11 ms·

Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago (2022)

196 points by TMWNN 2y ago

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
LastTrain 2y ago
"There were a bunch of bottom feeders targeting the home-brew market" Yes we all know how poorly it went for those folks lol
- TMWNN 2y ago
  Is he talking about Venix, Coherent, PC/IX?
  - anonymousiam 2y ago
    I think he's talking about hardware. I remember at the time there were 68k board kits that would run Unix. I didn't learn Unix until a few years later (on a Sun 2), so I stuck with my Z-80 SBC and CP/M.
    - kjs3 2y ago
      Yeah...he even points it out in the article. There were 100 companies in that timeframe that were some more or less minor variation on 680x0 processor, 10Mb ethernet and Unix (usually from Unisoft).
      - davidw 2y ago
        Even back in the mid to late nineties, you still had a bunch of different Unix OS's and their associated hardware: * AIX / POWER * Solaris / Sparc * Irix / MIPS * HP-UX / PA-RISC And probably some I'm forgetting.
        icedchai 2y ago
        DEC Alpha was another big one. Digital Unix (AKA: Tru64, OSF/1) / Alpha
        crmd 2y ago
        That brings back memories. The first time I ever heard of Digital Unix was in college looking at netcraft.com's web server ranking, where it showed that www.amazon.com was running on OSF/1. I figured if Amazon was using it, it must be worth looking into. Found an Alphastation in an IT storage room and had some fun playing around with it. Good memories.
        icedchai 2y ago
        Yes, Alpha was incredible for the time. Sparc was a dog in comparison. Software wise, Solaris felt more standard though. I remember having to tweak open source stuff to compile on Digital Unix. Solaris almost always just worked.
        kjs3 2y ago
        We're talking about 1982, not 'mid to late nineties'. None of those chips even existed. Silicon Graphics Unix was running on 680x0 based series 1000 machines (and wasn't called IRIX yet). HP/UX was running on 680x0 based HP9000 series. AIX was a couple of years away and would first run on the RT/PC development of the 801 project, not on POWER. In 1982-ish IBM did have a Unix machine tho...the 9000 series, which was a 68000 running Xenix. DEC hadn't started PRISM, much less ALPHA then...it's Unix was Ultrix on VAX and PDP-11.
        davidw 2y ago
        Yes, I read what was written. My point was that there were still a lot of companies doing Unix systems years later.
        kjs3 2y ago
        No, there weren't. There were the few you mentioned, and a dozen or two others. I worked with most of them. The point was that in the early 80s, there were a far larger number. The only real similarity was that like the '80s were the days of mc68k and Unisoft, the majority of the 90s Unix vendors were x86 and System V, all from the same code base.
      - rconti 2y ago
        Wow. 10Mb ethernet. I even remember in the late 90s "Fast Ethernet" (100Mbps) was a feature in small switches; that implied 10Mb was the default.
        kjs3 2y ago
        Commercial ethernet switches weren't a thing until 1990 (Kalpana), and 100Mb ethernet is from 1995. So, yeah, a lot of ethernet in the late 90s was 10Mb. It's still a thing today in some embedded applications, and switches still support it.
        rconti 2y ago
        I guess I hadn't stepped back to think about the difference between computer ethernet and switched ethernet. I _do_ remember hubs, though, so it should have occurred to me that we didn't have switching on day 1.
        anonymousiam 2y ago
        Most any switch that supports 10GBase-T will only auto-negotiate down to 100Base-T, and some of them will only go as slow as 1GBase-T. 10Base-T was an upgrade over 10Base-2 and 10Base-5 (AUI), but the latter were more popular in the early 80's.
        kjs3 1y ago
        Well, yes...since 10base-T wasn't a standard until 1990[1] it's a pretty easy guess it was less popular a decade before. [1] https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/802.3i/1068/ https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/802.3i/1068/
  - LastTrain 2y ago
    That is how I took it. Xenix, etc, anything not deemed a "workstation" in that era's parlance.
    - TMWNN 2y ago
      I didn't mention Xenix because Lyon is obviously not including it in his list of bottom feeders, given that he distinguishes Altos (which runs Xenix) from them.
minitoar 2y ago
Great pictures. lol @ khosla.
ajross 2y ago
