4 ms·

> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I'm not even out of college, and I feel the same way. Especially for Sun, everyth

> I regret being born too late to work somewhere like Bell Labs, SGI, or Sun. I'm not even out of college, and I feel the same way. Especially for Sun, everything they did was so cool. "The network is the computer" and all that.

mjamil 1y ago
The coolness peaked before the “the network is the computer” phase, IMO. Late 80s vs mid 90s.
- at-fates-hands 1y ago
  This was also back when you could walk into the library and get the email credentials of a random professor and then use it to hide behind when you took down a network of another in state university because an engineering professor didn't think computer science majors were as smart as he was. Yeah, man, good times. My buddy got a visit from the feds and lost his computer lab access for a semester. I still giggle when I tell that story.
  - netdevphoenix 1y ago
    > I still giggle when I tell that story. Not sure why anyone would think that stealing someone else's data and attacking a network is funny. The only difference between then and now is that now you would get a criminal record for that. It was as morally wrong to do that back then as it is now.
ghaff 1y ago
I'd note that a huge amount of the work at those companies was hardware (and a lot of theory in the case of Bell Labs)--though there was, of course important software as well, a lot of it related to Unix. Doesn't mean it might not have been a blast but not hacking on software and playing in the open source world as is the case at at least some companies today.
- kaladin-jasnah 1y ago
  Well I still think that software like DTrace, ZFS, NFS, IRIX and Solaris, IrisGL, and the like are cool, even if there was a lot of hardware engineering. I realize that there are disadvantages to it, but the variances in ISAs (MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, etc) seems like it could have posed challenges for software people. I don't know; I'm not young enough to remember.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    Sun did a lot of great software too and I know a lot of the folks involved. I just think many people look at the innovation through the lens of software (especially open source) hacking which a great deal of it wasn't. When I was in the minicomputer business, it was maybe 50/50 hardware and software (and that mostly assumes you considered software to include low-level things like microcode). And software people weren't mostly paid more than those in hardware--which is to say generally a good middle class professional wage.
    - neilv 1y ago
      > which is to say generally a good middle class professional wage. Working with Suns and other workstations as a teen (so my perspective was limited), I caught the very tail end of software as a modest middle class professional wage for everyone doing it (right before the dotcom boom hit). The people I worked with were really good at what they do, but not strutting like newcomers started doing pretty much the instant the dotcom boom started, and not rich. (Well, one guy did buy a used MR2, and get his private pilot license, but he also lived with his wife in a trailer on an undeveloped parcel. He was a very solid software engineer, working on important stuff.) I might have inadvertently tried to preserve some of that modestly-paid excellence of the generation before me, but I don't recommend that. Cost-of-living in my area is determined by people making FAANG-like money (well, and real estate investors, and price-fixing), and you have to either play along with that, or move away.
      - ghaff 1y ago
        Mind you, California cost of living was on the high side even in the nineties even relative to at least modestly expensive areas like the Boston area suburbs--there was really very little tech in Boston proper at that time. But a somewhat high-flying (albeit hardware) company was recruiting me for a CA job and they basically admitted it would be a lifestyle downgrade in terms of salary. Some people made a lot of money when dot-com hit. A lot also got wiped out and ended up leaving the industry. I never had the highs or lows. I was probably making something south of $100K in the late 90s.
cdf 1y ago
Even though I worked for companies that killed Sun, I never stopped admiring the foundational work the company was doing, which was not just cool, but critical for technological progress, and was very sad when the company sold out to Oracle and was gutted alive. HPC stuff Sun pioneered is still very relevant today. In an alternate timeline, Sun fully embraced Open Source and became a key pillar of the internet today. Unfortunately, while we are well aware of cool tech companies that were ran aground by the finance/sales/management consulting types, Sun felt like a company ran aground by engineers. Zuck famously kept the Sun logo up for quite a while when Facebook bought Sun's HQ campus, as a warning to the employees of what they could become. In some ways, Facebook/Meta is the spiritual successor of Sun, just like Google became the spiritual successor of SGI when they bought the SGI campus. But these two ad driven companies never quite became the new Sun/SGI, for better and worse.
- bcantrill 1y ago
  I don't disagree that Sun was a company run aground by engineers -- though I certainly like to think of myself as one of the engineers trying to navigate us around the rocky shoals! For whatever it's worth, I broadly stand by my analysis on HN fourteen years ago (!!) of Sun's demise[0] -- which now also stands as clear foreshadowing for Oxide eight years before its founding.[1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033 [1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-computer-company/ https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...
  - ghaff 1y ago
    Bryan, I'm not sure what Sun could realistically have done to come out the other side of the dot-com carnage. Other companies in roughly equivalent situations come to mind. You start looking at doing a hard reboot when the margins for that reboot aren't there and it's difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe an earlier reinvention involving more open source and alignment with where hardware was headed. Don't know.
    - shrubble 1y ago
travisgriggs 1y ago
Interesting. That was not my perception of Sun at all. “The network is the computer” was a marketing campaign. Java was a language developed for IoT/toasters, and then hard pivoted to a write once run anywhere weblet language (ultimately to be replaced by a guy who threw together an integerless programming language that sounded like a skin condition, renamed to ride the crest of energy sun marketing money threw at things). Sure, Solaris was rock solid, but it was also pretty conservative in its march forward as a Unix, being ultimately trumped by Linux. Sun had an amazing team of people that worked on Self project led by David Ungar and others (Lars Bak who helped give us V8). They let the whole team go, who then went off and did sime cool things with dynamic optimization, which Sun ultimately ended up hiring/buying back to create the HotSpot VM. Any NIH and other dysfunctionality went far beyond the engineers at Sun.
- FearNotDaniel 1y ago
  It's a small side point, but the skin-disease name came later: Mocha -> LiveScript -> JavaScript -> EczemaScript or whatever [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript
- jjav 1y ago
  > “The network is the computer” was a marketing campaign. No, not at all. It became a marketing campaing in the very late 90s dot.com boom, but the concept that defined Sun goes back to the beginning, 1984. Back then, that was a radical vision and Sun truly lived it internally for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer
- nosianu 1y ago
  > an integerless programming language Technically true-ish, but deserves an important qualifier. The Javascript number format has a huge "safe space" of integers between Number.MIN_SAFE_INTEGER => -9007199254740991 (-(2^53 - 1)) Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER => 9007199254740991 (2^53 – 1) Also, the number format is a standard, not only used by JS, and given that it was supposed to be a minimal scripting language it is hard to argue against the initial design choice of choosing one all-encompassing big standard, and not burden the language with a complete set. Since he criticism was on the initial design: > ultimately to be replaced by a guy who threw together an integerless programming language I would like to refute it by pointing out that the criticism ignores the initial use case, as well as the actual existence of integers within that larger number format standard. Later, when enough people (and companies) demanded it, a big integer type was added, after all. Internally runtimes use different paths depending on what kind of number it is. For many use cases of integers, especially internal ones, like array indexing and counting, those integers are just that, and an extra integer type for extra purity is not much of a problem. For other uses of integers, e.g. finance (using cents instead of dollars), it sucks that you have to pay a lot of attention to what calculations you perform, so not having (had - until BIGINT) a real integer type as aid indeed made it less pleasant to do integer arithmetic.

