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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]

#21

Post by chx »

neilv wrote: post #16
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 fo…

> Was it because of customers already using VMS,

Certainly. Vaguely in the 80s VAX was massively popular with universities and the government. Today you'd think the twenty grand price of the first PDP-11 (in 1977 dollars, too) was very high but when you compared it to an IBM machine of similar capabilities and there was no one else to compare to, that was pocket change. And then it was pretty much a given there is a VAX supermini somewhere in the building so why not get the workstation from the same company?

They had -- for the time -- pretty good software too. They were absolute trailblazers. X Windows added color support to support the "Caylith" (marketing name VAXstation II/GPX) with its high performance video card. You couldn't possibly get more bleeding edge than that.

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

#23

Post by DonHopkins »

ggm wrote: post #11
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…

Sun-3's had an empty socket for DES chips (AmZ8068 Data Ciphering Processor (DCP) from AMD) that were never widely used outside of NSA, for export control reasons.

Ironically enough, John Gilmore build the EFF "Deep Crack" DES cracker in Sun 4/470 chassis. I coined the name as homage to Deep Blue and Deep Thought, and to signify that there was a deep crack in the US export control policies, which the project was meant to point out.

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

https://cryptome.org/jya/des-cracker.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20040223021545/http://www.eff.or...

https://rescue.sunhelp.narkive.com/ErZgSQER/sun-des-chips

>"Bug Id: 1107024 Synopsis: man page for des(1) contains humorous but inflamatory text in RESTRICTIONS. Description: The man page for des(1) contains the following text in section RESTRICTIONS

>Software encryption is disabled for programs shipped outside of the U.S. The program will still be able to encrypt files if one can obtain an encryption chip, legally or otherwise.

>While this is intended to be funny, the concern is that the State or Defence departments may interpret this as an endorsement (or encouragement) by Sun for users to illegally "obtain an encryption chip". [...]

>"The hardware of Sun 3 and 4 workstations supports a data encryption chip (DES), but the federal government pressured Sun to eliminate the DES chips from their products. For this reason the DES chip's IC socket is empty in these workstations." [...]

>Now being curious, I went to the Sun 2 Multibus Rev R ROM that Matt Fredette has posted on his Sun-2/120 emulator page (http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~fredette/tme/sun2-120-nbsd.html).

    % strings sun2-multi-rev-R.bin
    
    @(#)version.c 2.8 85/02/19 Copyright (c) 1985 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
    Rev R
    
    , DES chip
    Love your country, but never trust its government.
>I doubt the line "Love your country, but never trust its government." is intended to be spit out on the console. It appears someone at Sun added a subliminal protest against the government to the Sun-2 BootROM code...!

The actual story behind the string "Love your country, but never trust its government." in the Sun boot ROMs is that John Gilmore (who wrote the original Sun boot ROMs -- the first ones long before Mitch Bradley's FORTH Open Boot ROMs aka OpenFirmware) put that in there as an easter egg, such that if you typed it at the boot loader prompt, it would echo it back to you instead of printing an error message. That was done so that there was a way to prove if a competitor had copied Sun's boot ROMs, and it was actually used in court to win a copyright infringement case.

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

#24

Post by DonHopkins »

chx wrote: post #21
neilv wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fo…

> Was it because of customers already using VMS, Certainly. Vaguely in the 80s VAX was massively popular with universities and the government. Today you'd think the twenty grand price of the first PDP-11 (in 1977 dollars, too) was very high but when you compared it to an IBM machine of similar capabilities and there was no one else to compare to, that was pocket change. And then it was pretty much a given there is a…

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

>The X-Windows Disaster

>[...] The color situation is a total flying circus. The X approach to device independence is to treat everything like a MicroVAX framebuffer on acid. [...]

>[...] My super 3D graphics, then, runs only on /dev/crt1, and X windows runs only on /dev/crt0. Of course, this means I cannot move my mouse over to the 3d graphics display, but as the HP technical support person said “Why would you ever need to point to something that you’ve drawn in 3D?” [...]

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

#25

Post by DonHopkins »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #13
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?

AKA OpenSores. ;)

The Day SunOS Died:

https://www.stokely.com/lighter.side/day.sunos.died.html

    "Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
    ATT System V has replaced BSD.
    You can cling to the standards of the industry
    But only if you pay the right fee --
    Only if you pay the right fee..."

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

#26

Post by zozbot234 »

jacquesm wrote: post #18
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 e…

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

Come on, macOS is Unix certified. Linux is not.

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

#29

Post by mpweiher »

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

...runs on your desktop in the shape of macOS (via NeXT) and in your pocket via iOS and on your wrist via watchOS. And Android as well.

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

#30

Post by ekianjo »

zozbot234 wrote: post #26
jacquesm wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> The professional Unix workstation now runs Linux and there are lots of them. Come on, macOS is Unix certified. Linux is not.

Who cares about the UNIX certification
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