers that prevented them from sucking a lot of oxygen out of the market. Sun invested heavily in the i86 architecture, c…

> Sun's biggest potential competitor early on was Digital Equipment Corp's VAXStation.

Interesting; I'd never heard that. Was it because of customers already using VMS, just as Sun attracted customers already using Unix?

(I worked on CASE for mil/aerospace/datacom and ICEs at the time, and we developed for almost all the workstation platforms of that era, including the VAXstations. The VAXstations were interesting for software, but if you'd asked me then, I would've guessed that they were one of the lesser-important among our customers. Sun seemed most important to us by 1990, and before that, our founding East Coast HQ was an early Apollo shop, nothing DEC. Though a co-founder did have a PDP-8e as a kind of art display.)

Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

#17

Post by DonHopkins »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #10

It is a good video but it isn't necessarily "accurate." (I worked at Sun from 1986 to 1995) Some things I would have said differently; Sun's biggest potential competitor early on was Digital Equipment Corp's VAXStation. It was only DECs unwillingness to cannibalize the sale of their larger minicomputers that prevented them from sucking a lot of oxygen out of the market. Sun invested heavily in the i86 architecture, c…

You're right, it was Slowlaris that killed Sun, and Java was meant to be a "Microsoft Killer", not a programming language.

Sun was a dead man walking long before Java. And Scott McNealy's me-too obsession with Microsoft was extremely unhealthy, leading to him actually naming the division "SunSoft". Never define and even NAME yourself in terms of your enemy. Scott McNealy knew neither himself nor his enemy.

“If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” - Sun Tzu’s “The Art Of War”

Sun could never measure up to Microsoft, and McNealy was totally obsessed with fighting them, to the point that Java was not actually a programming language for solving developer's problems per se, but primarily a weapon in his personal vendetta against Microsoft, and Java developers were considered expendable mercenaries in that war, above all else. Everything they did with Java was measured by how much it would harm Microsoft, not help developers.

Scott McNealy was pathetically and pathologically obsessed with being and beating Bill Gates and Windows, yet so unfit for the task, just as he has been more recently obsessed with licking Trump's boots, raising money for him and his failed coup attempt, and towing his anti-mask anti-vax anti-science line of bullshit.

https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/mcnealy_trump_fundrai...

Michael Tiemann on "The Worst Job in the World":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann

>Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...

>Subject: The Worst Job in the World

>From: Michael Tiemann

>I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]

Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

#18

Post by jacquesm »

college_physics wrote: post #12

Will the sun ever shine again or will it forever remain obscured by dark clouds? It feels strange that the professional unix workstation has gone the way of the dodo precisely when many of its genes are triumphant

The professional Unix workstation now runs Linux and there are lots of them.

I've used SGI and Sun Microsystems hardware (and long before that Apollo, which probably means very little to people today). They were fantastic in their day and the degree of stability that you could get out of those boxes was something that I'd love to have now. But almost all of the functionality with maybe some degraded performance for edge cases (yes, 30 years later...) is now available for free + an old laptop or desktop.

If I had the choice between a modern day Irix workstation or Linux I'd most likely pick Linux, but Irix will always have a special place in my heart in that it was the first OS that made me feel like everything was just right and it enabled me rather than limited me at almost every step. Powertools for the mind.

Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

#19

Post by jacquesm »

DonHopkins wrote: post #17
ChuckMcM wrote: post #10

It is a good video but it isn't necessarily "accurate." (I worked at Sun from 1986 to 1995) Some things I would have said differently; Sun's biggest potential competitor early on was Digital Equipment Corp's VAXStation. It was only DECs unwillingness to cannibalize the sale of their larger minicomputers that prevented them from sucking a lot of oxygen out of the market. Sun invested heavily in the i86 architecture, c…

You're right, it was Slowlaris that killed Sun, and Java was meant to be a "Microsoft Killer", not a programming language. Sun was a dead man walking long before Java. And Scott McNealy's me-too obsession with Microsoft was extremely unhealthy, leading to him actually naming the division "SunSoft". Never define and even NAME yourself in terms of your enemy. Scott McNealy knew neither himself nor his enemy. “If you kn…

Good morning, Don. Between you and Chuck you could probably write a fairly authoritative history of that era. I'd definitely pay to read it.

Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

#20

Post by DonHopkins »

jacquesm wrote: post #19
DonHopkins wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, it was Slowlaris that killed Sun, and Java was meant to be a "Microsoft Killer", not a programming language. Sun was a dead man walking long before Java. And Scott McNealy's me-too obsession with Microsoft was extremely unhealthy, leading to him actually naming the division "SunSoft". Never define and even NAME yourself in terms of your enemy. Scott McNealy knew neither himself nor his enemy. “If you kn…

Good morning, Don. Between you and Chuck you could probably write a fairly authoritative history of that era. I'd definitely pay to read it.

Oh Chuck could probably tell you a lot more than I. I bailed after they surrendered in the Window System Wars! ;)

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...

>The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet.

My housemate scanned and posted to twitter some of the beautiful dreamy surrealistic photo spreads from some old 80's era Sun 4 brochures that I saved. Primo hacker fapping material of the time. The runway shot is my favorite!

https://twitter.com/miuott/status/1238181870816366592

He uploaded the whole Sun 4/200 series brochure to the Internet Archive for your self indulgent pleasures:

https://archive.org/details/sun4200seriesbrochure

Notes from watching the video:

1:10 -- Stanfurd! ;)

3:20 -- Bill Joy: "He also conceptualized an internet-friendly language called JavaScript." WTF?!? Bill Joy didn't invent JavaScript. He was involved with Java, which James Gosling invented, but the language Bill Joy conceptualized in 1991 he called "C++++-=".

https://donhopkins.medium.com/bill-joys-law-2-year-1984-mill...

>Bill Joy’s Law: 2^(Year-1984) Million Instructions per Second: The peak computer speed doubles each year and thus is given by a simple function of time. Specifically, S = 2^(Year-1984), in which S is the peak computer speed attained during each year, expressed in MIPS. -Wikipedia, Joy’s law (computing) [...]

>C++++-=

>“C++++-= is the new language that is a little more than C++ and a lot less.” -Bill Joy

>In this talk from 1991, Bill Joy predicts a new hypothetical language that he calls “C++++-=”, which adds some things to C++, and takes away some other things.

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