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, creating the "east coast division" on route 128 outside of Boston. However, the ideas that group had clashed with the "old school" UNIX folks in Mountain View and as a result SunOS actually feature forked between the version ECD shipped and the version Sun shipped.
John Hennessy, who knew Andy from Stanford, convinced Andy and Bill Joy that "CISC" was dead and RISC was the future. Nobody was going to build a new processor at that point and so Bill & Andy decided Sun would design one and make it open (unlike the 68K series or the x86 series). The first workstation, codenamed Campus 1 was the result.
But by the time SPARC was "real", too much of the company was seeing risk in being too open. And so even though SPARC was an open standard, Sun tended to compete viciously with anyone that implemented it. It made for a some weird dynamics.
The UNIX wars were heating up, and Sun, a company that had a high cash burn rate because of its HW business, had a quarter that we "burped" (which was SunOS 4.0 was late (it was the big shared library release and a LOT of code had been rewritten[1])) Anyway we had a quarter were the software delay had delayed the release of the next workstation which had interrupted revenue and as a result we have a quarterly loss (for like the first time ever) and that scared the crap out of the senior management. Berkeley was yelling at us because they felt not enough of the changes Sun were making were making it back into BSD, and AT&T started threatening everyone with lawsuits because, well UNIX System 3 kinda sucked and they didn't want it to. The result of THAT tornado was that Sun struck a deal (codenamed "lulu") with AT&T where AT&T would give Sun a billion dollars (which at the time was a lot of money), and in exchange, Sun would STOP improving BSD, and instead would work with AT&T to make was System 3 (which was going to be System 4 but became System 5) the best of both worlds, and AT&T and Sun would both cross license the IP so that they wouldn't sue each other but they could sue anyone else making a UNIX derivative.
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.
Sun made some excellent stuff after that, massively symmetric multiprocessing systems, "Spring" a really creative re-imagined OS, Etc. But none of it, even Java which was leveraged so hard to be a "Microsoft killer" that Sun lost sight of what it was to be a leader.
When John Hime left Sun (he had been Carol Bartz's boss as I recall) he told me that leaders don't imitate or copy their competitors, they identify what it was they were missing that gave the competitor some traction and improved their understanding of their own path. As I saw Sun become more and more their competitors by following them on their path, rather than blazing their own, it really became clear what he meant.
I remember when Opteron was introduced (AMD's first processor in the AMD64 set) at Microprocessor Forum in 2003 I emailed Scott and suggested perhaps while Sun had become DEC (they were retreating to the machine room with their big iron, and Solaris Desktop was a smaller and smaller part of their revenue mix) that coming out with an open workstation based on the AMD64 architecture using BSD again might not be a bad idea. He thought that was pretty funny and said that train had left the station.
[1] I still have my "4.0 Team Member" sign that we put on the doors of engineers who were working on 4.0 to remind others not to bother us with non-important problems :-).
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)
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.
>"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." [...]
% strings sun2-multi-rev-R.bin
<snip>
@(#)version.c 2.8 85/02/19 Copyright (c) 1985 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Rev R
<snip>
, DES chip
Love your country, but never trust its government.
<snip>
>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.
Yup. And when I joined in March of '86 I needed to help a customer with the crypto chip but there weren't any systems with them around, so I went over to Building 10 and we "built" a Sun 3/50 from parts inventory, including the chip, which I carried back over to my office in building 5. However, because it had never gone through the manman system (manufacturing tracking) the system didn't exist when Sun got around to doing inventory management internally!
I regret not taking the advice of a senior engineer there at the time (John L.) who said, "Well if it doesn't exist, you should take it home, no one will miss it." But no, I figured out how to make it "real" and got it put into the system so that it could get an inventory tag. (a special one it turned out, that identified it for "secured destruct." Aka things that were crushed and not scrapped)
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
|> In <112...@bu.edu> j...@bu-pub.bu.edu (Jason Heirtzler) writes:
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.
[Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by
Mark Segal,
Carl Korobkin,
Rolf van Widenfelt,
Jim Foran,
Paul Haeberli,
Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
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 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.
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.
>Sun started to turn into DEC when the manufacturing people started getting hired from DEC into Sun.
That is precisely what happened. Sun also hired a whole bunch of frat boy brogrammers and incompetent bozogrammers from HP and AT&T, too.
