12 ms·

Sun: The Network Is the Computer

165 points by BirAdam 4y ago

Manfred 4y ago
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the story, but I don't think the story lines up entirely. > At 16, Bechtolsheim designed an industrial controller for a company that was based on the 8008. 1955 + 16 = 1971. That means they based their design on a chip that wasn't commercially available until the middle of 1972.
- roundandround 4y ago
  The 8008 architecture was essentially in use before it was bought by Intel and made into a finished chip, I.e.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200 Though this could also just be referring to the start date of a project that ultimately was implemented with an 8008.
jasoneckert 4y ago
I was at Sun in the early 1990s working on Sun OS 4 and 5, and the slogan "the network is the computer" was still the slogan everywhere, and everyone in the company seemed to be on board with it. Of course, back then most associated it with Yellow Pages (NIS), NFS, and distributed computing using SPARC, but Sun was always actively looking for ways to push everything to the network.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  It was the slogan till the end. (I was at Sun via MySQL acquisition)
  - retcond 4y ago
    Not the only slogan actually, "The Dot In Dot Com" ran with several important campaigns at the beginning of the nineties and was a crucial security public service announcement that's explained here : https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/12/a-tale-of-a-trailing-dot/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/12/a-tale-of-a-trailing-... THE money quote : The trailing dot then means the name is to be used actually exactly only like that, it is specified in full, while the name without a trailing dot can be tried with a domain name appended to it. Or even a list of domain names, until one resolves. This makes people want to use a trailing dot at times, to avoid that domain test."
    - johannes1234321 4y ago
      Back in the nineties I stumbled over the dot, when a friend of mine claimed his mail address was `something@aol.com.` insisting on the dot. I proved him wrong, claiming it didn't matter. Only a few years later, when dealing with DNS config I learned the truth... now it's knowledge I can use to be alone in a bar. But more recently that knowledge got some relevance in Kubernetes clusters to me: By default they use the `cluster.local.` domain. As that is configurable, now many people leave that out and rely on the search domain config. In consequence in some situations a broken service may try to connect to the outside and with bad choice of i.e. namespace names might leak as valid host names on the public DNS ... which in worst names can lead to a connection attempt from cluster to some foreign system.
    - DonHopkins 4y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042291 DonHopkins 10 months ago: You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident! But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if. The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft. It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc! And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. 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... Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris. To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke: Q: What do you get when you cross Sun and AT&T? A: AT&T.
animal-hash 4y ago
"The Sun-1 workstation used a Motorola 68000 CPU at 10MHz. This was paired with an in-house designed MMU. It had 256K zero wait state memory with parity, and 32K EPROM memory." I like how these specs are described as if it was a computer in a Fast and Furious action flic
- bitwize 4y ago
  Now my brain is reading that line in a Vin Diesel voice, and it seems to fit.
  - ElfinTrousers 4y ago
    Now imagine it using the tone of voice Pyle used in Full Metal Jacket right before the unpleasantness in the washroom.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  I think if a lot of computer enthusiasts had been born say 70 years earlier than they were, they would've been gearheads--auto enthusiasts--instead.
pavlov 4y ago
Around the turn of the millennium Sun was talking a lot about grid computing, which was essentially what we call public cloud now. In a slightly different universe Sun would be AWS.
- DamonHD 4y ago
  Sun kept touting a service that we would call cloud, and I kept trying to buy it for one of my financial clients, but it never happened...
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    Sun was very much enterprise, nice reliability and support but commodity hardware completely blew them away for most purposes. They were still selling $10k workstations when a cheap consumer PC running Linux would run laps around it.
    - unxdfa 4y ago
      Linux didn't even dent it in my universe back then. Between 1996 and 1999 we switched our internal systems from Solaris to NT. Even our Oracle on HP/UX estate got eaten by SQL Server 7. Our 1999 capex and opex was 25% of what it was in 1996 and we delivered more benefits to our users.
  - forgetfulness 4y ago
    It was nigh impossible to find on their website a place where you could pay them to sell you things, it was sad but not surprising that they were going under.
- throw0101c 4y ago
  > Around the turn of the millennium Sun was talking a lot about grid computing […] Not (just) talking, but offering: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud Also: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Grid_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Grid_Engine
- 4y ago
eternalban 4y ago
Saw the name Kim Polese and remembered Marimba and Bongo. I actually liked Bongo a lot - it was great for quickly prototyping an idea. I haven’t had any luck finding it. (In case you’re curious: https://archive.org/details/officialmarmba00good https://archive.org/details/officialmarmba00good) P.s. > “Behind and the Green Door” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Green_Door https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Green_Door
- codetrotter 4y ago
  > I actually liked Bongo a lot - it was great for quickly prototyping an idea. I haven’t had any luck finding it. Not familiar with Bongo, and not sure if this fits what you are looking for. > IBM Developer Connection Release 2 Volume 2 > June 1998 > Discontinued Software > This is a complete list of the The IBM Developer Connection Release 2, Volume 2 content. > […] > Bongo, Castanet Tuner & Transmitter (Marimba) (M9) https://archive.org/details/IBMDevConR2V2#ia-carousel https://archive.org/details/IBMDevConR2V2#ia-carousel Might be worth to download CD_09.zip and have a look https://archive.org/download/IBMDevConR2V2 https://archive.org/download/IBMDevConR2V2 You’ll need a way to mount bin and cue files. --- Edit: So I just had a look at the contents of the CD 9. I had to convert the bin and cue file to iso in order to mount it. Did so using a cli tool called "bchunk". When you mount the CD, there is an "index.htm" file that you can open in your web browser. This page is a little confusing because it has no other navigation than a link to the license agreement. On the bottom of the license page, you see: > Enter the Catalog > Select a catalog option below to explore the variety of content available from the Developer Connection. Select the appropriate Java catalog based on the Java level supported by your browser. For Java 1.1, be sure to obtain the latest browser updates. > Java catalog (Java 1.0) > Java catalog (Java 1.1) > Pure HTML catalog Click that link for the Pure HTML catalog. From there, click the link "Bongo, Castanet Tuner & Transmitter (Marimba) (M9)" There we find the following description: > Bongo, Castanet Tuner & Transmitter (Marimba) (M9) > This product is located on Member Disc 9. > Bongo is a visual interface builder for Java. Bongo includes a wide variety of interface "widgets" to enable rapid development of rich user interfaces. Widgets are pre-written visual controls, ready to immediately insert into Bongo. Simply drag and drop Bongo widgets to create a stunning visual interface, then use Bongo to add intelligence behind the interface via scripts written in Java. > Unlike widgets in most builders, Bongo widgets can be transparent or opaque, offering developers a great deal of flexibility and ease of use. Features such as these make Bongo an extremely powerful development tool. Bongo can produce visual interfaces for stand-alone Java applications as well as applets. > Best of all, Bongo's output can be directly published as a Marimba Castanet channel, and the presentation is then automatically distributed and maintained by Castanet within a company or across the Internet. Bongo is not required for developing Castanet channels, but if you're looking for a great tool that makes it easy to create Castanet channels, Bongo is for you. > Castanet automatically distributes and maintains software applications and content within a company or across the Internet. The Castanet Transmitter (server) and Castanet Tuner (client) work together to keep software and content always up-to-date. Create a "channel" and place it on a Castanet Transmitter. Castanet automatically distributes, installs, maintains, and updates the channel, all via the internet. Castanet can support any type of channel: internal corporate applications, multimedia consumer channels, and more. And the install instructions: > Installation Instructions: > To install from the CD: > 1. Change to the \marimba\bongo directory on the CD and type bongo1_0. > 2. Change to the \marimba\tuner directory on the CD and type tuner1_0. > 3. Change to the \marimba\transmit directory on the CD and type trans1_0. These files are all Windows exe files. I tried to run bongo1_0.exe in Wine, but nothing happened. I don't usually use Windows anymore, not since many years. But I do have a laptop that I recently installed an old copy of Windows 7 on because I needed to use another piece of software that was also Windows only.
drmpeg 4y ago
I worked in the same building where Bechtolsheim's company Granite Systems was located (3450 Hillview Ave in Palo Alto). My company was on the 2nd floor and Granite was on the 1st floor. We didn't even know he was there until they were sold to Cisco in 1996. 3450 Hillview was in horrible shape when we first moved in. But the owners refurbished it a floor at a time. When we moved to the second floor, there were four big corner offices. There was so much fighting as to who would get the 4th corner office that the CEO got pissed off and gave it to me and another engineer (we worked together as a team and designed all the products).
- lizknope 4y ago
  I worked at an semiconductor foundry that was doing chips with Cisco's Gigabit Switching Group which was the former Granite Systems team. I was 23 and all the guys there were millionaires and all under 30. All of our chip design software ran on Sun workstations which I had been using since high school in 1991. I wanted a Sun so badly in 1993 when I started college. Then I learned about Linux and got a PC just for Linux. Andy Bechtolsheim's office was just around the corner from the guys I was working with. I walked by a bunch of times just to see him inside his office talking on the phone. The first time I went on a business trip to Silicon Valley I literally searched for all the company's headquarters and drove around to see them and the signs out front on the weekend. It sounds super geeky and it was but I loved it.
Romen_b 4y ago
Sun microsystem disappearing was/is a saddest case of a business failing for me. I wish they have done the correct marketing and partnership back in the time.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  They got absorbed by Oracle.
  - ericvsmith 4y ago
    It would be hard to argue that Sun has not disappeared.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      Consumed by a black hole of legal wrangling and excessive billing.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    One of the most innovative companies absorbed by the company whose only innovation is finding new legal loopholes to screw more money out of their customers. Some fates are worse than disappearance.
    - forgetfulness 4y ago
      At least they began iterating more quickly on Java, I remember as years went by and Sun's OOP purists were still saying that they were considering anonymous functions but just couldn't decide on the syntax.
    - smackeyacky 4y ago
      That's not entirely fair to Oracle. Their original database had a big impact. It was only later that their business model switched to screwing their own customers as hard as possible.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
seydor 4y ago
wonder what tech of today is way ahead of its time (To answer my own question, 1) VR goggles etc, 2) Balaji's network state, as ridiculous as it sounds in 2023)
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Everything we have reverse engineered from nature.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  Limb regeneration through bioelectric signals [1] [2], like calling an API of the damaged cells to start the reconstruction. [1] "Diverse Intelligence" - a talk by Michael Levin, https://youtu.be/iIQX6m2eRPY?t=3097 https://youtu.be/iIQX6m2eRPY?t=3097 [2] Acute multidrug delivery via a wearable bioreactor facilitates long-term limb regeneration and functional recovery in adult Xenopus laevis, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2164 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2164
  - seydor 4y ago
    Hopefully these types of interventions will happen sooner rather than in the far future. Levin's methods use tools that are almost 'conventional' now in biotech and neuroscience. If they will work for organ regeneration etc, then it should be a matter of engineering to put them to use.
- anthk 4y ago
  ChatGPT, Whisper C++ running on a netbook to transcribe audio in record time...
- pjmlp 4y ago
  VR googles were already looking for their customers back in 1994, when I saw someone using them alongside id Software games on a computer expo.
bluedino 4y ago
The early 1980's were an amazing (yet strange) time in computing. On one hand you have these $10,000 UNIX workstations that almost seem futuristic. Then you have the IBM PC for 1/4 the price. 16-bit CPU, DOS, enough memory to be usable. And at the bottom for 1/4 of that price, you had the Commodore 64. Minimal memory and storage, 8 bit CPU, almost a game console on steroids.
- pklausler 4y ago
  There was a lot of other stuff going on that wasn’t microcomputing.
- daitangio 4y ago
  And with C/64 there as also some business application (Geos, VisiCalc...). The 8BitGuy noted usually business computers have 80-columns, whereas "home" compueters 40-colums. Neverless C/64 could run a small database for a 'VHS Store' without troubles (I made it in basic... :)
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    The 40 columns limit derives ultimately from most video output in home computers being low-quality RF to a TV screen. You can try to output 80-column text to a TV, but you'll get tons of arfifacts that make it barely usable. Especially if you also insist on color output.
- anthk 4y ago
  You forgot the Amiga and the Atari, in between, except the Amiga was superior to the IBM PC at a much cheaper price.
  - ajross 4y ago
