10 ms·

The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

167 points by zdw 4y ago

anyfactor 4y ago
I wonder how companies like IBM, Intel and Oracle were able to survive through the dotcom crash and 2008's financial recession, where Sun Microsystems essentially got obliterated. Did Sun Microsystems really had that bad of a management compared to them?
- wmf 4y ago
  Intel is the one who obliterated Sun so that answers that one. IBM and Oracle were diversified and could depend on the enterprise market which didn't crash.
- p_l 4y ago
  In addition to other events, Sun entered dotcom boom a bit from a wounded position due to high volume of recalls caused by radioactive cache in what was to be flagship processor. Meanwhile IBM had a lot more revenue streams (including still x86 machines on low end, AS/400 on middle size, and Mainframe and supercomputing business at the top) that weren't much impacted by fickle nature of dotcom.
  - RedShift1 4y ago
    Radioactive cache? Sun shipped radioactive parts to customers?
    - andylynch 4y ago
      I think I remember the problem was something like bit flips due to alpha decay from trace material in the chips’ packaging. Not physically dangerous but hard to diagnose and fix.
    - Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
      Static RAM they bought from IBM; they trusted it too much, didn't include ECC in its path to CPUs, and completely torched any chance at becoming an enterprise vendor by blaming their customers, making them sign NDAs before Sun would "help" etc. You really don't want customers to describe an "enterprise" experience as "They treated the whole thing like a cover-up" https://www.computerworld.com/article/2596346/more-users-slam-sun-for-memory-issue.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2596346/more-users-sla... That and what PeterStuer's describes as "They died because they were unable to rapidly change their businessmodel that relied on an expensive sales staff vendoring relatively big ticket items." killed them dead. Specifically startups weren't able to buy Sun's high quality x86 systems in medium quantities from Sun's designated channels, there was a fatal gap between what you could put on a credit card and placing million dollar enterprise quantity orders. So startups bought from Dell which was actually willing trade money for hardware, learned how to deal with those cheaper systems' quirks, and if successful by the time they were big enough to buy Sun systems in enterprise quantities it was way too late. This of course before the cloud became a thing. Something like what's discussed in the recent topic "Bugs that cost money" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34103323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34103323 If you won't accept money from the people who want to pay you it for your stuff you aren't likely to survive.
      - p_l 4y ago
        IIRC They had ECC on them - the ECC catching the error resulted in machine check exception, iirc, severe enough it led to reboot of the machine
- znpy 4y ago
  Ibm most likely had many multi-years (decades?) long contracts. Stuff like mainframes assure, at least, decades of support contracts.
PeterStuer 4y ago
Sun was caught by the WinTel (Windows - Intel) engine that commoditized computing. They died because they were unable to rapidly change their businessmodel that relied on an expensive sales staff vendoring relatively big ticket items. In other words, they died by their own sword.
- sateesh 4y ago
  Didn't also raise of Linux sped Sun's demise. In early 2000's the private compute farm of the org I was working had a mix of Solaris and Linux machines, with Solaris hosts outnumbering Linux hosts. Within couple of years with aim of uniformization all hosts were standardized to Linux.
  - PeterStuer 4y ago
    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.
    - lizknope 4y ago
      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 recompiled for Linux by typing "make"
      - PeterStuer 4y ago
        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.
neilv 4y ago
18m32s This seems to be a new video, and looks interesting so far (haven't seen the whole thing yet), so hopefully won't fall through the cracks of HN due to Christmas.
- herodoturtle 4y ago
  Good to know, thanks! Compliments of the season.
adg001 4y ago
Sun Microsystems could not have a more special place in my hacker heart. In my youth Sun was all over the place; I was dreaming working for them – as I would eventually did later in my life – and, admittedly, I would have done so even only on the basis of their uber cool logo. I remember working on their Sun Ray thin clients for a military contract. Good times. Thanks for sharing this video.
neilv 4y ago