What I find fascinating about Sun is how fast its ride was. They launched their MVP in 1982 which was really just a bare 68000 board with a kluged together software suite. The second generation Sun 2's were like a year and a half later, running virtual memory on 4BSD, the 68020 made the Sun 3's in 1985 faster than a VAX, and suddenly Sun was The Premier Unix that everyone targetted. The next few years (up through 1991 or so) would see the launch of SPARC[1] and all the Unix goodness we all still work on: shared libraries, NFS, RPC, pervasive IPv4 networking, basically everything about the modern datacenter software environment dates from these few years at Sun. And then, sort of out of nowhere in the mid 90's, Linux distros running on P6 boards had essentially cloned it all on hardware 1/10th the price and the end had begun. Sun would continue to make a lot of money through the doc com boom, but their status as the thought and innovation center of Unix hit a brick wall. The story of the end was all about Java and Oracle and datacenter markets. And IMHO it's not that interesting. What the hell happened to Unix? [1] In hindsight it was just a flash in the pan, but the RISC arrival in the Unix world was shocking at the time. Even though in hindsight the workstation vendors had at most a 3-4 year lead on Intel at the peak and would rapidly fall behind.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  What happened to Unix? It became part of the background. Sun (and then Linux) succeeded so well that Sun didn't matter any more.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  Yeah in retrospect, it feels somewhat inevitable to me that Linux (or something similar if that hadn't happen) would displace it all and demolish the business model of "Unix as commodity", given Unix itself was clearly initially aimed at trying to popularize/democratize a set of technologies/techniques/concepts that had been previously locked up inside larger corporations and projects. The motive force of "getting this out there" was there, and was bound to escape the workstation maker's clutches. I didn't live through the minicomputer era, but definitely grew up in the "Unix [and then Linux] ascendant" era and was an early adopter (as a user) of Linux on my 486. We just wanted what all the cool kids [err, adults] had. I spent many hours fine tuning my X11 environment to look like the screenshots I saw in UnixWorld of real Unix workstations, etc. ... without doing any actual "real work" with it... Looking back, it was inevitable that Unix would become less and less a sale-able commodity and more and more a free standard that hackers would just ... assume. I'm not sure how Sun could have saved itself without just turning itself into a services company, just too hard to win on economies of scale making actual hardware. They made hay while the Sun(tm) shone, I guess.
gopalv 2y ago
> But let’s talk about my unfair advantage – my Lyon family mafia. I was living with my brother Bob and his wife. Bob was working at Xerox SDD developing the Xerox Star workstation. And my brother Dick was at Xerox PARC with an Alto on his desk Sometimes, I feel like the whole downwards trend having a single kid loses the family aspect of my previous generation - I meet enough people who don't have uncles, aunts, nieces or nephews for nepotism (literal) to work sideways on. Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways. I got into Linux because my uncle's brother in law worked in computer repair when I was 14, back when India still needed to fill in an export control form to download software. Another uncle sent me extra 32Mb of RAM from Dubai and a modem which wasn't a winmodem (& my dad hated him for the phone bills). > We were just managing a house mortgage with 3 full time incomes. Interest rates then were well above 10%.
- Take8435 2y ago
  > Sometimes, I feel like the whole downwards trend having a single kid loses the family aspect of my previous generation There are many reasons folks have no kids or only one kid. I don't think opining for a larger family 'for the chance' of having a family member with similar tastes is really... compelling. > Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways. Are you saying friends cannot provide support in minor ways? In my view, it's more compelling to solution the many downsides of nepotism (esp. in governments not just private entities) rather than endorse or perpetuate it.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I pretty much agree. All of my jobs since grad school have come through professional connections—none remotely through relatives.
  - geodel 2y ago
