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Even Sun Microsystems had a phase where they made thought-terminating illogical statements. My 2 favorites: "The network is the computer" - No, it's not, and S

Even Sun Microsystems had a phase where they made thought-terminating illogical statements. My 2 favorites: "The network is the computer" - No, it's not, and Sun's tech at the time, just Unix servers, definitely did not have any enlightened concept of networking that others lacked. It had Berkeley sockets and NFS. Such a statement makes me think of single-system image cluster computing, or other cool stuff, but they didn't have it! Lame. "We put the dot in dot-com" - ??? - I think they got scared that they were starting to lose relevancy in the internet age. It turned out that Sun hardware was a poor choice if you really wanted to scale.

pram 7y ago
“The network is the computer” is truer today than it’s ever been though.
- randomidiot123 7y ago
  It's as gibberish today as it's always been.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  "The door is a jar." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkmoQvbMRFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkmoQvbMRFk
mc3 7y ago
I remember the dot in dot-com ads. I was thinking of starting a blog titled: "I put the dot in dotnet"
dottrap 7y ago
> "We put the dot in dot-com" - ??? Yes, it's marketing fluff (as with any marketing), but I liked that one. For all you tech people like me that have problems answering to non-techie family members what you do, I thought that was an example of a beautiful succinct answer that still conveyed enough of an idea to be satisfying to laymen. As for one I really hated from Sun: "Java Desktop System", which was just a distro with GNOME, and had nothing to do with Java.
- etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
  Yesss... The name Java Desktop System made my soul hurt. The funny thing though is it was an okay GUI environment. Conservative and thoughtful. It was 10 years late to the GUI party though :)
- bch 7y ago
  Wasn’t that implying their infra running the implicit “.” at the end of “.com” (I know, it’s literally not what the copy says)? I.e. the internet .com resolving depended on Sun.[0][1] [0] https://serverfault.com/questions/134611/why-no-final-dot-for-domain-names https://serverfault.com/questions/134611/why-no-final-dot-fo... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    I like the idea that their slogan was really "we put the second dot in dot-com-dot". "You know, the one you've never heard of."
DonHopkins 7y ago
Sun: "We put the dot into dot-com!" Microsoft: "Oh yeah? Well we put the COM into dot-com. Pthththth!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model IBM: ”When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots. Badoom psssh!” https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computing-to-the-channel/4107 https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computin...

pram 7y ago

“The network is the computer” is truer today than it’s ever been though.

randomidiot123 7y ago
It's as gibberish today as it's always been.
DonHopkins 7y ago
"The door is a jar." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkmoQvbMRFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkmoQvbMRFk

mc3 7y ago

I remember the dot in dot-com ads. I was thinking of starting a blog titled: "I put the dot in dotnet"

dottrap 7y ago

> "We put the dot in dot-com" - ??? Yes, it's marketing fluff (as with any marketing), but I liked that one. For all you tech people like me that have problems answering to non-techie family members what you do, I thought that was an example of a beautiful succinct answer that still conveyed enough of an idea to be satisfying to laymen. As for one I really hated from Sun: "Java Desktop System", which was just a distro with GNOME, and had nothing to do with Java.

etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
Yesss... The name Java Desktop System made my soul hurt. The funny thing though is it was an okay GUI environment. Conservative and thoughtful. It was 10 years late to the GUI party though :)
bch 7y ago
Wasn’t that implying their infra running the implicit “.” at the end of “.com” (I know, it’s literally not what the copy says)? I.e. the internet .com resolving depended on Sun.[0][1] [0] https://serverfault.com/questions/134611/why-no-final-dot-for-domain-names https://serverfault.com/questions/134611/why-no-final-dot-fo... [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  I like the idea that their slogan was really "we put the second dot in dot-com-dot". "You know, the one you've never heard of."

DonHopkins 7y ago

Sun: "We put the dot into dot-com!" Microsoft: "Oh yeah? Well we put the COM into dot-com. Pthththth!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model IBM: ”When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots. Badoom psssh!” https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computing-to-the-channel/4107 https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-computin...