Beware a few of their choices of stock photos are a little misleading. Such as when they're talking about Sun market impact in some era, or their use of off-the-shelf components, and show a photo from a product generation decades later.
ChuckMcM 4y ago
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 :-).
college_physics 4y ago
Will the sun ever shine again or will it forever remain obscured by dark clouds? It feels strange that the professional unix workstation has gone the way of the dodo precisely when many of its genes are triumphant
- jacquesm 4y ago
  The professional Unix workstation now runs Linux and there are lots of them. I've used SGI and Sun Microsystems hardware (and long before that Apollo, which probably means very little to people today). They were fantastic in their day and the degree of stability that you could get out of those boxes was something that I'd love to have now. But almost all of the functionality with maybe some degraded performance for edge cases (yes, 30 years later...) is now available for free + an old laptop or desktop. If I had the choice between a modern day Irix workstation or Linux I'd most likely pick Linux, but Irix will always have a special place in my heart in that it was the first OS that made me feel like everything was just right and it enabled me rather than limited me at almost every step. Powertools for the mind.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    > The professional Unix workstation now runs Linux and there are lots of them. Come on, macOS is Unix certified. Linux is not.
    - ekianjo 4y ago
      Who cares about the UNIX certification
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      That may be so. I have a bunch of Apple laptops, the first thing I do when I get a new one is wipe it and install Linux. I couldn't give a rats ass about certification, I need a workstation, and preferably one that is as close as I can get it to what my servers run, not a fashion accessory.
  - college_physics 4y ago
theCrowing 4y ago
I still catch me sometimes thinking about the sun workstation I used in the 90s. My favorite was probably still a Silicon Graphics SGI 02 even the color schemes were matching :)
zeruch 4y ago
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.
- chii 4y ago
  would they have been better had their sale been to google? Coz that was the only possible alternative outcome tbh. At least it seems oracle's stewardship of java is good enough (atm at least...).
  - gonzo 4y ago
    Sun once tried to merge with Apple That would have been nice.
    - pavlov 4y ago
      That would have been instead of the NeXT merger which brought Jobs to Apple. It seems likely a Sun-Apple would have ended up with both companies destroyed, and Steve Jobs might have spent the early 2000s hawking enterprise web dev software like he was doing at NeXT in 1995.
      - chii 4y ago
        What a different world that would've been! I wonder which company would've made the trailblazing iphone in this alternate reality world...
        macintux 4y ago
        My supposition has been that, absent Apple to throw their weight behind the iPhone, someone would have created a pure touchscreen device (Android had one such concept under development IIRC) but it would have failed because it would have been just one phone among many, gathering dust at retail stores. Apple bet the farm on one phone, had the built-in fan base to leverage, and the resources to make it work well from day one.
nirvgorilla 4y ago
[flagged]
s5300 4y ago
Not sure what year they arrived, but Ohio University still has an entire lab equipped with old Sun systems. Intro to programming or whatever all engineering majors have to take have their class in that lab… have been there for at least 15 years to my knowledge.
- detourdog 4y ago
  Sun had a System adminstrator 1 class that lasted a week. I was lucky to be sent by an employer and it was fantastic and granular. Essentially the class was bring up a Solaris install in such a granular system the we started with Inodes or just below Inodes. The entire OS and it’s supporting abstractions were revealed. If this lab is used for that type of class it would be worth the trouble to keep it running.
jasoneckert 4y ago
I worked for Sun in the early 1990s when they were widely seen as an unstoppable force. It was wild. Even around 2000, I felt as if they were leading the Web into the future. But after the dot com bubble burst, it was sad to see how quickly they declined and how Solaris and SPARC faded into obscurity. I still have a lot of old Sun machines in my basement as a reminder of those amazing times. I can't get rid of them, because as Marie Kondo points out, they still SPARC joy ;-)
- hinkley 4y ago
