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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 o
by otras 1y 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 1y agoI 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 1y agoGreat, 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 1y agoJonathan Schwartz was the downfall of Sun
- rbanffy 1y agoNot 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 1y agoSolaris 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.
- dboreham 1y agoSun actually lasted much longer than they would have except that Linux was terrible, basically unusable for commercial purposes until about 2005.
- kstrauser 1y agoAnd here we were running a large regional ISP on it in 1997.
- rconti 1y agoIn the PNW, eskimo.com was using Sun machines at least in 1994 when I joined, and I assume for some years earlier. Oz.net was using Irix on SGI machines :)
- kstrauser 1y agoThat stuff was surely popular, too! But we were running LAMP stacks in the late 90s to host customer content on cheap x86 boxes, and it that was an enormously popular hosting solution for many years before 2005. Sun boxes were very nice machines, but an entry level Sun Fire V480 debuted for $20K, and that would buy a whole tabletop of x86 servers in tower cases. There was a much greater variety of plausible server options back then, to be sure. I'm mainly arguing against the idea that Linux+x86 was useless until 2005 or so. I had personally worked in 5 different ISP/hosting companies by then which all used that exact combination.
- abyesilyurt 1y agoAre there any other books about the Bell Labs you would recommend?
- burningChrome 1y agoA Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon’s full story for the first time. It’s the story of a small-town Michigan boy whose career stretched from the era of room-sized computers powered by gears and string to the age of Apple. It’s the story of the origins of our digital world in the tunnels of MIT and the “idea factory” of Bell Labs, in the “scientists’ war” with Nazi Germany, and in the work of Shannon’s collaborators and rivals, thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Wiener. I also loved this one: Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of “phone phreaks” who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI.
- plapsley 1y agoThanks for the mention and honored to be in the same mention as Soni and Goodman's book on Shannon!
- commandersaki 1y agoUNIX: A History and a Memoir by Kernighan is also good, a lot of the happenings of Bell Labs is interwoven through the narrative.
- mzs 1y agonot a book but 2hr talk w/ QA: https://youtu.be/dkmzb904tG0 https://youtu.be/dkmzb904tG0 There was a blog by a lady who was an early HR employee, but I can't find it anymore.
- mh-cx 1y agoYou might like The Dream Machine: J.c.r. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop Not really about a company, though.
- thenthenthen 1y agoThose are great! I picked up a copy of Nokia: The Inside Story at a thrift store and was pleasantly surprised. I will add more if something comes to mind.