I have a lot of respect for the old HP and DEC, but the charlatans that Sun hired from HP and DEC who perpetrated Project DOE (Distributed Object Everywhere) and CORBA were a completely incompetent turkey farm who sabotaged Sun and dragged it into the ground.
We used to call it Project DOPE (Distributed Object Practically Everywhere), and the OMG (Object Management Group) was better described as OMFG, then it took so long to ship NEO that they should have called it NEOLD.
>SunSoft is delivering the first component against its vision of Project
DOE. In February 1991, SunSoft and Hewlett-Packard (HP) developed the
industry's first Distributed Object Management Facility (Distributed
OMF). This was submitted to the Object Management Group (OMG). In June,
SunSoft added to its object technology foundation with the introduction
of ToolTalk. The product has been endorsed by a number of leading
software vendors including Lotus Development Corp., Cadence, Valid and
Clarity Software. Other elements of Project DOE will be introduced
later this year.
>New York City -- Perhaps the only vaporware touted for a longer period of time before its release than Windows 95 was Sun's Project DOE. This ambitious object-oriented programming toolkit and distributed operating environment that offers built-in network awareness has arrived at last. The company chose a hastily planned morning press event during Unix Expo to offer details on the software Sun's talked about for almost five years.
>The software and programs making up Project DOE (Distributed Objects Everywhere) are now under the umbrella term "Neo," a word Sun CEO Scott McNealy joked doesn't stand for anything in particular except it being the last three-letter word not trademarked in the US. (Apparently, the second to the last was "JOE," a term Sun picked up for its Java application development tools.)
Then once Java became popular, Sun was overrun by enormous hoards of minions jumping on the Java bandwagon, who just wanted to work effortlessly for a successful company instead of working hard to make a company successful (just as JWZ observed about Netscape, too).
McNealy's worst enemies weren't at Microsoft, they were only himself and the other useless idiots he hired after selling out to AT&T, letting all those DOEZOS on the bus, and rolling out the Java Juggernaut.
The only misguided lesson Scott McNealy learned from his tragic failure driving Sun into the ground was to put all his wood behind one arrow of Putin's useful idiot Trump, instead of so many useless idiots from AT&T, DEC, and HP.
DonHopkins on March 1, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-se...
Yes you're definitely in the ball park with a beer and a hot dog -- there was a huge amount of corporate baggage.
The hype and corporate bullshit that surrounded Java is a good example of what that corporate baggage would have been like if it had been deployed for NeWS's benefit instead of Java's.
If Sun had put as much energy into promoting and supporting NeWS as they did with Java, we would probably live in a very different world today.
Sun turned a corner when they abandoned their Berkeley hippie BSD roots and got into bed with AT&T / SVR4 / Solaris, and that changed a lot of stuff for the worse, making it a lot harder to do things like give away the source code to X11/NeWS. A lot of people from different companies who used to be Sun's enemies, and who had extremely different philosophies and antithetical approaches to "open software", joined Sun and started influencing and managing its policies and projects. A disastrous example was the Distributed Objects Everywhere project and CORBA fiasco, which was originally the crazy idea of a bunch of people from HP and DEC, Sun's former nemesis's, who then came to Sun and started pushing it into everything, to the detriment of NeWS and other older projects at Sun. Some of the problematic people and armchair architectural astronauts that Sun imported and put in charge of DOE/CORBA, like Steve MacKay and Michael Powell, were worthless corporate bullshitters whose main goals were to establish and maintain a hegemony, and they kept their grandiose plans in their head and never wrote anything down or made any hard decisions or came up with anything concrete, because they didn't want to be pinned down to committing to something, when they were actually in way over their heads. The whole point of the incredibly complex software they finally developed was interoperability with other company's compatible software, but in reality none of it actually worked together. It only talked to itself. SLOWLY.
Since DOE was intended to run everywhere and talk to everything but actually didn't, they should have called DOPE for Distributed Objects Practically Everywhere.
DOPE was a complete failure at its stated mission, and it had ridiculously costly overhead and complexity. When they finally delivered something years behind schedule and lacking crucial promised features, it actually required TWO CDROMs to install. (You'd think they could have distributed a distributed network object system over the network, instead of via CDROM, but nooooo: it was just too big to download.) And in the end, nobody actually used "DOE" or "NEO" for anything consequential. They wasted a spectacular amount of time, energy, money, careers, and good will on that crap.