  I worked at a company in about 2002-5 that was selling software to mobile phone carriers. They were still exclusively Sun hardware. And that was probably the last time I used Sun hardware. I have no recollection of why McNealy left, but I’m not sure Schwartz was the right person for the job. He did some good work for forwarding the case for FOSS, but it always seemed to come at the expense of Sun.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    I don't see how Sun's could have successfully navigated the Linux on commodity x86 onslaught without becoming a services company. Google and Facebook would have been huge Sun customers pre-dotcom-bust, before Linux/x86 got a solid foothold. Both server hardware and software got commoditized, leaving Sun no complement to monetize.
    - rbanffy 4y ago
      > I don't see how Sun's could have successfully navigated the Linux on commodity x86 Sorry for necromancing your comment, but we only need to look at Apple - they make RISC-based Unix workstations today. For servers it's always been a game of either providing something others can't have (think IBM mainframes and POWER systems) or competing in price with razor-thin margins. When Sun started making x86 boxes, I knew it was game over.
exabrial 4y ago
Everyone complained openly about sun while they were around. They didn’t do everything right, but they were very generous with their open source contributions, all the way to a fault.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Absolutely to a fault, although it has helped humanity a lot. Sun's best work is all open-source, and the proprietary work isn't very compelling in comparison.
fexecve 4y ago
Everyone has good things to say about Sun, but let's not forget that they tried to monetize Java (even trying to take money from open-source communities like FreeBSD) long before they were acquired by Oracle.
- znpy 4y ago
  I don’t see the problem with monetising tour own products. Keep in mind those were different times, and development tools were one of the things that costed a lot of money. Microsoft still does a large amount of money off the visual studio tooling.
- twblalock 4y ago
  God forbid! A company trying to make money? How awful! Maybe Sun would still be around if it was better at monetizing the things it invented. Maybe that would have been a better outcome than Oracle owning all of it. Should we also be mad at Red Hat for trying to monetize Linux (which they didn’t even invent)?
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  It's not just that they tried to monetize Java. That's one thing that's debatably good or bad, but not the worst thing that's objectively terrible: Sun tried to MILITARIZE Java DEVELOPERS as disposable mercenaries in Scott McNealy's personal war against Bill Gates and Microsoft. See me other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125284 >You're right, it was Slowlaris that killed Sun, and Java was meant to be a "Microsoft Killer", not a programming language. [...] >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. [...]
_448 4y ago
Anyone know who designed the SUN logo. It is a very clever arrangement of the characters S U and N. You can see SUN from any angle; and it also looks like electronic circuit. Very clever design.
- lizknope 4y ago
  https://1000logos.net/sun-microsystems-logo/ https://1000logos.net/sun-microsystems-logo/ The emblem was created in 1982 by Vaughan Pratt, professor of computer science.
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    That's right: Vaughan Pratt designed the original square Sun logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Pratt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Pratt And Sun Science Officer and Nixon Enemy John Gage is the genius who rotated it 45 degrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage Nixon Enemies List entry for John B. Gage: https://www.enemieslist.info/enemy.php?ID=463 https://www.enemieslist.info/enemy.php?ID=463 Another one of the greatest logos of all time is the SGI logo, designed by none other than Scott Kim! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kim http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/sgi_logo.html http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/sgi_logo.html https://www.amazon.com/Inversions-Scott-Kim/dp/1559532807 https://www.amazon.com/Inversions-Scott-Kim/dp/1559532807 https://scottkim.com/ https://scottkim.com/
lizknope 4y ago
