6 ms·

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

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...
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  Ignored the internet in terms of distributed systems, which I assumed was obvious from the wording. Look at that 1994 paper, none of the things in the paper show any background to build a distributed key-value storage or really anything for the cloud. I'm not sure why people are trying to claim otherwise. Even ZFS from a decade later reflects both a complete lack of experience in distributed systems and ignorance towards the internet.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    I believe ZFS represented a missed opportunity by spending all that effort on a local filesystem instead of trying to do something interesting in the distributed space. I even said so at the time, since I was working on distributed filesystems at the time, but that's just a strategic issue (and one that's quite arguable). It's not evidence of ignorance or lack of experience.
    - zzzcpan 7y ago
      Well, on that part I was referring more specifically to the vdev mess and raidz, how you cannot just add a disk to the file system. Which is pretty silly, considering that at the time there were plenty of ideas how to do it much better, although not for disks, but for nodes in distributed systems. But apparently no one on ZFS team had any idea about any of it.
      - notacoward 7y ago
        That was a pretty common pattern at Sun. Engineers there did a lot of great work, no denying it. Like many other projects, ZFS solved some pretty difficult and important problems while ignoring others. Which ones get talked about ad nauseam? We all make mistakes, of course, but some of those ignored problems were well known at the time to be worth solving. Did those self-professed "complete engineers" learn anything from those times they missed the target? The fact that Sun doesn't exist any more suggests an answer.
        Annatar 7y ago
        The problem is they cannot all be solved with just one single thing. Jeff Bonwick and his team knew that. They knew what was left on the table and they had to make that call. A completely fault tolerant, distributed system which can correctly arbitrate a write to a single shared resource (usually a file or even a block) from multiple nodes at the exact same time is a problem which has not been solved correctly yet, to the best of my knowledge and belief. I myself have spent considerable amount of time (20 years, to be precise) trying to solve that particular problem correctly for all edge cases. That problem is terra incognita in computer science and yet to be throughly researched, let alone understood. All attempts at solving that particular problem 100% correctly have not been successful, by anyone, but if you know of someone, please do tell, I'd love to be corrected on this and start using such technology immediately. The ZFS team was well aware of this and that's why they made the trade-offs they did. They picked a subset of problems and they solved them. Even in hindsight, to me at least, it's obvious why. But to suggest that Sun Microsystems doesn't exist because the company's engineers picked only a subset of problems they knew they could solve is... either terribly ignorant or wilfully malicious, or both, since malice often stems from ignorance. Sun Microsystems lost because they were too expensive, more expensive than garbage intel personal computer servers and because Solaris wasn't open source code in 1993. It's that simple.
aramallo 7y ago
Moreover, Sun’s legacy in distributed system goes far beyond theory, people forget about Jini (and Javaspaces) a distributed computing platform that shipped by 2000 or before (I had the pleasure to work with and it was the only reason I would develop in Java), SOA? micro services? In-memory distributed computing? It was all there at work. Want P2P?, enter JXTA. There you go.
rainymanyu 7y ago
Whatever... They are now history and lately remembered by hanging over Java to Oracle... Everything else will be buried in history or 42nd page of Google search results
- Annatar 7y ago
  Because "Linux is the best", or some bullshit like that?

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...

zzzcpan 7y ago
Ignored the internet in terms of distributed systems, which I assumed was obvious from the wording. Look at that 1994 paper, none of the things in the paper show any background to build a distributed key-value storage or really anything for the cloud. I'm not sure why people are trying to claim otherwise. Even ZFS from a decade later reflects both a complete lack of experience in distributed systems and ignorance towards the internet.
- notacoward 7y ago
  I believe ZFS represented a missed opportunity by spending all that effort on a local filesystem instead of trying to do something interesting in the distributed space. I even said so at the time, since I was working on distributed filesystems at the time, but that's just a strategic issue (and one that's quite arguable). It's not evidence of ignorance or lack of experience.
  - zzzcpan 7y ago
    Well, on that part I was referring more specifically to the vdev mess and raidz, how you cannot just add a disk to the file system. Which is pretty silly, considering that at the time there were plenty of ideas how to do it much better, although not for disks, but for nodes in distributed systems. But apparently no one on ZFS team had any idea about any of it.
    - notacoward 7y ago
      That was a pretty common pattern at Sun. Engineers there did a lot of great work, no denying it. Like many other projects, ZFS solved some pretty difficult and important problems while ignoring others. Which ones get talked about ad nauseam? We all make mistakes, of course, but some of those ignored problems were well known at the time to be worth solving. Did those self-professed "complete engineers" learn anything from those times they missed the target? The fact that Sun doesn't exist any more suggests an answer.
      - Annatar 7y ago
        The problem is they cannot all be solved with just one single thing. Jeff Bonwick and his team knew that. They knew what was left on the table and they had to make that call. A completely fault tolerant, distributed system which can correctly arbitrate a write to a single shared resource (usually a file or even a block) from multiple nodes at the exact same time is a problem which has not been solved correctly yet, to the best of my knowledge and belief. I myself have spent considerable amount of time (20 years, to be precise) trying to solve that particular problem correctly for all edge cases. That problem is terra incognita in computer science and yet to be throughly researched, let alone understood. All attempts at solving that particular problem 100% correctly have not been successful, by anyone, but if you know of someone, please do tell, I'd love to be corrected on this and start using such technology immediately. The ZFS team was well aware of this and that's why they made the trade-offs they did. They picked a subset of problems and they solved them. Even in hindsight, to me at least, it's obvious why. But to suggest that Sun Microsystems doesn't exist because the company's engineers picked only a subset of problems they knew they could solve is... either terribly ignorant or wilfully malicious, or both, since malice often stems from ignorance. Sun Microsystems lost because they were too expensive, more expensive than garbage intel personal computer servers and because Solaris wasn't open source code in 1993. It's that simple.

aramallo 7y ago

Moreover, Sun’s legacy in distributed system goes far beyond theory, people forget about Jini (and Javaspaces) a distributed computing platform that shipped by 2000 or before (I had the pleasure to work with and it was the only reason I would develop in Java), SOA? micro services? In-memory distributed computing? It was all there at work. Want P2P?, enter JXTA. There you go.

rainymanyu 7y ago

Whatever... They are now history and lately remembered by hanging over Java to Oracle... Everything else will be buried in history or 42nd page of Google search results

Annatar 7y ago
Because "Linux is the best", or some bullshit like that?