    > In my view, it's more compelling to solution the many downsides of nepotism The solution is endless growing bureaucracy to implement and enforce fairness at every level and it is happening everywhere I can see. > Are you saying friends cannot provide support in minor ways? From my experience family members have some sort of obligation towards other members( though maybe less true or just untrue in modern day US) whereas friends can say yes or no to any request purely based on convenience.
DogRunner 2y ago
If you want to see the included images, jump back to 2022: https://web.archive.org/web/20221218011802/https://akapugs.blog/2022/05/03/674/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221218011802/https://akapugs.b...
jmwilson 2y ago
Working for a great company in its heyday is a gift - one that I wish for everyone. Stories like this are a comfort when the industry is near its nadir, and reminder that the industry moves in cycles, and all glory fades. I got my turn at Facebook in 2010. A bunch of times I'd see a name I'd recognize pop up in internal discussions: an esteemed classmate or colleague had joined, and you knew with all this talent concentrating in one place, good things were to come.
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  I think the author is also very skilled, considering porting part of UNIX to a new architecture almost all by himself as a sophomore. I admit everything is simpler back then, but again tooling is bad and docs was just Lyon's book. Putting myself in the shoes. I don't even know where to start. Honestly it would be an interesting project to port xv6 from RISC-V to another architecture WITHOUT the help of Internet and AI.
  - loas 2y ago
    Was he very skilled back then when he did it? Or was it the grit and pushing through the pain of banging his own head against the wall many times while dealing with mysterious errors and compiler warnings that made him very skilled? I fear the current state of our industry eliminated the possibility for not-great, not-skilled juniors to embark in these journeys such as these to become great and skilled seniors. And I'm afraid that sooner or later we will all regret it.
    - geodel 2y ago
      As usual I think it is combination of skill, luck and hard work. There are people who do enormous hard work but just do not have skill to create impact. And there are many highly skilled people but not motivated enough or likely they just not in right place at right time to create consequential things. > I fear the current state of our industry eliminated the possibility for not-great, not-skilled juniors to embark in these journeys It is just that industry would be 100 or 1000 times larger than it was in 70s or 80s. Now not-great not-skilled people can get IT jobs in Accentures/IBMs of today which pays well enough for mediocre computer skills. When thousands of new PhDs in Computer science, electronics and semiconductors etc are available every year it is infeasible that mediocre folks can land in hardcore engineering roles.
otras 2y ago
I enjoy historical books about the rise, fall, and everything in between for companies in the industry — things like The Idea Factory about Bell Labs, Dealers of Lightning about Xerox PARC, and Soul of a New Machine about Data General. Are there any books folks would recommend like that about Sun?
- ecliptik 2y ago
  I haven't read it, but High Noon[1] comes up in recommendations about Sun Microsystems history. 1. https://archive.org/details/highnoon00kare https://archive.org/details/highnoon00kare
  - otras 2y ago
    Great, thanks for the pointer! I see it was published in 1999, so I imagine it’ll be a good time-capsule read too, even if it predates the dot com bubble burst and the eventual Oracle acquisition, though maybe that’s where the “Larry Ellison lawnmower” talk fills in well.
- zombiwoof 2y ago
  Jonathan Schwartz was the downfall of Sun
  - rbanffy 2y ago
    Not sure anyone could save the company, but he didn't help one single bit. Sun never decided whether they were a hardware company of a software company. They had great hardware and software, but couldn't make much money with the latter. Failing to recognize software as a way to sell THEIR hardware was the biggest issue. When they decided to launch x86 workstations, I knew they were doomed. When they exited the workstation business, I knew it wouldn't be long. When you destroy all the on-ramps to your highway, it's a matter of time until the toll booths are empty.
    - asveikau 2y ago
      Solaris got disrupted by Linux, and their hardware was disrupted by Intel machines. When Linux on x86 is working well, there's little reason to shell out money for Solaris on SPARC. They had Java but that's also challenging to monetize. When it was introduced it was novel to have a portable C-like workhorse that has GC and bounds checking, but now there are many free options for that.