    You both forgot the Apple II, which did all that stuff much earlier. Any history that writes out Woz is missing the point. Fundamentally the Atari 800 was an attempt to make a better Apple and target it at the home market. The C64 was a better Atari and won the fight. But the paradigm for how both those systems work was settled in the summer of 1978 when the Disk II shipped. That was four and a half years before the Commodore reached market. (Four and a half years after the C64 release we could buy 32 bit PCs and Macs. It's a long, long time in this context.)
wkat4242 4y ago
I often wonder what would have happened if Sun hadn't been bought by Oracle and innovation had continued. They were very far ahead. They invented things like containers in Solaris way before Kubernetes and Docker popularised them on Linux.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  And Dtrace, NFS, ZFS… truly a shame.
- ajross 4y ago
  > They were very far ahead. They weren't, though, not really. The tech industry just moves too fast for that kind of pronouncement. It's absolutely true that a Sun-3/75 in 1986 was a revelation[1], but every one of those features was cloned as free software and running on sub-$1000 hardware by 1994. They likewise had a brief moment with SPARC in the early 90's where their machines were the fastest you could buy, but Intel demolished those hopes too[4]. Their swan song was the early dot com boom, where they still held onto the reputation as "The Best Unix" and sold a ton of web server hardware to the more conservative outfits. But we could all see the writing on the wall even then. I mean, it's true they had some great stuff toward the end. But not that great, and generally not marketed in a way that would help them. Containers are actually a good example. Solaris Zones were... just a weird circus act[2]. I don't know any major players who made bets on the technology. And, again, within 2-3 years Linux had cgroups and LXC running[3] in a more performant (and much cheaper to deploy) environment and that's what Docker picked. [1] Faster than a VAX, which was still the reference Unix box. Megapixel framebuffer with windowing and competent terminal emulation. Every box was on the Internet. Every box could see the rest of its network over NFS (and most were deployed diskless). FWIW: anyone know where I can get one? Would love one for the collection, but most seem to have disappeared (government and university equipment tends not to end up on eBay...) [2] Edit because this was misunderstood: I'm saying it was an oddity with minimal uptake, not that it was chaotic or bad as a matter of design. [3] This too got misunderstood, though I don't see how. I'm really not interested in a flame war about whose container technology is better. I'm just saying that to Sun in the early/mid 00's, it wasn't much of a competetive advantage (as evidenced by the fact that it lost to Docker). [4] Ooph, this one too. I'm saying that in the early 90's SPARC was dancing with MIPS for the fastest CPUs on the planet, but by the release of the P6 core that was over and Intel had essentially won (though DEC kept the dance going a while longer with Alpha). I'm just amazed at the propensity for folks here to jump in to argue stuff that in my mind was settled decades ago.
thom 4y ago
The fate of Sun just goes to show that 'worse is better' isn't just about the superiority of the Unix philosophy, it really takes no prisoners.
remote_phone 4y ago
The post is very good but has a huge glaring hole in it. They say Sun died because of AMD64 but that’s incorrect. It was Linux. I know this because I was in enterprise software during this era and the demise of Sun due to Linux was stunning. Intel and Windows killed SGI, which was a huge coup. However Sun was killed because during that time, Linux went from a toy OS into a fully supported enterprise OS that was “good enough”. I remember how at one point in time, Oracle on Solaris was just about as rock solid as you could get. But slowly and surely more enterprise software moved over to Linux, especially Oracle. And within 10 years Sun went from one of the “4 horsemen of the Internet” to being sold to Oracle. It was sad because I loved Solaris as a technology, I even had a Sun workstation at home. That said, how quickly Linux killed Solaris/Sun is a great reminder of how quickly things change in tech.
- BirAdam 4y ago
  From the article: > SPARC didn’t keep its edge. The x86 platform became extremely competitive with the arrival of AMD64. The 64 bit x86 machines were cheaper than SPARC machines, and when coupled with Linux they could run all of the UNIX software any web company needed. This fact was proven by the likes of Google and Facebook. The core of Sun’s business was destroyed.
  - remote_phone 4y ago
    64 bit came after Linux. And amd64 didn’t become popular until Intel moved to it unwillingly. Enterprise didn’t mess Around with amd at that point.
    - BirAdam 4y ago
      Yes. Linux came before AMD64, but that’s irrelevant. Corporate UNIX was more popular than Linux in the 1990s. AMD64 launched with the Opteron in 2003. In 2004, it was making AMD hundreds of millions per quarter and it was beating both Sun and Intel in server sales. Intel and HP were trying to push Itanium at this point, and Itanium was performing quite poorly. By 2004, AMD Opteron was also doing better than IBM Power. AMD was was crushing it. EDIT: To give an idea of AMD at this point, a few customers of AMD buying Opteron were The Weather Channel, Siemens, Boeing, Lockheed, Ferrari, Racksaver, Volkswagon, Rackspace, University of Kentucky (these are the ones to have publicly stated they adopted Opteron whose news articles to the effect I could find). Revenue of Q3 2003 was $1.2 billion (about $2 billion today), and that was the first quarter to include AMD64.
CalChris 4y ago
T-shirt wars. Sun had a t-shirt with their slogan, The Network Is The Computer. So DEC had another t-shirt, The Network Is The Network and The Computer Is The Computer. We regret the confusion.
sbierwagen 4y ago
> We wanted computers to go away, to instead become an everyday thing. We thought the third wave of computing would be driven by consumer electronics. The hardware would come from Circuit City, and the software would come from Tower Records. Interesting. He was half right: hardware did commoditize, but software got so cheap that it completely vanished: consumers just use whatever’s bundled with their phone/laptop, occasionally buying games on Steam or the PlayStation store. (Itself commoditized: they’re not really buying de-novo “software” but more a basket of content that plugs into Unity engine)
Scubabear68 4y ago
I still have fond memories working at Bear Stearns in the early 90s in Fixed Income, every developer had a Sun workstation on their desk instead of a PC, initially running SunOS and eventually transitioning to this weird thing called Solaris. I felt like I was living in the future.
- blantonl 4y ago
  I remember in the late 90's working as an enterprise systems management architect (Tivoli) for a large financial services firm, and we were deploying the entire project on Solaris and Sun Boxes that were crazy expensive. Because of this, I was given a Sun Workstation at my desk alongside my Windows machine, and I thought it made me look like the baddest mfr on the floor with that big monitor, the sun workstation with the logo, and that antiquated x windows environment. It was like voodoo level stuff for your regular Netware lan admins etc that were my neighbors.
  - Scubabear68 4y ago
    Yep. Correction on my above post though, only the IT side of Fixed Income used Sun boxes. The analytics guys in the FAST department were all on HP-UX. A definite Sun vs HP rivalry going on there, and very eye opening to me seeing HP-UX and Sun were both “Unix” but very different in so many details.
lizknope 4y ago
My comment from 2 months ago about Sun 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)