I started using M68K based Sun 3 machines in high school in 1991. In college from 1993-97 we had thousands of Suns, HP-UX, DEC Ultrix, Unix RISC workstations on campus. I joined the semiconductor industry in 1997 and all of of chip design EDA software ran on Suns. Everyone had a Sun on their desk and some people also had a Windows PC for MS-Office. We had big 14 CPU Suns in the server room with 16GB RAM for big jobs and would remotely display to our local Sun machines via X11. I convinced my manager to let me install Linux on a PC and we got a 21" monitor running beyond 1600x1200 (1800x1440 I think) and everyone thought was much nicer, quieter, and most importantly far cheaper than the Sun on their desk. Then everyone decided to switch and we stacked all the Suns in the server room. In 1999 we were trying a new chip synthesis tool from a startup called Ambit (later acquired by Cadence) I submitted a bug report with a crash dump showing "Sun4u SPARC Solaris 2.5" and got a reply back from the support showing they replicated the crash and it had "i686 Linux 2.0 GCC" or something in the log. I was surprised to see that the developers were running it on Linux. You could only buy this software for Solaris / HP-UX / IBM AIX. I asked for the Linux version and the developer said "We don't sell the Linux version, we're a startup that doesn't have money to buy a Sun for every developer so we use Linux x86 and then compile for Sun/HP/IBM at the very end" Around 2002 the Linux / x86 machines had gotten so fast and cheap that the EDA companies started releasing their software for Linux and we started buying Linux machines. I remember recompiling a custom Linux kernel to change the user / kernel memory split for 2GB / 2GB to 3GB user / 1GB kernel and then 3.75GB user / 250MB kernel. We had some programs that needed over 4GB RAM so we kept a few 64-bit Suns for those. Then the AMD 64-bit Opteron came out and it was all over. We never bought a Sun after that. I'm still in the semiconductor industry and everything still runs on Linux. We have clusters with tens of thousands of Linux machines and access them via a remote X11 desktop session (Exceed, NoMachine, X2Go)
- guenthert 4y ago
  > Then the AMD 64-bit Opteron came out and it was all over. We never bought a Sun after that. Sun actually sold an Opteron based workstation, reusing the 'Ultra' name, for a quite reasonable price then. A buddy of mine, interested in Java development, bought it (and a few years later gifted it to me). It was a well engineered PC (could run MS Windows), with Solaris installed (I only ever used it with Linux).
cryptonector 4y ago
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 Professional Services (presumably in order to preserve R&D). Compare to IBM, which did the opposite, and whose professional services division became hugely valuable to IBM. Professional services organizations sell their services and their parent companies other products and services. Losing the professional services organization meant losing sales. That was all in 2002. Many more mistakes were made later (and before), but these are the ones that really killed Sun. Other mistakes after 2002: - Treating J2ME as a cash cow and thus failing to get it on competitors' handsets when iPhones came about. This failure being one of limited R&D and mispricing the product. Compare to Android essentially adopting Java not that much later. - In general treating x86 as a second class citizen to protect SPARC. Now, this one is not very fair because after the cancellation of Solaris on x86 was reverse, internally x86 was a first class citizen, and Sun built a great systems group around x86, but Sun was quite the cash cow milker and put too much effort to keep SPARC from falling too far behind x86, and from the outside it probably looked like Sun just didn't really mean x86 support until around the time of the Oracle acquisition (at which time Sun had great x86 systems for its storage appliance). You have to know when the cash cow is dying and when it's beyond rebuilding, and Sun just didn't. - The MySQL acquisition. $1bn out the window. There were others, like Cobalt. Oracle too made mistakes, chiefly killing OpenSolaris in response to Greenbytes' shipping non-release OpenSolaris ZFS dedup code before Oracle. There were other ways to handle this. Oracle is a company built on mindshare, but it didn't understand that Solaris was now the underdog and needed to build mindshare, and the way to do it was to loss-lead. Friends of mine immediately told me they'd no longer run any new Solaris systems and would migrate from existing ones ASAP because of shades of the 2002 cancellation of Solaris on x86 -- they felt they could not trust Oracle. This could be my bias because 2002 is when I joined Sun. Clearly there were other mistakes made before 2001. But the Solaris team at Sun did incredible things in the 00s with a smaller team than in the 90s. The Sun culture that created ZFS, SMF, FMA, and other things in the 00s doesn't exist anywhere now. It was a culture of internal openness and skunkworks projects that paid off.
peace177 4y ago
[flagged]
catmikk 4y ago
I worked with and around a lot of the Sun folks, including founders. I just ran into this and enjoyed the reading. Thought I'd add this document. Sun brought some awesome culture to the Silicon Valley with their pranks. https://www.sunreunion.com/pdfs/Facts-at-a-Glance-April-Fools-1985-1993.pdf https://www.sunreunion.com/pdfs/Facts-at-a-Glance-April-Fool...