jeffrallen 2y ago
If you like the Lyons (and you should, they are good guy hackers) be sure to listen to Tom on the On The Metal podcast from Oxide.
berlinbrowndev 2y ago
Nice. I always wondered how Java grew out of all this.
zkmon 2y ago
I always wondered why it was sold to Oracle.
- trollbridge 2y ago
  A fire sale where Oracle got IP they could figure out how to make money off of. IBM should have bought Sun, or at least Java; it was a much more natural fit.
  - crmd 2y ago
    I was there. IBM tried to buy Sun. Lawyers said no.
    - TMWNN 2y ago
      Whose lawyers? IBM's, or Sun's? And why?
      - crmd 2y ago
        IBM. Regulatory risk issue.
  - matt_heimer 2y ago
    Given that IBM has turned Redhat Linux into the next Solaris after what they did to CentOS, I'm not sure that Java would have been better with IBM. At least Java has been getting updates and things still get released under OpenJDK.
  - sys_64738 2y ago
    IBM would have killed the hardware immediately. They wanted JAVA not the HW.
JSR_FDED 2y ago
I was at SGI during its heyday. Best time of my career. The highest density of insanely smart people I’ve ever worked with, I learned so much from them. One thing overlooked from that era was that the customers were so cool - they were building virtual wind tunnels, flight simulators, protein visualizers, etc - not running payroll or inventory management. We used to say our customers used our products to make money, not count money. Joke’s on us because it turned out the market for counting money is much bigger :-)
- jahnu 2y ago
  Like personal computing up through the 90s to the .com boom everyone was trying to have fun and make cool stuff at the same time. Being able to get paid for it was an amazing bonus. Now it feels like getting paid comes first.
  - TMWNN 2y ago
    > Joke’s on us because it turned out the market for counting money is much bigger :-) Even that turned out to be not as large a market as expected. PC Magazine and InfoWorld in the 1980s ran many, many reviews of packaged accounting software at various price/size tiers. 70% of them died against QuickBooks, a product that didn't even exist then. 15% got bought by SAP, Sage, Infor (for some reason, Europeans dominate the "legacy accounting rollup" space), or Microsoft. 15% survive by selling the same software for 40 years to small customers local to them, and/or very specialized verticals (pawnshops, watercraft rental).
    - mrandish 2y ago
      I think the expression the GP was referring to (which would have been common in 90s workstation vendors selling to engineering/scientific customers) wasn't so much about accounting software specifically as big finance and business systems in general. This would include the high-availability, data center big iron supporting things like transaction processing, inventory and business processes in general. The kind of stuff companies like SAP can sell at $5M a year to one customer with so many modules I'd have trouble even remembering how they all fit into the overall global operations of a F500 firm. IBM and others could make stupid amounts of money selling computers, storage, networking, services and consulting around this stuff (and they still do). None of that software was "packaged" in the way desktop and workstation-centric people like me think of it and unlikely to be reviewed as products by PC Mag or Infoworld. For example, I had a friend in the 2000s who worked at Intel in "operations" try to explain the project he was working on to me. It was a multi-year, multi-million dollar software module + integration + customization contract with SAP that was focused on tracking, managing, projecting and optimizing Intel's product SKUs, which apparently number in the tens of thousands across variants, versions and geos. I never really got a thorough understanding of what it actually did but it was expected to take five years to implement and hundreds of people across multiple divisions worked hours a day in it and it was 'mission critical'. I asked what would happen at the end of five years and he told me it would certainly run at least a year or two over and then they'd probably start a new contract to work on the next iteration of a system to replace it (because that was, apparently, pretty normal).
mrcwinn 2y ago
A 280Z with a "UNIX" plate. So basically you're the coolest person of that decade. Thanks for the post! Amazing.
- rconti 2y ago
  The "Live Free or Die" NH plate really makes it.
mise_en_place 2y ago
Every Sun alum that I had the pleasure of working with was brilliant. Truly learned a lot from them, especially when pair programming. Must have been a special place to work at.
wendy4151 1y ago
[dead]