And then when Java finally came along, the same meddlesome corporate baggage handlers and armchair architectural astronauts went into overdrive to evangelize and promote the Java Juggernaut. And even more of them flocked in droves to Sun to jump on the Java bandwagon. If it was bad after the invasion of System V / AT&T / HP / DEC minions, things got much worse once the Java zombies started arriving in teaming brain-eating hoards to get their part of the action in response to all the hype. The original Java team was brilliant, and there were some extremely excellent people working on it, but they were totally outnumbered by the dead weight of all the hangers-on who didn't want to work hard to make a struggling company great, but just wanted an easy job at a secure company that was already great.
If Sun had shown the commitment and dedicated the resources to NeWS that they did to DOE and Java, things would be a lot different. And it would have probably also turned out terribly, for all the same reasons.
JWZ said the same kind of thing happened at NetScape, too.
>This is starting to sound familiar (Score:4, Interesting) by gothzilla ( 676407 ) on Thursday March 10, 2005 @11:10AM (#11899790)
>I remember reading JWZ's blog back in the Netscape days. I remember one entry in particular where he noted that Netscape had changed. It used to be full of people who wanted to help create a great company. It turned into a place full of people who just wanted to work for a great company. The people who live to help create get replaced by those who want to ride on their coat-tails. This happens when businesses become successful. Everything changes. Like the band that was good friends and partied together every night. They get signed, shit gets serious, and suddenly they're fighting and arguing about things till they break up and go their separate ways.
>From an old post in his blog:
>What is most amazing about this is not the event itself, but rather, what it indicates: Netscape has gone from ``hot young world-changing startup'' to Apple levels of unadulterated uselessness in fewer than four years, and with fewer than 3,000 employees.
>But I guess Netscape has always done everything faster and bigger. Including burning out.
>It's too bad it had to end with a whimper instead of a bang. Netscape used to be something wonderful.
>The thing that hurts about this is that I was here when Netscape was just a bunch of creative people working together to make something great. Now it's a faceless corporation like all other faceless corporations, terrified that it might accidentally offend someone. But yes, all big corporations are like that: it's just that I was here to watch this one fall.
>Perhaps the same fate awaits Mozilla. Hopefully not, but when your product becomes as successful as Mozilla and Firefox have, things do change and change is inevitable. It all comes down to how the people involved with the projects handle the change.
>Mozilla did rise from the ashes of Netscape though. Hopefully some of the original Netscape people are still around to help lead Mozilla in the right direction, using their experience from the crashing and burning of Netscape in the late 90's.
``I have yet to come across so much self-righteous bullshit as when I gaze upon the massive heap of crap that is the jwz web experience.''
-- an anonymous poster to slashdot.org, 1998.
I'm not saying it always has to end in tragedy: C# and TypeScript turned out beautifully, given the constraints they had to deal with, in spite of the fact that they came from a giant corporate behemoth like Microsoft. (Although I'm sure there's a lot of bullshit going on behind the scenes, the trend is to make them more open and community driven.)
Yes, I am aware. I was at a Usenix conference where Rob Pike presented a paper on it, back when it was a bright idea out of Bell Labs. It is the curse of brilliant people that they see too far into the future, get treated as crazy when they are most lucid and get respect when they are most bitter [1]. I was working for Sun Microsystems at the time and Sun was pursuing a strategy known as "Distributed Objects Everywhere" or (DOE) but insiders derisively called it "Distributed Objects Practically Everywhere" or DOPE, it was thinking about networks of 100 megabits with hundreds of machines on them. Another acquaintance of mine has a PDP 8/s this was a serial implementation of the PDP-8 architecture, Gordon Bell did that in the 70's well before serial interconnects made sense. It was a total failure, the rest of the world had yet to catch up. Both Microsoft and Google have invested in this space, neither have published a whole lot, every now and then you see something that lets you know that somebody is thinking along the same lines, trying to get to an answer. I suspect Jeff Bezos thinks similarly if his insistence on making everything an API inside Amazon was portrayed accurately.
The place where the world is catching up is that we have very fast networks in very dense compute. In the case of a cell phone you see a compute node which is a node in a web of nodes which are conspiring to provide a user experience. At some point that box under the table might have X units of compute, Y units of IO, and Z units of storage. It might be a spine which you can load up with different colored blocks to get the combination of points needed to activate a capability at an acceptable latency. If you can imagine a role playing game where your 'computer' can do certain things based on where you invested its 'skill points' that is a flavor of what I think will happen. The computers that do shipping, or store sales will have skill points in transactions, the computers that simulate explosions will have skill points in flops. People will argue whether or not the brick from Intel or the Brick from AMD/ARM really deserves a rating of 8 skill points in CRYPTO or not.