167 points by zdw 4y ago

I wonder how companies like IBM, Intel and Oracle were able to survive through the dotcom crash and 2008's financial recession, where Sun Microsystems essentially got obliterated. Did Sun Microsystems really had that bad of a management compared to them?

wmf 4y ago
Intel is the one who obliterated Sun so that answers that one. IBM and Oracle were diversified and could depend on the enterprise market which didn't crash.
p_l 4y ago
In addition to other events, Sun entered dotcom boom a bit from a wounded position due to high volume of recalls caused by radioactive cache in what was to be flagship processor. Meanwhile IBM had a lot more revenue streams (including still x86 machines on low end, AS/400 on middle size, and Mainframe and supercomputing business at the top) that weren't much impacted by fickle nature of dotcom.
- RedShift1 4y ago
  Radioactive cache? Sun shipped radioactive parts to customers?
  - andylynch 4y ago
    I think I remember the problem was something like bit flips due to alpha decay from trace material in the chips’ packaging. Not physically dangerous but hard to diagnose and fix.
  - Throwawayaerlei 4y ago
    Static RAM they bought from IBM; they trusted it too much, didn't include ECC in its path to CPUs, and completely torched any chance at becoming an enterprise vendor by blaming their customers, making them sign NDAs before Sun would "help" etc. You really don't want customers to describe an "enterprise" experience as "They treated the whole thing like a cover-up" https://www.computerworld.com/article/2596346/more-users-slam-sun-for-memory-issue.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2596346/more-users-sla... That and what PeterStuer's describes as "They died because they were unable to rapidly change their businessmodel that relied on an expensive sales staff vendoring relatively big ticket items." killed them dead. Specifically startups weren't able to buy Sun's high quality x86 systems in medium quantities from Sun's designated channels, there was a fatal gap between what you could put on a credit card and placing million dollar enterprise quantity orders. So startups bought from Dell which was actually willing trade money for hardware, learned how to deal with those cheaper systems' quirks, and if successful by the time they were big enough to buy Sun systems in enterprise quantities it was way too late. This of course before the cloud became a thing. Something like what's discussed in the recent topic "Bugs that cost money" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34103323 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34103323 If you won't accept money from the people who want to pay you it for your stuff you aren't likely to survive.
    - p_l 4y ago
      IIRC They had ECC on them - the ECC catching the error resulted in machine check exception, iirc, severe enough it led to reboot of the machine
znpy 4y ago
Ibm most likely had many multi-years (decades?) long contracts. Stuff like mainframes assure, at least, decades of support contracts.

PeterStuer 4y ago

Sun was caught by the WinTel (Windows - Intel) engine that commoditized computing. They died because they were unable to rapidly change their businessmodel that relied on an expensive sales staff vendoring relatively big ticket items. In other words, they died by their own sword.

sateesh 4y ago
Didn't also raise of Linux sped Sun's demise. In early 2000's the private compute farm of the org I was working had a mix of Solaris and Linux machines, with Solaris hosts outnumbering Linux hosts. Within couple of years with aim of uniformization all hosts were standardized to Linux.
- PeterStuer 4y ago
  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.
  - lizknope 4y ago
    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 recompiled for Linux by typing "make"
    - PeterStuer 4y ago
      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.

neilv 4y ago

18m32s This seems to be a new video, and looks interesting so far (haven't seen the whole thing yet), so hopefully won't fall through the cracks of HN due to Christmas.

herodoturtle 4y ago
Good to know, thanks! Compliments of the season.

adg001 4y ago

Sun Microsystems could not have a more special place in my hacker heart. In my youth Sun was all over the place; I was dreaming working for them – as I would eventually did later in my life – and, admittedly, I would have done so even only on the basis of their uber cool logo. I remember working on their Sun Ray thin clients for a military contract. Good times. Thanks for sharing this video.

neilv 4y ago

Beware a few of their choices of stock photos are a little misleading. Such as when they're talking about Sun market impact in some era, or their use of off-the-shelf components, and show a photo from a product generation decades later.