196 points by TMWNN 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

"There were a bunch of bottom feeders targeting the home-brew market" Yes we all know how poorly it went for those folks lol

TMWNN 2y ago
Is he talking about Venix, Coherent, PC/IX?
- anonymousiam 2y ago
  I think he's talking about hardware. I remember at the time there were 68k board kits that would run Unix. I didn't learn Unix until a few years later (on a Sun 2), so I stuck with my Z-80 SBC and CP/M.
  - kjs3 2y ago
    Yeah...he even points it out in the article. There were 100 companies in that timeframe that were some more or less minor variation on 680x0 processor, 10Mb ethernet and Unix (usually from Unisoft).
    - davidw 2y ago
      Even back in the mid to late nineties, you still had a bunch of different Unix OS's and their associated hardware: * AIX / POWER * Solaris / Sparc * Irix / MIPS * HP-UX / PA-RISC And probably some I'm forgetting.
      - icedchai 2y ago
        DEC Alpha was another big one. Digital Unix (AKA: Tru64, OSF/1) / Alpha
        crmd 2y ago
        That brings back memories. The first time I ever heard of Digital Unix was in college looking at netcraft.com's web server ranking, where it showed that www.amazon.com was running on OSF/1. I figured if Amazon was using it, it must be worth looking into. Found an Alphastation in an IT storage room and had some fun playing around with it. Good memories.
        icedchai 2y ago
        Yes, Alpha was incredible for the time. Sparc was a dog in comparison. Software wise, Solaris felt more standard though. I remember having to tweak open source stuff to compile on Digital Unix. Solaris almost always just worked.
      - kjs3 2y ago
        We're talking about 1982, not 'mid to late nineties'. None of those chips even existed. Silicon Graphics Unix was running on 680x0 based series 1000 machines (and wasn't called IRIX yet). HP/UX was running on 680x0 based HP9000 series. AIX was a couple of years away and would first run on the RT/PC development of the 801 project, not on POWER. In 1982-ish IBM did have a Unix machine tho...the 9000 series, which was a 68000 running Xenix. DEC hadn't started PRISM, much less ALPHA then...it's Unix was Ultrix on VAX and PDP-11.
        davidw 2y ago
        Yes, I read what was written. My point was that there were still a lot of companies doing Unix systems years later.
        kjs3 2y ago
        No, there weren't. There were the few you mentioned, and a dozen or two others. I worked with most of them. The point was that in the early 80s, there were a far larger number. The only real similarity was that like the '80s were the days of mc68k and Unisoft, the majority of the 90s Unix vendors were x86 and System V, all from the same code base.
    - rconti 2y ago
      Wow. 10Mb ethernet. I even remember in the late 90s "Fast Ethernet" (100Mbps) was a feature in small switches; that implied 10Mb was the default.
      - kjs3 2y ago
        Commercial ethernet switches weren't a thing until 1990 (Kalpana), and 100Mb ethernet is from 1995. So, yeah, a lot of ethernet in the late 90s was 10Mb. It's still a thing today in some embedded applications, and switches still support it.
        rconti 2y ago
        I guess I hadn't stepped back to think about the difference between computer ethernet and switched ethernet. I _do_ remember hubs, though, so it should have occurred to me that we didn't have switching on day 1.
        anonymousiam 2y ago
        Most any switch that supports 10GBase-T will only auto-negotiate down to 100Base-T, and some of them will only go as slow as 1GBase-T. 10Base-T was an upgrade over 10Base-2 and 10Base-5 (AUI), but the latter were more popular in the early 80's.
        kjs3 1y ago
        Well, yes...since 10base-T wasn't a standard until 1990[1] it's a pretty easy guess it was less popular a decade before. [1] https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/802.3i/1068/ https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/802.3i/1068/
- LastTrain 2y ago
  That is how I took it. Xenix, etc, anything not deemed a "workstation" in that era's parlance.
  - TMWNN 2y ago
    I didn't mention Xenix because Lyon is obviously not including it in his list of bottom feeders, given that he distinguishes Altos (which runs Xenix) from them.