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  At Sun in 1990 in the multimedia group (working on the X11/NeWS window system), everyone had a Sun workstation on their desk (typically SS1 at the time), and a Wyse terminal hooked up to the serial port to reboot it or restart the window system when it got stuck!
jkmcf 4y ago
Every time I look at developing a GUI, I think back to using DevGuide and wonder why the present DX sucks so bad.
DonHopkins 4y ago
Anyone dare to deconstruct and psychoanalyze this Sun commercial? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o05CuNgvsDw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o05CuNgvsDw
- hulitu 4y ago
  Some comment claims is from 1997. My experience, with using Windows for work, is that will not survive a couple of days without reboot. And all this on enterprise class HW (HP). Even win 10 has random bugs which cause GUI elements dissapearing or even blue screen.
DonHopkins 4y ago
John Gilmore on Sun and Internet history: https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2023-February/008686.html https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2023-Febr... John Gilmore gnu at toad.com, Mon Feb 13 21:34:53 PST 2023 Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history@elists.isoc.org> wrote: >Networking and computing vendors were a little slower to realize TCP had won. My perspective on this history comes from being a young "Tourist" on the ARPAnet (via Telenet and MIT-AI), and then being employee #5 of Sun in 1982, working there for five or six years. It was incredibly refreshing to be on the ARPAnet and have mailing lists where standards were discussed openly, for free, among anyone who wanted to participate. And with drafts and standards easily available on FTP sites, in plain ASCII text, for me to read, understand, and if I wanted to, implement. I had come from the IBM mainframe (APL and OS/MVT) world. There we had had two mainframes IN THE SAME ROOM and designed an email system that would move messages back and forth between them with timed transfers several times per day on manually moved 9-TRACK MAGTAPES! Because you really couldn't get an interface any better than a serial port that would talk between two mainframes, and IBM's software tended to suck. And non-ARPAnet standards documents were obtuse, obviously not designed to be easily understood. Jon Postel as the RFC author and editor completely shattered the mold there. By the time I joined Sun in 1982, everything we did was based on Ethernet and TCP/IP. Our original prototypes had 3-meg Experimental Ethernet multibus boards created by our founder, grad student Andy Bechtolsheim. These had been created at Stanford along with the first 8-MHz 68000 Sun CPU boards. There might have been a tiny bit of XNS or something around, inherited from Stanford, but everything we built and used was IP. Our software started with a UNIX V7 clone from Unisoft as a stopgap. After hiring Bill Shannon, Tom Lyon, and Bill Joy among the first 10 employees, we rapidly moved to 4.1[abc]BSD and 4.2BSD systems that included TCP/IP networking as a standard feature. This took our standalone UNIX systems and made them part of a tight network of cooperating systems by 1983. We adopted 3Com Multibus 10-megabit Ethernet boards -- with separate transceivers -- as soon as they were available. We adopted (and I maintained) sendmail as our networked email software. Tons of universities adopted our hardware and software, because we were cheaper than Vaxes, ran solid portable UNIX software, and came with high-resolution graphics displays and high speed networking. The high single-unit prices of disk drives and tape drives meant that you got much more storage per user dollar if you bought big drives and split them among multiple workstations. Bill Croft built a simple block-level storage sharing protocol (nd, network disk) that ran over UDP. The tape access commands like dump were hacked to work simply over TCP. Bill and I wrote the bootstrap code that enabled diskless workstations to boot across the Ethernet (again using UDP) from a local server. In parallel, Sun designed and eventually shipped and standardized the Network File System for object-level sharing of files and directories. Again, it ran over IP and UDP with some TCP, on 10-meg Ethernet. (Bill and I also invented and published BOOTP at the time, to automate getting your new machine's IP address. Sun didn't ship it then, because the NFS kernel people had picked Reverse ARP as their bootstrap method. BOOTP later became DHCP.) Eventually, Sun migrated the Ethernet interface right onto the motherboard, once we started building larger circuit boards. Sun had a healthy third-party catalog of applications that included OSI and SNA and Netware and X.25 and other networking protocols. Sun may have even adopted some of those products under its own brand. But they all were licensed at something like $1000 per workstation -- real money in 1983. TCP/IP came free and well debugged in the basic OS. And you couldn't boot the machine over SNA, or share drives that way, so you had to understand TCP/IP anyway and run it in parallel if you wanted any of those features. (A great short story of his early Sun history was posted last year by Sun emp#8, Tom Lyon, as a twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/aka_pugs/status/1521489115585421314 https://twitter.com/aka_pugs/status/1521489115585421314 ) As most of this list knows, Berkeley Unix had TCP/IP because DARPA had funded UC Berkeley in 1978 to make it a standard feature in evolving 4.1BSD into 4.2BSD for the research community. I don't know how few or many dollars that investment cost them, but it got incredible bang for the buck! The result was that every UNIX system (except the lame microprocessor ones like Xenix) came standard with TCP/IP. Every research lab that was buying minicomputers like Pyramids, DEC Vaxes, Sequents, or workstations like Suns or SGIs, therefore had every reason to make their whole advanced-computing network use TCP/IP. Their email would interoperate locally over the LAN and be gatewayed by a server onto UUCP or BITNET or CSNET for global connectivity. And whenever they could beg, borrow, or steal a realtime IP connection to the wider Internet, then poof, their local machines just popped onto the worldwide network. This multi-vendor consortium rapidly pushing Ethernet and TCP/IP forward contrasted with every other wide-area networking technology, which was either owned by one company (like DECNET or SNA) or was managed by a slothful postal bureacracy like X.25. The impact of that UC Berkeley funding was akin to (and prerequisite to) the impact that came from the later research funding given to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which allowed them to create the Mosaic graphical web browser that jumpstarted public use of the WWW (over TCP/IP). Don't ignore the impact of Ethernet on the acceptance of TCP/IP. Ethernet provided the first solid standardized multi-megabit-per-second cable interface at reasonable prices. It would support any networking protocol, and was supported and evolved forward by hundreds of hardware and software companies. Ethernet was the "on-ramp" for TCP/IP, which would have gone nowhere if it had been limited to serial port or modem speeds (under 100 kbits/sec). I worked where Ethernet was adopted early, so it shortly became unremarkable to me. Later, I suddenly knew it had taken over the universe when I started seeing 8-pin modular jacks and Ethernet cables on cash registers in small ordinary shops. (Ethernet's evolution into back-end full duplex, fiber, higher speeds, and long haul networks only cemented its position as the standard network front end faster than modems.) TCP/IP went to most places that Ethernet went, in some ways riding on its coattails. John Gilmore

