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Sun Microsystems literally invented the network is the computer. They were the first company ever to even begin to think in terms of distributed systems on a ne

Sun Microsystems literally invented the network is the computer. They were the first company ever to even begin to think in terms of distributed systems on a network scale (DEC had done some pioneering work on the hardware front prior to that with VMS, but not the network). The network file system, NFS, exists because Sun Microsystems engineers willed it so -- they wanted to multiply the computational power of smaller systems into a larger, distributed one. They were a pioneer in distributed systems computing. Not many computer companies can claim that. Even fewer companies can claim engineers which hold patents which now power the InterNet, like Radia Perlman does for the spanning tree routing protocol. If that's not distributed, I don't know what is.

notacoward 7y ago
Wow, they invented the slogan. Sun alumni seem awfully thin-skinned about not getting credit for every little thing they did, which is why it's pretty unforgivable to deny DEC credit for anything more than "some work on hardware". I was working on DECnet-based remote file access software in 1989. It wasn't new, but NFSv2 was. DEC already had real clusters doing real work before Sun did. Within the company there was already a globe-spanning LAT network. I had friends at Apollo who were also way ahead of Sun wrt distributed computing. AT&T's RFS was at least contemporary with NFS, as were Netware and Vines. Sun was definitely a player in that space and made some seminal contributions, but to say they were the first even to think about it is unmitigated BS.
- Annatar 7y ago
  I am not a Sun Microsystems alumni. I wish I was, just as I equally wish I were an SGI alumni. Yes DEC did have clusters, and I remember booting my Alpha workstations from a Sun SPARCStation 20 over DECNet as an AutoClient and I know DEC had hardware clustering and VMS working together as a distributed system, but since I came at the end of that era and only worked with Ultrix and DECUnix, I don't know any more about it which is why I couldn't go into detail. I only go into detail when I know about something and usually I've done that something myself.
zzzcpan 7y ago
All of this experience is pretty shallow and completely irrelevant to distributed systems in the age of the cloud computing and the internet. For some reason Sun ignored the internet and didn't move into distributed systems at all. So, for example, this experience at Sun couldn't help the engineers in any way to build a distributed key-value storage for the cloud, while Amazon was publishing stuff like Dynamo paper.
- bcantrill 7y ago
  You know, whenever I vow to stop explaining Sun, there is some yet-more outrageous claim that I just can't seem to summon the willpower to ignore, for fear that it will join a corpus of alternative facts that poison the wellspring of future generations. So, in that spirit: Sun emphatically did not "ignore the internet" (?!) -- and was in fact a pioneer of distributed systems in many ways. Instead of rattling off the many important, early distributed systems that Sun built -- or the many pioneers of distributed systems that Sun employed -- I will vector you to a single Sun-authored paper circa 1994, "A Note on Distributed Computing"[1] (and to Chris Meiklejohn's discussion of it at Papers We Love[2]). The paper itself drips with wisdom that still feels current and important a quarter of a century later -- and it very much reflects the zeitgeist of the time at Sun. Please read the paper -- and more generally, take the time to educate yourself as to the history of our domain and the many people and companies who have made seminal contributions to it; the generations whose shoulders your work stands upon will thank you for it! [1] https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master/distributed_systems/a-note-on-distributed-computing.pdf https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z79mjsLdkpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z79mjsLdkpY
  - mpweiher 7y ago
    Just to add to the "ignored the internet" bit: This is the company that had "the dot in .com" as its marketing slogan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njnNVV5QNaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njnNVV5QNaA https://slashdot.org/story/00/04/20/1542217/sun-no-longer-the-dot-in-com https://slashdot.org/story/00/04/20/1542217/sun-no-longer-th...
prirun 7y ago
Prime Computer Inc. had transparent remote disk access across PrimeNet in 1980. You could not distinguish being on a local disk vs remote disk, other than performance. PrimeNet ran over token ring (they also had fiber optic token ring running at Ford's main Dearborn, MI campus), full-duplex synchronous, and half-duplex dial-up synchronous network connections. Prime had remote procedure calls. Their MIDAS product (index sequential files, basically key-value store with multiple indexes) allowed multiple nodes to access the same file by allocating a "slave" on the node hosting the file, forwarding all calls over the network, and returning call results. OS file access worked the same way, using the same slave for all remote procedure calls. Source code designed for local file access didn't require any changes to be used for remote files, just like NFS. I'd say Sun had a pretty good example to go by for NFS. In fact, if you want to see this in action, I wrote a Prime minicomputer emulator and have remote disks available between 5 different revs of their operating system, spanning a 10-year period. Telnet em.prirun.com 8001 and enjoy!

