31–40 of 112 posts
I was at SUN in the mid/late 90s, when Java and the E10K were released. It was a glorious place to work, with an amazing corporate culture. Their sale to Oracle was a tragedy.
At least it seems oracle's stewardship of java is good enough (atm at least...).
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.
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.
Also on iOS some POSIX APIs are no longer useful, like the new networking stack.
I was at SUN in the mid/late 90s, when Java and the E10K were released. It was a glorious place to work, with an amazing corporate culture. Their sale to Oracle was a tragedy.
would they have been better had their sale been to google? Coz that was the only possible alternative outcome tbh. At least it seems oracle's stewardship of java is good enough (atm at least...).
That would have been nice.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mean…
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 quarter that burped also had the problem that IT was late transitioning the ERP system from the HP3000 setup while a new product mix was brought out: the final set of the Sun 3 line (including the 3/85)powered by the MOV 68030 and the SPARCststion 1.
Marketing had guessed wrong at the mix (SS1 was ordered in far larger volumes than had been built, while 3/85s and their cousins languished on the shelves), but the ERP system wasn’t ready, so Sun management was flying blind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
would they have been better had their sale been to google? Coz that was the only possible alternative outcome tbh. At least it seems oracle's stewardship of java is good enough (atm at least...).
Sun once tried to merge with Apple That would have been nice.
It seems likely a Sun-Apple would have ended up with both companies destroyed, and Steve Jobs might have spent the early 2000s hawking enterprise web dev software like he was doing at NeXT in 1995.
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…
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…
I think IBM buying redhat and aggressively pushing Linux was also a big factor in killing sun
I was at SUN in the mid/late 90s, when Java and the E10K were released. It was a glorious place to work, with an amazing corporate culture. Their sale to Oracle was a tragedy.
Again, I can't speak for other parts of the company, and maybe Java's successful integration into Oracle has been a fluke (given Java's immense success and that it's at the cutting edge of compilation and runtime technology; I do know that the experience of Sun engineers in other areas has not been anything like that of the Java folks), but the Sun people in JPG have been very pleased with how it's been going overall. The work culture in the JPG and the mix of talent and personality, also compare very favourably to Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Netflix (based on reports of friends or hires that came from those companies), and at least on three occasions engineers that left for some of these companies have come back.