165 points by BirAdam 4y ago

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the story, but I don't think the story lines up entirely. > At 16, Bechtolsheim designed an industrial controller for a company that was based on the 8008. 1955 + 16 = 1971. That means they based their design on a chip that wasn't commercially available until the middle of 1972.

roundandround 4y ago
The 8008 architecture was essentially in use before it was bought by Intel and made into a finished chip, I.e.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200 Though this could also just be referring to the start date of a project that ultimately was implemented with an 8008.

jasoneckert 4y ago

I was at Sun in the early 1990s working on Sun OS 4 and 5, and the slogan "the network is the computer" was still the slogan everywhere, and everyone in the company seemed to be on board with it. Of course, back then most associated it with Yellow Pages (NIS), NFS, and distributed computing using SPARC, but Sun was always actively looking for ways to push everything to the network.

johannes1234321 4y ago
It was the slogan till the end. (I was at Sun via MySQL acquisition)
- retcond 4y ago
  Not the only slogan actually, "The Dot In Dot Com" ran with several important campaigns at the beginning of the nineties and was a crucial security public service announcement that's explained here : https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/12/a-tale-of-a-trailing-dot/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/12/a-tale-of-a-trailing-... THE money quote : The trailing dot then means the name is to be used actually exactly only like that, it is specified in full, while the name without a trailing dot can be tried with a domain name appended to it. Or even a list of domain names, until one resolves. This makes people want to use a trailing dot at times, to avoid that domain test."
  - johannes1234321 4y ago
    Back in the nineties I stumbled over the dot, when a friend of mine claimed his mail address was `something@aol.com.` insisting on the dot. I proved him wrong, claiming it didn't matter. Only a few years later, when dealing with DNS config I learned the truth... now it's knowledge I can use to be alone in a bar. But more recently that knowledge got some relevance in Kubernetes clusters to me: By default they use the `cluster.local.` domain. As that is configurable, now many people leave that out and rely on the search domain config. In consequence in some situations a broken service may try to connect to the outside and with bad choice of i.e. namespace names might leak as valid host names on the public DNS ... which in worst names can lead to a connection attempt from cluster to some foreign system.
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042291 DonHopkins 10 months ago: You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident! But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if. The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft. It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc! And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. 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... Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris. To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke: Q: What do you get when you cross Sun and AT&T? A: AT&T.

animal-hash 4y ago

"The Sun-1 workstation used a Motorola 68000 CPU at 10MHz. This was paired with an in-house designed MMU. It had 256K zero wait state memory with parity, and 32K EPROM memory." I like how these specs are described as if it was a computer in a Fast and Furious action flic

bitwize 4y ago
Now my brain is reading that line in a Vin Diesel voice, and it seems to fit.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  Now imagine it using the tone of voice Pyle used in Full Metal Jacket right before the unpleasantness in the washroom.
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
I think if a lot of computer enthusiasts had been born say 70 years earlier than they were, they would've been gearheads--auto enthusiasts--instead.

pavlov 4y ago

Around the turn of the millennium Sun was talking a lot about grid computing, which was essentially what we call public cloud now. In a slightly different universe Sun would be AWS.

DamonHD 4y ago
Sun kept touting a service that we would call cloud, and I kept trying to buy it for one of my financial clients, but it never happened...
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  Sun was very much enterprise, nice reliability and support but commodity hardware completely blew them away for most purposes. They were still selling $10k workstations when a cheap consumer PC running Linux would run laps around it.
  - unxdfa 4y ago
    Linux didn't even dent it in my universe back then. Between 1996 and 1999 we switched our internal systems from Solaris to NT. Even our Oracle on HP/UX estate got eaten by SQL Server 7. Our 1999 capex and opex was 25% of what it was in 1996 and we delivered more benefits to our users.
- forgetfulness 4y ago
  It was nigh impossible to find on their website a place where you could pay them to sell you things, it was sad but not surprising that they were going under.
throw0101c 4y ago
> Around the turn of the millennium Sun was talking a lot about grid computing […] Not (just) talking, but offering: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud Also: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Grid_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Grid_Engine
4y ago

eternalban 4y ago

Saw the name Kim Polese and remembered Marimba and Bongo. I actually liked Bongo a lot - it was great for quickly prototyping an idea. I haven’t had any luck finding it. (In case you’re curious: https://archive.org/details/officialmarmba00good https://archive.org/details/officialmarmba00good) P.s. > “Behind and the Green Door” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Green_Door https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Green_Door

codetrotter 4y ago
> I actually liked Bongo a lot - it was great for quickly prototyping an idea. I haven’t had any luck finding it. Not familiar with Bongo, and not sure if this fits what you are looking for. > IBM Developer Connection Release 2 Volume 2 > June 1998 > Discontinued Software > This is a complete list of the The IBM Developer Connection Release 2, Volume 2 content. > […] > Bongo, Castanet Tuner & Transmitter (Marimba) (M9) https://archive.org/details/IBMDevConR2V2#ia-carousel https://archive.org/details/IBMDevConR2V2#ia-carousel Might be worth to download CD_09.zip and have a look https://archive.org/download/IBMDevConR2V2 https://archive.org/download/IBMDevConR2V2 You’ll need a way to mount bin and cue files. --- Edit: So I just had a look at the contents of the CD 9. I had to convert the bin and cue file to iso in order to mount it. Did so using a cli tool called "bchunk". When you mount the CD, there is an "index.htm" file that you can open in your web browser. This page is a little confusing because it has no other navigation than a link to the license agreement. On the bottom of the license page, you see: > Enter the Catalog > Select a catalog option below to explore the variety of content available from the Developer Connection. Select the appropriate Java catalog based on the Java level supported by your browser. For Java 1.1, be sure to obtain the latest browser updates. > Java catalog (Java 1.0) > Java catalog (Java 1.1) > Pure HTML catalog Click that link for the Pure HTML catalog. From there, click the link "Bongo, Castanet Tuner & Transmitter (Marimba) (M9)" There we find the following description: > Bongo, Castanet Tuner & Transmitter (Marimba) (M9) > This product is located on Member Disc 9. > Bongo is a visual interface builder for Java. Bongo includes a wide variety of interface "widgets" to enable rapid development of rich user interfaces. Widgets are pre-written visual controls, ready to immediately insert into Bongo. Simply drag and drop Bongo widgets to create a stunning visual interface, then use Bongo to add intelligence behind the interface via scripts written in Java. > Unlike widgets in most builders, Bongo widgets can be transparent or opaque, offering developers a great deal of flexibility and ease of use. Features such as these make Bongo an extremely powerful development tool. Bongo can produce visual interfaces for stand-alone Java applications as well as applets. > Best of all, Bongo's output can be directly published as a Marimba Castanet channel, and the presentation is then automatically distributed and maintained by Castanet within a company or across the Internet. Bongo is not required for developing Castanet channels, but if you're looking for a great tool that makes it easy to create Castanet channels, Bongo is for you. > Castanet automatically distributes and maintains software applications and content within a company or across the Internet. The Castanet Transmitter (server) and Castanet Tuner (client) work together to keep software and content always up-to-date. Create a "channel" and place it on a Castanet Transmitter. Castanet automatically distributes, installs, maintains, and updates the channel, all via the internet. Castanet can support any type of channel: internal corporate applications, multimedia consumer channels, and more. And the install instructions: > Installation Instructions: > To install from the CD: > 1. Change to the \marimba\bongo directory on the CD and type bongo1_0. > 2. Change to the \marimba\tuner directory on the CD and type tuner1_0. > 3. Change to the \marimba\transmit directory on the CD and type trans1_0. These files are all Windows exe files. I tried to run bongo1_0.exe in Wine, but nothing happened. I don't usually use Windows anymore, not since many years. But I do have a laptop that I recently installed an old copy of Windows 7 on because I needed to use another piece of software that was also Windows only.