ChuckMcM 4y ago

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 :-).

college_physics 4y ago

Will the sun ever shine again or will it forever remain obscured by dark clouds? It feels strange that the professional unix workstation has gone the way of the dodo precisely when many of its genes are triumphant

jacquesm 4y ago
The professional Unix workstation now runs Linux and there are lots of them. I've used SGI and Sun Microsystems hardware (and long before that Apollo, which probably means very little to people today). They were fantastic in their day and the degree of stability that you could get out of those boxes was something that I'd love to have now. But almost all of the functionality with maybe some degraded performance for edge cases (yes, 30 years later...) is now available for free + an old laptop or desktop. If I had the choice between a modern day Irix workstation or Linux I'd most likely pick Linux, but Irix will always have a special place in my heart in that it was the first OS that made me feel like everything was just right and it enabled me rather than limited me at almost every step. Powertools for the mind.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  > The professional Unix workstation now runs Linux and there are lots of them. Come on, macOS is Unix certified. Linux is not.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    Who cares about the UNIX certification
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    That may be so. I have a bunch of Apple laptops, the first thing I do when I get a new one is wipe it and install Linux. I couldn't give a rats ass about certification, I need a workstation, and preferably one that is as close as I can get it to what my servers run, not a fashion accessory.
- college_physics 4y ago

theCrowing 4y ago

I still catch me sometimes thinking about the sun workstation I used in the 90s. My favorite was probably still a Silicon Graphics SGI 02 even the color schemes were matching :)

zeruch 4y ago

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.

chii 4y ago
would they have been better had their sale been to google? Coz that was the only possible alternative outcome tbh. At least it seems oracle's stewardship of java is good enough (atm at least...).
- gonzo 4y ago
  Sun once tried to merge with Apple That would have been nice.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    That would have been instead of the NeXT merger which brought Jobs to Apple. It seems likely a Sun-Apple would have ended up with both companies destroyed, and Steve Jobs might have spent the early 2000s hawking enterprise web dev software like he was doing at NeXT in 1995.
    - chii 4y ago
      What a different world that would've been! I wonder which company would've made the trailblazing iphone in this alternate reality world...
      - macintux 4y ago
        My supposition has been that, absent Apple to throw their weight behind the iPhone, someone would have created a pure touchscreen device (Android had one such concept under development IIRC) but it would have failed because it would have been just one phone among many, gathering dust at retail stores. Apple bet the farm on one phone, had the built-in fan base to leverage, and the resources to make it work well from day one.

nirvgorilla 4y ago

[flagged]

s5300 4y ago

Not sure what year they arrived, but Ohio University still has an entire lab equipped with old Sun systems. Intro to programming or whatever all engineering majors have to take have their class in that lab… have been there for at least 15 years to my knowledge.

detourdog 4y ago
Sun had a System adminstrator 1 class that lasted a week. I was lucky to be sent by an employer and it was fantastic and granular. Essentially the class was bring up a Solaris install in such a granular system the we started with Inodes or just below Inodes. The entire OS and it’s supporting abstractions were revealed. If this lab is used for that type of class it would be worth the trouble to keep it running.

jasoneckert 4y ago

I worked for Sun in the early 1990s when they were widely seen as an unstoppable force. It was wild. Even around 2000, I felt as if they were leading the Web into the future. But after the dot com bubble burst, it was sad to see how quickly they declined and how Solaris and SPARC faded into obscurity. I still have a lot of old Sun machines in my basement as a reminder of those amazing times. I can't get rid of them, because as Marie Kondo points out, they still SPARC joy ;-)

