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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]

#101

Post by PeterStuer »

lizknope wrote: post #91
PeterStuer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as i recall. Linux at that time was seen as an interesting project, but not yet suitable for the typical workloads ascociated with a Sun workstation.

Strongly disagree. I posted elsewhere in this thread but the semiconductor ran on Sun / Solaris / SPARC. We switched to Linux x86 practically overnight in 2002. Sun was slightly relevant for a few jobs requiring 64-bit >4GB memory. When AMD released the 64-bit Opteron that was the exact moment that Sun died and was completely irrelevant to the semiconductor industry. 99% of our software was text based and could be re…

This might be where our experiences differ. Our workloads often had strong graphical / visialization components. We ran a mix of Sun and Apple machines. We tried some SGI as well but found them less suited. We moved to x86 with (for that time) highend GPUs because of pricing as wel as better/cheaper connectivity and toolchain support for what would now be called IoT.

We ran some Linux, purely as basic unix stations.

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

#102

Post by lizknope »

PeterStuer wrote: post #101
lizknope wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly disagree. I posted elsewhere in this thread but the semiconductor ran on Sun / Solaris / SPARC. We switched to Linux x86 practically overnight in 2002. Sun was slightly relevant for a few jobs requiring 64-bit >4GB memory. When AMD released the 64-bit Opteron that was the exact moment that Sun died and was completely irrelevant to the semiconductor industry. 99% of our software was text based and could be re…

This might be where our experiences differ. Our workloads often had strong graphical / visialization components. We ran a mix of Sun and Apple machines. We tried some SGI as well but found them less suited. We moved to x86 with (for that time) highend GPUs because of pricing as wel as better/cheaper connectivity and toolchain support for what would now be called IoT. We ran some Linux, purely as basic unix stations.

I agree, our use cases were quite different.

In my other comment I said that around 1997 we put Linux x86 and 21" monitors running at 1800x1440 on all the engineers desks and used them basically as X terminals to the Suns in the closet. Our Sun graphics cards and monitors were 19" (I think) limited to 1152x900 so everyone thought Linux and the monitors was a big upgrade.

We did use graphical programs like waveform viewers and chip layout programs but they were all simple 2D graphics and worked okay via remote X11 with 10 Mbit ethernet. We upgraded to 100 Mbit ethernet and it was virtually the same as running locally.

By 2002 we were running all the software on Linux x86 directly

We did have some Creator 3D cards in the Ultra 2's but it was mostly overkill for what we were doing. Those cards did have an interesting feature for programs hard coded to X11 8-bit 256 PseudoColor. We had an internally written program like that and we would basically run out of colors if you also tried to run a web browser or evern a second copy of the program. The Creator 3D card had one 24-bit display and then 4 separate 8-bit displays combined together. We could run 4 copies of that poorly written internal program before having colormap issues.

I remember running netscape with the -install option to get a private colormap. The screen would basically look like a rainbow except in the netscape window then move the mouse outside and netscape would turn into a rainbow.

On Linux we could use the extra virtual consoles to start multiple X servers so sometimes I had one 16-bit X server running for normal stuff and two 8-bit X servers for that ol d program. Luckily we didn't need to copy paste between all that much if ever.

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

#103

Post by linksnapzz »

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…

[flagged]

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

#104

Post by cryptonector »

cryptonector wrote: post #98

Sun was done in by the following mistakes from around 2002: - Failure to license Solaris to Google (reportedly Sun wanted to have a license count, while Google considered the number of systems they ran a secret). - The "termination" of Solaris on x86, which was really (or became) a pause in development for six months -- whichever the case, it was a disaster as it gave Linux a huge boost. - The closing down of Sun Pro…

I should add that Sun died of its contradictions:

- Java, "write once run anywhere" meant openness. SPARC meant closedness. Conflict.

- Java, "write once run anywhere" meant openness. J2ME and J2SE cash cows meant closedness. Conflict -- in the same team!

- x86 systems division meant openness. SPARC meant closedness. Conflict.

- The Sun directory services product was profitable and then Active Directory came along, but rather than acquire or build AD interoperability in the early 00s the Sun DS team chose to keep milking their cow, which led to closedness in what originally had been an openness tool.