drmpeg 4y ago

I worked in the same building where Bechtolsheim's company Granite Systems was located (3450 Hillview Ave in Palo Alto). My company was on the 2nd floor and Granite was on the 1st floor. We didn't even know he was there until they were sold to Cisco in 1996. 3450 Hillview was in horrible shape when we first moved in. But the owners refurbished it a floor at a time. When we moved to the second floor, there were four big corner offices. There was so much fighting as to who would get the 4th corner office that the CEO got pissed off and gave it to me and another engineer (we worked together as a team and designed all the products).

lizknope 4y ago
I worked at an semiconductor foundry that was doing chips with Cisco's Gigabit Switching Group which was the former Granite Systems team. I was 23 and all the guys there were millionaires and all under 30. All of our chip design software ran on Sun workstations which I had been using since high school in 1991. I wanted a Sun so badly in 1993 when I started college. Then I learned about Linux and got a PC just for Linux. Andy Bechtolsheim's office was just around the corner from the guys I was working with. I walked by a bunch of times just to see him inside his office talking on the phone. The first time I went on a business trip to Silicon Valley I literally searched for all the company's headquarters and drove around to see them and the signs out front on the weekend. It sounds super geeky and it was but I loved it.

Romen_b 4y ago

Sun microsystem disappearing was/is a saddest case of a business failing for me. I wish they have done the correct marketing and partnership back in the time.

jjtheblunt 4y ago
They got absorbed by Oracle.
- ericvsmith 4y ago
  It would be hard to argue that Sun has not disappeared.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Consumed by a black hole of legal wrangling and excessive billing.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  One of the most innovative companies absorbed by the company whose only innovation is finding new legal loopholes to screw more money out of their customers. Some fates are worse than disappearance.
  - forgetfulness 4y ago
    At least they began iterating more quickly on Java, I remember as years went by and Sun's OOP purists were still saying that they were considering anonymous functions but just couldn't decide on the syntax.
  - smackeyacky 4y ago
    That's not entirely fair to Oracle. Their original database had a big impact. It was only later that their business model switched to screwing their own customers as hard as possible.
ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago

seydor 4y ago

wonder what tech of today is way ahead of its time (To answer my own question, 1) VR goggles etc, 2) Balaji's network state, as ridiculous as it sounds in 2023)

29athrowaway 4y ago
Everything we have reverse engineered from nature.
ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
Limb regeneration through bioelectric signals [1] [2], like calling an API of the damaged cells to start the reconstruction. [1] "Diverse Intelligence" - a talk by Michael Levin, https://youtu.be/iIQX6m2eRPY?t=3097 https://youtu.be/iIQX6m2eRPY?t=3097 [2] Acute multidrug delivery via a wearable bioreactor facilitates long-term limb regeneration and functional recovery in adult Xenopus laevis, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2164 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2164
- seydor 4y ago
  Hopefully these types of interventions will happen sooner rather than in the far future. Levin's methods use tools that are almost 'conventional' now in biotech and neuroscience. If they will work for organ regeneration etc, then it should be a matter of engineering to put them to use.
anthk 4y ago
ChatGPT, Whisper C++ running on a netbook to transcribe audio in record time...
pjmlp 4y ago
VR googles were already looking for their customers back in 1994, when I saw someone using them alongside id Software games on a computer expo.

bluedino 4y ago

The early 1980's were an amazing (yet strange) time in computing. On one hand you have these $10,000 UNIX workstations that almost seem futuristic. Then you have the IBM PC for 1/4 the price. 16-bit CPU, DOS, enough memory to be usable. And at the bottom for 1/4 of that price, you had the Commodore 64. Minimal memory and storage, 8 bit CPU, almost a game console on steroids.

pklausler 4y ago
There was a lot of other stuff going on that wasn’t microcomputing.
daitangio 4y ago
And with C/64 there as also some business application (Geos, VisiCalc...). The 8BitGuy noted usually business computers have 80-columns, whereas "home" compueters 40-colums. Neverless C/64 could run a small database for a 'VHS Store' without troubles (I made it in basic... :)
- zozbot234 4y ago
  The 40 columns limit derives ultimately from most video output in home computers being low-quality RF to a TV screen. You can try to output 80-column text to a TV, but you'll get tons of arfifacts that make it barely usable. Especially if you also insist on color output.
anthk 4y ago
You forgot the Amiga and the Atari, in between, except the Amiga was superior to the IBM PC at a much cheaper price.
- ajross 4y ago
  You both forgot the Apple II, which did all that stuff much earlier. Any history that writes out Woz is missing the point. Fundamentally the Atari 800 was an attempt to make a better Apple and target it at the home market. The C64 was a better Atari and won the fight. But the paradigm for how both those systems work was settled in the summer of 1978 when the Disk II shipped. That was four and a half years before the Commodore reached market. (Four and a half years after the C64 release we could buy 32 bit PCs and Macs. It's a long, long time in this context.)