[1] I didn't get to work with Rob when I was at Google although I did hear him speak once and he didn't seem particularly bitter, so I don't consider him a good exemplar of the problem. Many brilliant people I've met over the years however have been lost to productive work because their bitterness at not being accepted early only has clouded their ability to enjoy the success their vision has seen since they espoused it.
> 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.)
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.
>[...] 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?” [...]
No one ever accused X Windows of being a user friendly or hardware friendly or basically having any attribute even vaguely synonymous of positive. It's even more backwards compatible than Microsoft Windows and there's a very heavy emphasis on backwards. I doubt say, XLFD have seen much use in this century but hey! it worked in 1985 so we can't possibly not support it.
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.
> 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 on a working JVM. A BSD port in cooperation with Sun would have been extremely easy.
Making enough people in Sun care about desktop computing again would have been the hardest part.
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.
Indeed, the SunOS -> Solaris transition left a lot of hackers keeping SunOS 4.1.4 patched until very very late in the game! And then you give up and run your stuff under NetBSD's compat layer, still on SPARC.
> 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?
"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..."
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.
>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."
>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!
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++++-=".
>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.
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]
According to [1] IBM declared support for Linux in 2000 [I thought it was around '97], that was a signal for many that Linux was good enough for business.
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, creating the "east coast division" on route 128 outside of Boston. However, the ideas that group had clashed with the "old school" UNIX folks in Mountain View and as a result SunOS actually feature forked between the version ECD shipped and the version Sun shipped.
John Hennessy, who knew Andy from Stanford, convinced Andy and Bill Joy that "CISC" was dead and RISC was the future. Nobody was going to build a new processor at that point and so Bill & Andy decided Sun would design one and make it open (unlike the 68K series or the x86 series). The first workstation, codenamed Campus 1 was the result.
But by the time SPARC was "real", too much of the company was seeing risk in being too open. And so even though SPARC was an open standard, Sun tended to compete viciously with anyone that implemented it. It made for a some weird dynamics.
The UNIX wars were heating up, and Sun, a company that had a high cash burn rate because of its HW business, had a quarter that we "burped" (which was SunOS 4.0 was late (it was the big shared library release and a LOT of code had been rewritten[1])) Anyway we had a quarter were the software delay had delayed the release of the next workstation which had interrupted revenue and as a result we have a quarterly loss (for like the first time ever) and that scared the crap out of the senior management. Berkeley was yelling at us because they felt not enough of the changes Sun were making were making it back into BSD, and AT&T started threatening everyone with lawsuits because, well UNIX System 3 kinda sucked and they didn't want it to. The result of THAT tornado was that Sun struck a deal (codenamed "lulu") with AT&T where AT&T would give Sun a billion dollars (which at the time was a lot of money), and in exchange, Sun would STOP improving BSD, and instead would work with AT&T to make was System 3 (which was going to be System 4 but became System 5) the best of both worlds, and AT&T and Sun would both cross license the IP so that they wouldn't sue each other but they could sue anyone else making a UNIX derivative.
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.
Sun made some excellent stuff after that, massively symmetric multiprocessing systems, "Spring" a really creative re-imagined OS, Etc. But none of it, even Java which was leveraged so hard to be a "Microsoft killer" that Sun lost sight of what it was to be a leader.
When John Hime left Sun (he had been Carol Bartz's boss as I recall) he told me that leaders don't imitate or copy their competitors, they identify what it was they were missing that gave the competitor some traction and improved their understanding of their own path. As I saw Sun become more and more their competitors by following them on their path, rather than blazing their own, it really became clear what he meant.
I remember when Opteron was introduced (AMD's first processor in the AMD64 set) at Microprocessor Forum in 2003 I emailed Scott and suggested perhaps while Sun had become DEC (they were retreating to the machine room with their big iron, and Solaris Desktop was a smaller and smaller part of their revenue mix) that coming out with an open workstation based on the AMD64 architecture using BSD again might not be a bad idea. He thought that was pretty funny and said that train had left the station.
[1] I still have my "4.0 Team Member" sign that we put on the doors of engineers who were working on 4.0 to remind others not to bother us with non-important problems :-).