There's a lesson in here for business schools. Something about how short-lived cash cows can be in software and even hardware (now that platform portability has become so much easier). Also maybe about how if you want to charge a premium and get customers to want to pay for it, you have to live up to a reputation for constant innovation. A comparison to Apple almost seems apt, but Apple sells to a different class of customer (consumers), so maybe not.

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

#105

Post by zeruch »

pron wrote: post #40
zeruch wrote: post #28

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.

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…

"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."

What you describe is the post-McNealy era (although I'd argue the last few years of McNealy started to decline as well). Zander was utterly lacking in dynamism and largely just a numbers guy, and Jonathan Schwartz was a total bungler with delusions of "thought leadership".

SUN after 2001 was a very very different animal from prior.

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

#106

Post by zeruch »

pron wrote: post #40
zeruch wrote: post #28

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.

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…

"Again, I can't speak for other parts of the company, and maybe Java's successful integration into Oracle has been a fluke"

They only cared about Java, and to a lesser extent controlling MySQL (the latter being one effectively stupid gambit, but one that's held on some tertiary value). The HW business has been slowly circling the bowl, they borked the OpenOffice, Jenkins and other projects, and their OS side is AWOL.

I know a few folks that went to Oracle to "hide" in the jungle, while they figure out what they actually want to do next. I've had Oracle recruiters call me before over the years, and I just have a long running disdain for their licensing/business approach, to the point that I have either prevented or ripped out every attempt for them in places I've been at.

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

#107

Post by LeFantome »

pron wrote: post #40
zeruch wrote: post #28

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.

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…

Very interesting. Nice to get some insider info.

Java came pretty near the end for Sun during a massive time of upheaval for their traditional business model, a massive economic downturn, and a historic change in leadership. Those could also be factors.

It would be interesting to get the same take of before and after from somebody working on SPARC or Solaris.

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

#108

Post by lizknope »

justin66 wrote: post #88
throwawaylinux wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -- expe…

> Sun would have been pushing shit uphill to convince Oracle to support a new port for a BSD they would sell on x86 systems. That would have been far and away the easiest part of that mission. Oracle will keep an utterly obscure port of the core database product alive for a single customer if they're paying enough money, or at least that is the way it was 20 years ago, and their other products generally just depend o…

HP developed Itanium jointly with Intel. HP was the last Itanium vendor and wanted Oracle to keep supporting their DB on Itanium.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/30/oracle_loses_itanium_...

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

#109

Post by justin66 »

lizknope wrote: post #108
justin66 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sun would have been pushing shit uphill to convince Oracle to support a new port for a BSD they would sell on x86 systems. That would have been far and away the easiest part of that mission. Oracle will keep an utterly obscure port of the core database product alive for a single customer if they're paying enough money, or at least that is the way it was 20 years ago, and their other products generally just depend o…

HP developed Itanium jointly with Intel. HP was the last Itanium vendor and wanted Oracle to keep supporting their DB on Itanium. https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/30/oracle_loses_itanium_...

Regarding the part of post I think you're responding to (Oracle will keep an utterly obscure port of the core database product alive for a single customer if they're paying enough money, or at least that is the way it was 20 years ago), it certainly does seem possible the attitudes changed at Oracle in 2009. In a short timeframe Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, a hardware competitor to Itanium, and Red Hat (whose Linux distribution Oracle clones) announced they would not support Itanium in their next enterprise Linux release.

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

#110

Post by fexecve »

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…

A selection of the best Scott McNealy quotes: "When Steve Ballmer calls me wacko, I consider that a compliment." "The only thing that I'd rather own than Windows is English, because then I could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it." "Shut down some of the bullshit the government is spending money on and use it to buy all the Microsoft stock. Then put all their intellectual property in the public domain. Free Windows for everyone! Then we could just bronze Gates, turn him into a statue and stick him in front of the Commerce Department." "Microsoft is now talking about the digital nervous system... I guess I would be nervous if my system was built on their technology too." "It's the good guys versus the bad guys, and the good guys are winning." "W2K (Windows 2000) will be a bigger disaster than Y2K." "A giant hairball." [About Windows NT] "The Evil Empire." [guess who] "The beast from Redmond." [yup] "Anyone heard any good monopolist jokes lately?" "Ballmer and Butthead" [Ballmer and you-know-who] ".Not, .Not Yet and .Nut" [Microsoft's .Net strategy]

(From: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=184145&cid=15205562 )

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