wkat4242 4y ago

I often wonder what would have happened if Sun hadn't been bought by Oracle and innovation had continued. They were very far ahead. They invented things like containers in Solaris way before Kubernetes and Docker popularised them on Linux.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tambourine_man 4y ago
And Dtrace, NFS, ZFS… truly a shame.
ajross 4y ago
> They were very far ahead. They weren't, though, not really. The tech industry just moves too fast for that kind of pronouncement. It's absolutely true that a Sun-3/75 in 1986 was a revelation[1], but every one of those features was cloned as free software and running on sub-$1000 hardware by 1994. They likewise had a brief moment with SPARC in the early 90's where their machines were the fastest you could buy, but Intel demolished those hopes too[4]. Their swan song was the early dot com boom, where they still held onto the reputation as "The Best Unix" and sold a ton of web server hardware to the more conservative outfits. But we could all see the writing on the wall even then. I mean, it's true they had some great stuff toward the end. But not that great, and generally not marketed in a way that would help them. Containers are actually a good example. Solaris Zones were... just a weird circus act[2]. I don't know any major players who made bets on the technology. And, again, within 2-3 years Linux had cgroups and LXC running[3] in a more performant (and much cheaper to deploy) environment and that's what Docker picked. [1] Faster than a VAX, which was still the reference Unix box. Megapixel framebuffer with windowing and competent terminal emulation. Every box was on the Internet. Every box could see the rest of its network over NFS (and most were deployed diskless). FWIW: anyone know where I can get one? Would love one for the collection, but most seem to have disappeared (government and university equipment tends not to end up on eBay...) [2] Edit because this was misunderstood: I'm saying it was an oddity with minimal uptake, not that it was chaotic or bad as a matter of design. [3] This too got misunderstood, though I don't see how. I'm really not interested in a flame war about whose container technology is better. I'm just saying that to Sun in the early/mid 00's, it wasn't much of a competetive advantage (as evidenced by the fact that it lost to Docker). [4] Ooph, this one too. I'm saying that in the early 90's SPARC was dancing with MIPS for the fastest CPUs on the planet, but by the release of the P6 core that was over and Intel had essentially won (though DEC kept the dance going a while longer with Alpha). I'm just amazed at the propensity for folks here to jump in to argue stuff that in my mind was settled decades ago.

thom 4y ago

The fate of Sun just goes to show that 'worse is better' isn't just about the superiority of the Unix philosophy, it really takes no prisoners.

remote_phone 4y ago

The post is very good but has a huge glaring hole in it. They say Sun died because of AMD64 but that’s incorrect. It was Linux. I know this because I was in enterprise software during this era and the demise of Sun due to Linux was stunning. Intel and Windows killed SGI, which was a huge coup. However Sun was killed because during that time, Linux went from a toy OS into a fully supported enterprise OS that was “good enough”. I remember how at one point in time, Oracle on Solaris was just about as rock solid as you could get. But slowly and surely more enterprise software moved over to Linux, especially Oracle. And within 10 years Sun went from one of the “4 horsemen of the Internet” to being sold to Oracle. It was sad because I loved Solaris as a technology, I even had a Sun workstation at home. That said, how quickly Linux killed Solaris/Sun is a great reminder of how quickly things change in tech.

BirAdam 4y ago
From the article: > SPARC didn’t keep its edge. The x86 platform became extremely competitive with the arrival of AMD64. The 64 bit x86 machines were cheaper than SPARC machines, and when coupled with Linux they could run all of the UNIX software any web company needed. This fact was proven by the likes of Google and Facebook. The core of Sun’s business was destroyed.
- remote_phone 4y ago
  64 bit came after Linux. And amd64 didn’t become popular until Intel moved to it unwillingly. Enterprise didn’t mess Around with amd at that point.
  - BirAdam 4y ago
    Yes. Linux came before AMD64, but that’s irrelevant. Corporate UNIX was more popular than Linux in the 1990s. AMD64 launched with the Opteron in 2003. In 2004, it was making AMD hundreds of millions per quarter and it was beating both Sun and Intel in server sales. Intel and HP were trying to push Itanium at this point, and Itanium was performing quite poorly. By 2004, AMD Opteron was also doing better than IBM Power. AMD was was crushing it. EDIT: To give an idea of AMD at this point, a few customers of AMD buying Opteron were The Weather Channel, Siemens, Boeing, Lockheed, Ferrari, Racksaver, Volkswagon, Rackspace, University of Kentucky (these are the ones to have publicly stated they adopted Opteron whose news articles to the effect I could find). Revenue of Q3 2003 was $1.2 billion (about $2 billion today), and that was the first quarter to include AMD64.

CalChris 4y ago

T-shirt wars. Sun had a t-shirt with their slogan, The Network Is The Computer. So DEC had another t-shirt, The Network Is The Network and The Computer Is The Computer. We regret the confusion.

sbierwagen 4y ago

> We wanted computers to go away, to instead become an everyday thing. We thought the third wave of computing would be driven by consumer electronics. The hardware would come from Circuit City, and the software would come from Tower Records. Interesting. He was half right: hardware did commoditize, but software got so cheap that it completely vanished: consumers just use whatever’s bundled with their phone/laptop, occasionally buying games on Steam or the PlayStation store. (Itself commoditized: they’re not really buying de-novo “software” but more a basket of content that plugs into Unity engine)

Scubabear68 4y ago

I still have fond memories working at Bear Stearns in the early 90s in Fixed Income, every developer had a Sun workstation on their desk instead of a PC, initially running SunOS and eventually transitioning to this weird thing called Solaris. I felt like I was living in the future.

blantonl 4y ago
I remember in the late 90's working as an enterprise systems management architect (Tivoli) for a large financial services firm, and we were deploying the entire project on Solaris and Sun Boxes that were crazy expensive. Because of this, I was given a Sun Workstation at my desk alongside my Windows machine, and I thought it made me look like the baddest mfr on the floor with that big monitor, the sun workstation with the logo, and that antiquated x windows environment. It was like voodoo level stuff for your regular Netware lan admins etc that were my neighbors.
- Scubabear68 4y ago
  Yep. Correction on my above post though, only the IT side of Fixed Income used Sun boxes. The analytics guys in the FAST department were all on HP-UX. A definite Sun vs HP rivalry going on there, and very eye opening to me seeing HP-UX and Sun were both “Unix” but very different in so many details.

lizknope 4y ago

My comment from 2 months ago about Sun 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)

DonHopkins 4y ago
At Sun in 1990 in the multimedia group (working on the X11/NeWS window system), everyone had a Sun workstation on their desk (typically SS1 at the time), and a Wyse terminal hooked up to the serial port to reboot it or restart the window system when it got stuck!

jkmcf 4y ago

Every time I look at developing a GUI, I think back to using DevGuide and wonder why the present DX sucks so bad.