minitoar 2y ago

Great pictures. lol @ khosla.

ajross 2y ago

What I find fascinating about Sun is how fast its ride was. They launched their MVP in 1982 which was really just a bare 68000 board with a kluged together software suite. The second generation Sun 2's were like a year and a half later, running virtual memory on 4BSD, the 68020 made the Sun 3's in 1985 faster than a VAX, and suddenly Sun was The Premier Unix that everyone targetted. The next few years (up through 1991 or so) would see the launch of SPARC[1] and all the Unix goodness we all still work on: shared libraries, NFS, RPC, pervasive IPv4 networking, basically everything about the modern datacenter software environment dates from these few years at Sun. And then, sort of out of nowhere in the mid 90's, Linux distros running on P6 boards had essentially cloned it all on hardware 1/10th the price and the end had begun. Sun would continue to make a lot of money through the doc com boom, but their status as the thought and innovation center of Unix hit a brick wall. The story of the end was all about Java and Oracle and datacenter markets. And IMHO it's not that interesting. What the hell happened to Unix? [1] In hindsight it was just a flash in the pan, but the RISC arrival in the Unix world was shocking at the time. Even though in hindsight the workstation vendors had at most a 3-4 year lead on Intel at the peak and would rapidly fall behind.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
What happened to Unix? It became part of the background. Sun (and then Linux) succeeded so well that Sun didn't matter any more.
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
Yeah in retrospect, it feels somewhat inevitable to me that Linux (or something similar if that hadn't happen) would displace it all and demolish the business model of "Unix as commodity", given Unix itself was clearly initially aimed at trying to popularize/democratize a set of technologies/techniques/concepts that had been previously locked up inside larger corporations and projects. The motive force of "getting this out there" was there, and was bound to escape the workstation maker's clutches. I didn't live through the minicomputer era, but definitely grew up in the "Unix [and then Linux] ascendant" era and was an early adopter (as a user) of Linux on my 486. We just wanted what all the cool kids [err, adults] had. I spent many hours fine tuning my X11 environment to look like the screenshots I saw in UnixWorld of real Unix workstations, etc. ... without doing any actual "real work" with it... Looking back, it was inevitable that Unix would become less and less a sale-able commodity and more and more a free standard that hackers would just ... assume. I'm not sure how Sun could have saved itself without just turning itself into a services company, just too hard to win on economies of scale making actual hardware. They made hay while the Sun(tm) shone, I guess.

gopalv 2y ago

> But let’s talk about my unfair advantage – my Lyon family mafia. I was living with my brother Bob and his wife. Bob was working at Xerox SDD developing the Xerox Star workstation. And my brother Dick was at Xerox PARC with an Alto on his desk Sometimes, I feel like the whole downwards trend having a single kid loses the family aspect of my previous generation - I meet enough people who don't have uncles, aunts, nieces or nephews for nepotism (literal) to work sideways on. Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways. I got into Linux because my uncle's brother in law worked in computer repair when I was 14, back when India still needed to fill in an export control form to download software. Another uncle sent me extra 32Mb of RAM from Dubai and a modem which wasn't a winmodem (& my dad hated him for the phone bills). > We were just managing a house mortgage with 3 full time incomes. Interest rates then were well above 10%.

Take8435 2y ago
> Sometimes, I feel like the whole downwards trend having a single kid loses the family aspect of my previous generation There are many reasons folks have no kids or only one kid. I don't think opining for a larger family 'for the chance' of having a family member with similar tastes is really... compelling. > Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways. Are you saying friends cannot provide support in minor ways? In my view, it's more compelling to solution the many downsides of nepotism (esp. in governments not just private entities) rather than endorse or perpetuate it.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I pretty much agree. All of my jobs since grad school have come through professional connections—none remotely through relatives.
- geodel 2y ago
  > In my view, it's more compelling to solution the many downsides of nepotism The solution is endless growing bureaucracy to implement and enforce fairness at every level and it is happening everywhere I can see. > Are you saying friends cannot provide support in minor ways? From my experience family members have some sort of obligation towards other members( though maybe less true or just untrue in modern day US) whereas friends can say yes or no to any request purely based on convenience.