notacoward 7y ago

Wow, they invented the slogan. Sun alumni seem awfully thin-skinned about not getting credit for every little thing they did, which is why it's pretty unforgivable to deny DEC credit for anything more than "some work on hardware". I was working on DECnet-based remote file access software in 1989. It wasn't new, but NFSv2 was. DEC already had real clusters doing real work before Sun did. Within the company there was already a globe-spanning LAT network. I had friends at Apollo who were also way ahead of Sun wrt distributed computing. AT&T's RFS was at least contemporary with NFS, as were Netware and Vines. Sun was definitely a player in that space and made some seminal contributions, but to say they were the first even to think about it is unmitigated BS.

Annatar 7y ago
I am not a Sun Microsystems alumni. I wish I was, just as I equally wish I were an SGI alumni. Yes DEC did have clusters, and I remember booting my Alpha workstations from a Sun SPARCStation 20 over DECNet as an AutoClient and I know DEC had hardware clustering and VMS working together as a distributed system, but since I came at the end of that era and only worked with Ultrix and DECUnix, I don't know any more about it which is why I couldn't go into detail. I only go into detail when I know about something and usually I've done that something myself.

zzzcpan 7y ago

All of this experience is pretty shallow and completely irrelevant to distributed systems in the age of the cloud computing and the internet. For some reason Sun ignored the internet and didn't move into distributed systems at all. So, for example, this experience at Sun couldn't help the engineers in any way to build a distributed key-value storage for the cloud, while Amazon was publishing stuff like Dynamo paper.

bcantrill 7y ago
You know, whenever I vow to stop explaining Sun, there is some yet-more outrageous claim that I just can't seem to summon the willpower to ignore, for fear that it will join a corpus of alternative facts that poison the wellspring of future generations. So, in that spirit: Sun emphatically did not "ignore the internet" (?!) -- and was in fact a pioneer of distributed systems in many ways. Instead of rattling off the many important, early distributed systems that Sun built -- or the many pioneers of distributed systems that Sun employed -- I will vector you to a single Sun-authored paper circa 1994, "A Note on Distributed Computing"[1] (and to Chris Meiklejohn's discussion of it at Papers We Love[2]). The paper itself drips with wisdom that still feels current and important a quarter of a century later -- and it very much reflects the zeitgeist of the time at Sun. Please read the paper -- and more generally, take the time to educate yourself as to the history of our domain and the many people and companies who have made seminal contributions to it; the generations whose shoulders your work stands upon will thank you for it! [1] https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master/distributed_systems/a-note-on-distributed-computing.pdf https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z79mjsLdkpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z79mjsLdkpY
- mpweiher 7y ago
  Just to add to the "ignored the internet" bit: This is the company that had "the dot in .com" as its marketing slogan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njnNVV5QNaA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njnNVV5QNaA https://slashdot.org/story/00/04/20/1542217/sun-no-longer-the-dot-in-com https://slashdot.org/story/00/04/20/1542217/sun-no-longer-th...

prirun 7y ago

Prime Computer Inc. had transparent remote disk access across PrimeNet in 1980. You could not distinguish being on a local disk vs remote disk, other than performance. PrimeNet ran over token ring (they also had fiber optic token ring running at Ford's main Dearborn, MI campus), full-duplex synchronous, and half-duplex dial-up synchronous network connections. Prime had remote procedure calls. Their MIDAS product (index sequential files, basically key-value store with multiple indexes) allowed multiple nodes to access the same file by allocating a "slave" on the node hosting the file, forwarding all calls over the network, and returning call results. OS file access worked the same way, using the same slave for all remote procedure calls. Source code designed for local file access didn't require any changes to be used for remote files, just like NFS. I'd say Sun had a pretty good example to go by for NFS. In fact, if you want to see this in action, I wrote a Prime minicomputer emulator and have remote disks available between 5 different revs of their operating system, spanning a 10-year period. Telnet em.prirun.com 8001 and enjoy!