hinkley 4y ago
I worked at a company in about 2002-5 that was selling software to mobile phone carriers. They were still exclusively Sun hardware. And that was probably the last time I used Sun hardware. I have no recollection of why McNealy left, but I’m not sure Schwartz was the right person for the job. He did some good work for forwarding the case for FOSS, but it always seemed to come at the expense of Sun.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  I don't see how Sun's could have successfully navigated the Linux on commodity x86 onslaught without becoming a services company. Google and Facebook would have been huge Sun customers pre-dotcom-bust, before Linux/x86 got a solid foothold. Both server hardware and software got commoditized, leaving Sun no complement to monetize.
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    > I don't see how Sun's could have successfully navigated the Linux on commodity x86 Sorry for necromancing your comment, but we only need to look at Apple - they make RISC-based Unix workstations today. For servers it's always been a game of either providing something others can't have (think IBM mainframes and POWER systems) or competing in price with razor-thin margins. When Sun started making x86 boxes, I knew it was game over.

exabrial 4y ago

Everyone complained openly about sun while they were around. They didn’t do everything right, but they were very generous with their open source contributions, all the way to a fault.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
Absolutely to a fault, although it has helped humanity a lot. Sun's best work is all open-source, and the proprietary work isn't very compelling in comparison.

fexecve 4y ago

Everyone has good things to say about Sun, but let's not forget that they tried to monetize Java (even trying to take money from open-source communities like FreeBSD) long before they were acquired by Oracle.

znpy 4y ago
I don’t see the problem with monetising tour own products. Keep in mind those were different times, and development tools were one of the things that costed a lot of money. Microsoft still does a large amount of money off the visual studio tooling.
twblalock 4y ago
God forbid! A company trying to make money? How awful! Maybe Sun would still be around if it was better at monetizing the things it invented. Maybe that would have been a better outcome than Oracle owning all of it. Should we also be mad at Red Hat for trying to monetize Linux (which they didn’t even invent)?
DonHopkins 4y ago
It's not just that they tried to monetize Java. That's one thing that's debatably good or bad, but not the worst thing that's objectively terrible: Sun tried to MILITARIZE Java DEVELOPERS as disposable mercenaries in Scott McNealy's personal war against Bill Gates and Microsoft. See me other post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125284 >You're right, it was Slowlaris that killed Sun, and Java was meant to be a "Microsoft Killer", not a programming language. [...] >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. [...]

_448 4y ago

Anyone know who designed the SUN logo. It is a very clever arrangement of the characters S U and N. You can see SUN from any angle; and it also looks like electronic circuit. Very clever design.

lizknope 4y ago
https://1000logos.net/sun-microsystems-logo/ https://1000logos.net/sun-microsystems-logo/ The emblem was created in 1982 by Vaughan Pratt, professor of computer science.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  That's right: Vaughan Pratt designed the original square Sun logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Pratt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Pratt And Sun Science Officer and Nixon Enemy John Gage is the genius who rotated it 45 degrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage Nixon Enemies List entry for John B. Gage: https://www.enemieslist.info/enemy.php?ID=463 https://www.enemieslist.info/enemy.php?ID=463 Another one of the greatest logos of all time is the SGI logo, designed by none other than Scott Kim! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kim http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/sgi_logo.html http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/sgi_logo.html https://www.amazon.com/Inversions-Scott-Kim/dp/1559532807 https://www.amazon.com/Inversions-Scott-Kim/dp/1559532807 https://scottkim.com/ https://scottkim.com/

