Not sure what year they arrived, but Ohio University still has an entire lab equipped with old Sun systems. Intro to programming or whatever all engineering majors have to take have their class in that lab… have been there for at least 15 years to my knowledge.
The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]
41–50 of 112 posts
Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]
#42I 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...).
IBM was the other offer on the table. Scott managed to scuttle the deal but his ability to do so was far from a certainty since he was already out as CEO.
Google was pretty much incompatible, they had no interest in workstations or paying for quality as their focus was redundant arrays on inexpensive machines.
Fujitsu was the best actual option for commercial compatibility, but everyone felt it would be a waste of time to pursue that as the USG would almost certainly block a foreign sale.
Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sun once tried to merge with Apple That would have been nice.
That would have been instead of the NeXT merger which brought Jobs to Apple. 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.
What a different world that would've been! I wonder which company would've made the trailblazing iphone in this alternate reality world...
Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]
#44It 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 started to turn into DEC when the manufacturing people started getting hired from DEC into Sun. 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 la…
I was working at a university when the sparcstation 1 was announced. My boss hit the roof, It was only a week or so after we were done setting up a lab of diskless 3/80 she was so proud of, the call to the sales rep was pretty spicy.
Sun burned a lot of customers between ditching BSD and dropping motorola.
Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]
#45I 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.
Radioactive cache? Sun shipped radioactive parts to customers?
Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]
#46I 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.
I work at Oracle's Java Platform Group, where most of the managers and senior engineers came over from Sun. They all tell me that, despite the normal big-corp issues, work under Oracle's control is better than it was under Sun, where management was more chaotic, strategy unclear, and resources shifted erratically from one project to another, often wasted on unreasonable goals with bad prospects. Not only that, but th…
It makes sense that those who've stayed on under Oracle have a favorable opinion of how Oracle does things: one might say they are self-selected for it.
Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]
#47Earlier 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...).
IBM was the other offer on the table. Scott managed to scuttle the deal but his ability to do so was far from a certainty since he was already out as CEO. Google was pretty much incompatible, they had no interest in workstations or paying for quality as their focus was redundant arrays on inexpensive machines. Fujitsu was the best actual option for commercial compatibility, but everyone felt it would be a waste of ti…
Google bought Motorola, amd that went okay until Samsung blew its top. Recall this was the era Google was frantically buying IP to shore up it's patent portfolio. Apple had gone "thermonuclear", so a somewhat-independent Google-ow ned Sun was in the realm of possibility,perhaps to be sold piecemeal.
Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]
#48Earlier 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.
The joke was the combined company would be called Snapple.
Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]
#49I 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.
I work at Oracle's Java Platform Group, where most of the managers and senior engineers came over from Sun. They all tell me that, despite the normal big-corp issues, work under Oracle's control is better than it was under Sun, where management was more chaotic, strategy unclear, and resources shifted erratically from one project to another, often wasted on unreasonable goals with bad prospects. Not only that, but th…
Wait a minute, an opinion of somebody working at Oracle not bashing Oracle? You deserve downvotes, the only interesting opinions about working at Oracle are those from people who never worked at Oracle! :)
Re: The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work at Oracle's Java Platform Group, where most of the managers and senior engineers came over from Sun. They all tell me that, despite the normal big-corp issues, work under Oracle's control is better than it was under Sun, where management was more chaotic, strategy unclear, and resources shifted erratically from one project to another, often wasted on unreasonable goals with bad prospects. Not only that, but th…
It makes sense that those who've stayed on under Oracle have a favorable opinion of how Oracle does things: one might say they are self-selected for it.
Survivorship Bias.