DogRunner 2y ago

If you want to see the included images, jump back to 2022: https://web.archive.org/web/20221218011802/https://akapugs.blog/2022/05/03/674/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221218011802/https://akapugs.b...

jmwilson 2y ago

Working for a great company in its heyday is a gift - one that I wish for everyone. Stories like this are a comfort when the industry is near its nadir, and reminder that the industry moves in cycles, and all glory fades. I got my turn at Facebook in 2010. A bunch of times I'd see a name I'd recognize pop up in internal discussions: an esteemed classmate or colleague had joined, and you knew with all this talent concentrating in one place, good things were to come.

markus_zhang 2y ago
I think the author is also very skilled, considering porting part of UNIX to a new architecture almost all by himself as a sophomore. I admit everything is simpler back then, but again tooling is bad and docs was just Lyon's book. Putting myself in the shoes. I don't even know where to start. Honestly it would be an interesting project to port xv6 from RISC-V to another architecture WITHOUT the help of Internet and AI.
- loas 2y ago
  Was he very skilled back then when he did it? Or was it the grit and pushing through the pain of banging his own head against the wall many times while dealing with mysterious errors and compiler warnings that made him very skilled? I fear the current state of our industry eliminated the possibility for not-great, not-skilled juniors to embark in these journeys such as these to become great and skilled seniors. And I'm afraid that sooner or later we will all regret it.
  - geodel 2y ago
    As usual I think it is combination of skill, luck and hard work. There are people who do enormous hard work but just do not have skill to create impact. And there are many highly skilled people but not motivated enough or likely they just not in right place at right time to create consequential things. > I fear the current state of our industry eliminated the possibility for not-great, not-skilled juniors to embark in these journeys It is just that industry would be 100 or 1000 times larger than it was in 70s or 80s. Now not-great not-skilled people can get IT jobs in Accentures/IBMs of today which pays well enough for mediocre computer skills. When thousands of new PhDs in Computer science, electronics and semiconductors etc are available every year it is infeasible that mediocre folks can land in hardcore engineering roles.

otras 2y ago

I enjoy historical books about the rise, fall, and everything in between for companies in the industry — things like The Idea Factory about Bell Labs, Dealers of Lightning about Xerox PARC, and Soul of a New Machine about Data General. Are there any books folks would recommend like that about Sun?

ecliptik 2y ago
I haven't read it, but High Noon[1] comes up in recommendations about Sun Microsystems history. 1. https://archive.org/details/highnoon00kare https://archive.org/details/highnoon00kare
- otras 2y ago
  Great, thanks for the pointer! I see it was published in 1999, so I imagine it’ll be a good time-capsule read too, even if it predates the dot com bubble burst and the eventual Oracle acquisition, though maybe that’s where the “Larry Ellison lawnmower” talk fills in well.
zombiwoof 2y ago
Jonathan Schwartz was the downfall of Sun
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Not sure anyone could save the company, but he didn't help one single bit. Sun never decided whether they were a hardware company of a software company. They had great hardware and software, but couldn't make much money with the latter. Failing to recognize software as a way to sell THEIR hardware was the biggest issue. When they decided to launch x86 workstations, I knew they were doomed. When they exited the workstation business, I knew it wouldn't be long. When you destroy all the on-ramps to your highway, it's a matter of time until the toll booths are empty.
  - asveikau 2y ago
    Solaris got disrupted by Linux, and their hardware was disrupted by Intel machines. When Linux on x86 is working well, there's little reason to shell out money for Solaris on SPARC. They had Java but that's also challenging to monetize. When it was introduced it was novel to have a portable C-like workhorse that has GC and bounds checking, but now there are many free options for that.