lizknope 4y ago

I started using M68K based Sun 3 machines in high school in 1991. In college from 1993-97 we had thousands of Suns, HP-UX, DEC Ultrix, Unix RISC workstations on campus. I joined the semiconductor industry in 1997 and all of of chip design EDA software ran on Suns. Everyone had a Sun on their desk and some people also had a Windows PC for MS-Office. We had big 14 CPU Suns in the server room with 16GB RAM for big jobs and would remotely display to our local Sun machines via X11. I convinced my manager to let me install Linux on a PC and we got a 21" monitor running beyond 1600x1200 (1800x1440 I think) and everyone thought was much nicer, quieter, and most importantly far cheaper than the Sun on their desk. Then everyone decided to switch and we stacked all the Suns in the server room. In 1999 we were trying a new chip synthesis tool from a startup called Ambit (later acquired by Cadence) I submitted a bug report with a crash dump showing "Sun4u SPARC Solaris 2.5" and got a reply back from the support showing they replicated the crash and it had "i686 Linux 2.0 GCC" or something in the log. I was surprised to see that the developers were running it on Linux. You could only buy this software for Solaris / HP-UX / IBM AIX. I asked for the Linux version and the developer said "We don't sell the Linux version, we're a startup that doesn't have money to buy a Sun for every developer so we use Linux x86 and then compile for Sun/HP/IBM at the very end" Around 2002 the Linux / x86 machines had gotten so fast and cheap that the EDA companies started releasing their software for Linux and we started buying Linux machines. I remember recompiling a custom Linux kernel to change the user / kernel memory split for 2GB / 2GB to 3GB user / 1GB kernel and then 3.75GB user / 250MB kernel. We had some programs that needed over 4GB RAM so we kept a few 64-bit Suns for those. Then the AMD 64-bit Opteron came out and it was all over. We never bought a Sun after that. I'm still in the semiconductor industry and everything still runs on Linux. We have clusters with tens of thousands of Linux machines and access them via a remote X11 desktop session (Exceed, NoMachine, X2Go)

guenthert 4y ago
> Then the AMD 64-bit Opteron came out and it was all over. We never bought a Sun after that. Sun actually sold an Opteron based workstation, reusing the 'Ultra' name, for a quite reasonable price then. A buddy of mine, interested in Java development, bought it (and a few years later gifted it to me). It was a well engineered PC (could run MS Windows), with Solaris installed (I only ever used it with Linux).

cryptonector 4y ago

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 Professional Services (presumably in order to preserve R&D). Compare to IBM, which did the opposite, and whose professional services division became hugely valuable to IBM. Professional services organizations sell their services and their parent companies other products and services. Losing the professional services organization meant losing sales. That was all in 2002. Many more mistakes were made later (and before), but these are the ones that really killed Sun. Other mistakes after 2002: - Treating J2ME as a cash cow and thus failing to get it on competitors' handsets when iPhones came about. This failure being one of limited R&D and mispricing the product. Compare to Android essentially adopting Java not that much later. - In general treating x86 as a second class citizen to protect SPARC. Now, this one is not very fair because after the cancellation of Solaris on x86 was reverse, internally x86 was a first class citizen, and Sun built a great systems group around x86, but Sun was quite the cash cow milker and put too much effort to keep SPARC from falling too far behind x86, and from the outside it probably looked like Sun just didn't really mean x86 support until around the time of the Oracle acquisition (at which time Sun had great x86 systems for its storage appliance). You have to know when the cash cow is dying and when it's beyond rebuilding, and Sun just didn't. - The MySQL acquisition. $1bn out the window. There were others, like Cobalt. Oracle too made mistakes, chiefly killing OpenSolaris in response to Greenbytes' shipping non-release OpenSolaris ZFS dedup code before Oracle. There were other ways to handle this. Oracle is a company built on mindshare, but it didn't understand that Solaris was now the underdog and needed to build mindshare, and the way to do it was to loss-lead. Friends of mine immediately told me they'd no longer run any new Solaris systems and would migrate from existing ones ASAP because of shades of the 2002 cancellation of Solaris on x86 -- they felt they could not trust Oracle. This could be my bias because 2002 is when I joined Sun. Clearly there were other mistakes made before 2001. But the Solaris team at Sun did incredible things in the 00s with a smaller team than in the 90s. The Sun culture that created ZFS, SMF, FMA, and other things in the 00s doesn't exist anywhere now. It was a culture of internal openness and skunkworks projects that paid off.

peace177 4y ago

[flagged]

catmikk 4y ago

I worked with and around a lot of the Sun folks, including founders. I just ran into this and enjoyed the reading. Thought I'd add this document. Sun brought some awesome culture to the Silicon Valley with their pranks. https://www.sunreunion.com/pdfs/Facts-at-a-Glance-April-Fools-1985-1993.pdf https://www.sunreunion.com/pdfs/Facts-at-a-Glance-April-Fool...