DonHopkins 4y ago

Anyone dare to deconstruct and psychoanalyze this Sun commercial? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o05CuNgvsDw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o05CuNgvsDw

hulitu 4y ago
Some comment claims is from 1997. My experience, with using Windows for work, is that will not survive a couple of days without reboot. And all this on enterprise class HW (HP). Even win 10 has random bugs which cause GUI elements dissapearing or even blue screen.

DonHopkins 4y ago

John Gilmore on Sun and Internet history: https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2023-February/008686.html https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2023-Febr... John Gilmore gnu at toad.com, Mon Feb 13 21:34:53 PST 2023 Jack Haverty via Internet-history <internet-history@elists.isoc.org> wrote: >Networking and computing vendors were a little slower to realize TCP had won. My perspective on this history comes from being a young "Tourist" on the ARPAnet (via Telenet and MIT-AI), and then being employee #5 of Sun in 1982, working there for five or six years. It was incredibly refreshing to be on the ARPAnet and have mailing lists where standards were discussed openly, for free, among anyone who wanted to participate. And with drafts and standards easily available on FTP sites, in plain ASCII text, for me to read, understand, and if I wanted to, implement. I had come from the IBM mainframe (APL and OS/MVT) world. There we had had two mainframes IN THE SAME ROOM and designed an email system that would move messages back and forth between them with timed transfers several times per day on manually moved 9-TRACK MAGTAPES! Because you really couldn't get an interface any better than a serial port that would talk between two mainframes, and IBM's software tended to suck. And non-ARPAnet standards documents were obtuse, obviously not designed to be easily understood. Jon Postel as the RFC author and editor completely shattered the mold there. By the time I joined Sun in 1982, everything we did was based on Ethernet and TCP/IP. Our original prototypes had 3-meg Experimental Ethernet multibus boards created by our founder, grad student Andy Bechtolsheim. These had been created at Stanford along with the first 8-MHz 68000 Sun CPU boards. There might have been a tiny bit of XNS or something around, inherited from Stanford, but everything we built and used was IP. Our software started with a UNIX V7 clone from Unisoft as a stopgap. After hiring Bill Shannon, Tom Lyon, and Bill Joy among the first 10 employees, we rapidly moved to 4.1[abc]BSD and 4.2BSD systems that included TCP/IP networking as a standard feature. This took our standalone UNIX systems and made them part of a tight network of cooperating systems by 1983. We adopted 3Com Multibus 10-megabit Ethernet boards -- with separate transceivers -- as soon as they were available. We adopted (and I maintained) sendmail as our networked email software. Tons of universities adopted our hardware and software, because we were cheaper than Vaxes, ran solid portable UNIX software, and came with high-resolution graphics displays and high speed networking. The high single-unit prices of disk drives and tape drives meant that you got much more storage per user dollar if you bought big drives and split them among multiple workstations. Bill Croft built a simple block-level storage sharing protocol (nd, network disk) that ran over UDP. The tape access commands like dump were hacked to work simply over TCP. Bill and I wrote the bootstrap code that enabled diskless workstations to boot across the Ethernet (again using UDP) from a local server. In parallel, Sun designed and eventually shipped and standardized the Network File System for object-level sharing of files and directories. Again, it ran over IP and UDP with some TCP, on 10-meg Ethernet. (Bill and I also invented and published BOOTP at the time, to automate getting your new machine's IP address. Sun didn't ship it then, because the NFS kernel people had picked Reverse ARP as their bootstrap method. BOOTP later became DHCP.) Eventually, Sun migrated the Ethernet interface right onto the motherboard, once we started building larger circuit boards. Sun had a healthy third-party catalog of applications that included OSI and SNA and Netware and X.25 and other networking protocols. Sun may have even adopted some of those products under its own brand. But they all were licensed at something like $1000 per workstation -- real money in 1983. TCP/IP came free and well debugged in the basic OS. And you couldn't boot the machine over SNA, or share drives that way, so you had to understand TCP/IP anyway and run it in parallel if you wanted any of those features. (A great short story of his early Sun history was posted last year by Sun emp#8, Tom Lyon, as a twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/aka_pugs/status/1521489115585421314 https://twitter.com/aka_pugs/status/1521489115585421314 ) As most of this list knows, Berkeley Unix had TCP/IP because DARPA had funded UC Berkeley in 1978 to make it a standard feature in evolving 4.1BSD into 4.2BSD for the research community. I don't know how few or many dollars that investment cost them, but it got incredible bang for the buck! The result was that every UNIX system (except the lame microprocessor ones like Xenix) came standard with TCP/IP. Every research lab that was buying minicomputers like Pyramids, DEC Vaxes, Sequents, or workstations like Suns or SGIs, therefore had every reason to make their whole advanced-computing network use TCP/IP. Their email would interoperate locally over the LAN and be gatewayed by a server onto UUCP or BITNET or CSNET for global connectivity. And whenever they could beg, borrow, or steal a realtime IP connection to the wider Internet, then poof, their local machines just popped onto the worldwide network. This multi-vendor consortium rapidly pushing Ethernet and TCP/IP forward contrasted with every other wide-area networking technology, which was either owned by one company (like DECNET or SNA) or was managed by a slothful postal bureacracy like X.25. The impact of that UC Berkeley funding was akin to (and prerequisite to) the impact that came from the later research funding given to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, which allowed them to create the Mosaic graphical web browser that jumpstarted public use of the WWW (over TCP/IP). Don't ignore the impact of Ethernet on the acceptance of TCP/IP. Ethernet provided the first solid standardized multi-megabit-per-second cable interface at reasonable prices. It would support any networking protocol, and was supported and evolved forward by hundreds of hardware and software companies. Ethernet was the "on-ramp" for TCP/IP, which would have gone nowhere if it had been limited to serial port or modem speeds (under 100 kbits/sec). I worked where Ethernet was adopted early, so it shortly became unremarkable to me. Later, I suddenly knew it had taken over the universe when I started seeing 8-pin modular jacks and Ethernet cables on cash registers in small ordinary shops. (Ethernet's evolution into back-end full duplex, fiber, higher speeds, and long haul networks only cemented its position as the standard network front end faster than modems.) TCP/IP went to most places that Ethernet went, in some ways riding on its coattails. John Gilmore