jeffrallen 2y ago

If you like the Lyons (and you should, they are good guy hackers) be sure to listen to Tom on the On The Metal podcast from Oxide.

berlinbrowndev 2y ago

Nice. I always wondered how Java grew out of all this.

zkmon 2y ago

I always wondered why it was sold to Oracle.

trollbridge 2y ago
A fire sale where Oracle got IP they could figure out how to make money off of. IBM should have bought Sun, or at least Java; it was a much more natural fit.
- crmd 2y ago
  I was there. IBM tried to buy Sun. Lawyers said no.
  - TMWNN 2y ago
    Whose lawyers? IBM's, or Sun's? And why?
    - crmd 2y ago
      IBM. Regulatory risk issue.
- matt_heimer 2y ago
  Given that IBM has turned Redhat Linux into the next Solaris after what they did to CentOS, I'm not sure that Java would have been better with IBM. At least Java has been getting updates and things still get released under OpenJDK.
- sys_64738 2y ago
  IBM would have killed the hardware immediately. They wanted JAVA not the HW.

JSR_FDED 2y ago

I was at SGI during its heyday. Best time of my career. The highest density of insanely smart people I’ve ever worked with, I learned so much from them. One thing overlooked from that era was that the customers were so cool - they were building virtual wind tunnels, flight simulators, protein visualizers, etc - not running payroll or inventory management. We used to say our customers used our products to make money, not count money. Joke’s on us because it turned out the market for counting money is much bigger :-)

jahnu 2y ago
Like personal computing up through the 90s to the .com boom everyone was trying to have fun and make cool stuff at the same time. Being able to get paid for it was an amazing bonus. Now it feels like getting paid comes first.
- TMWNN 2y ago
  > Joke’s on us because it turned out the market for counting money is much bigger :-) Even that turned out to be not as large a market as expected. PC Magazine and InfoWorld in the 1980s ran many, many reviews of packaged accounting software at various price/size tiers. 70% of them died against QuickBooks, a product that didn't even exist then. 15% got bought by SAP, Sage, Infor (for some reason, Europeans dominate the "legacy accounting rollup" space), or Microsoft. 15% survive by selling the same software for 40 years to small customers local to them, and/or very specialized verticals (pawnshops, watercraft rental).
  - mrandish 2y ago
    I think the expression the GP was referring to (which would have been common in 90s workstation vendors selling to engineering/scientific customers) wasn't so much about accounting software specifically as big finance and business systems in general. This would include the high-availability, data center big iron supporting things like transaction processing, inventory and business processes in general. The kind of stuff companies like SAP can sell at $5M a year to one customer with so many modules I'd have trouble even remembering how they all fit into the overall global operations of a F500 firm. IBM and others could make stupid amounts of money selling computers, storage, networking, services and consulting around this stuff (and they still do). None of that software was "packaged" in the way desktop and workstation-centric people like me think of it and unlikely to be reviewed as products by PC Mag or Infoworld. For example, I had a friend in the 2000s who worked at Intel in "operations" try to explain the project he was working on to me. It was a multi-year, multi-million dollar software module + integration + customization contract with SAP that was focused on tracking, managing, projecting and optimizing Intel's product SKUs, which apparently number in the tens of thousands across variants, versions and geos. I never really got a thorough understanding of what it actually did but it was expected to take five years to implement and hundreds of people across multiple divisions worked hours a day in it and it was 'mission critical'. I asked what would happen at the end of five years and he told me it would certainly run at least a year or two over and then they'd probably start a new contract to work on the next iteration of a system to replace it (because that was, apparently, pretty normal).

mrcwinn 2y ago

A 280Z with a "UNIX" plate. So basically you're the coolest person of that decade. Thanks for the post! Amazing.

rconti 2y ago
The "Live Free or Die" NH plate really makes it.

mise_en_place 2y ago

Every Sun alum that I had the pleasure of working with was brilliant. Truly learned a lot from them, especially when pair programming. Must have been a special place to work at.

wendy4151 1y ago

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