mjamil 1y ago

The coolness peaked before the “the network is the computer” phase, IMO. Late 80s vs mid 90s.

at-fates-hands 1y ago
This was also back when you could walk into the library and get the email credentials of a random professor and then use it to hide behind when you took down a network of another in state university because an engineering professor didn't think computer science majors were as smart as he was. Yeah, man, good times. My buddy got a visit from the feds and lost his computer lab access for a semester. I still giggle when I tell that story.
- netdevphoenix 1y ago
  > I still giggle when I tell that story. Not sure why anyone would think that stealing someone else's data and attacking a network is funny. The only difference between then and now is that now you would get a criminal record for that. It was as morally wrong to do that back then as it is now.

ghaff 1y ago

I'd note that a huge amount of the work at those companies was hardware (and a lot of theory in the case of Bell Labs)--though there was, of course important software as well, a lot of it related to Unix. Doesn't mean it might not have been a blast but not hacking on software and playing in the open source world as is the case at at least some companies today.

kaladin-jasnah 1y ago
Well I still think that software like DTrace, ZFS, NFS, IRIX and Solaris, IrisGL, and the like are cool, even if there was a lot of hardware engineering. I realize that there are disadvantages to it, but the variances in ISAs (MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, etc) seems like it could have posed challenges for software people. I don't know; I'm not young enough to remember.
- ghaff 1y ago
  Sun did a lot of great software too and I know a lot of the folks involved. I just think many people look at the innovation through the lens of software (especially open source) hacking which a great deal of it wasn't. When I was in the minicomputer business, it was maybe 50/50 hardware and software (and that mostly assumes you considered software to include low-level things like microcode). And software people weren't mostly paid more than those in hardware--which is to say generally a good middle class professional wage.
  - neilv 1y ago
    > which is to say generally a good middle class professional wage. Working with Suns and other workstations as a teen (so my perspective was limited), I caught the very tail end of software as a modest middle class professional wage for everyone doing it (right before the dotcom boom hit). The people I worked with were really good at what they do, but not strutting like newcomers started doing pretty much the instant the dotcom boom started, and not rich. (Well, one guy did buy a used MR2, and get his private pilot license, but he also lived with his wife in a trailer on an undeveloped parcel. He was a very solid software engineer, working on important stuff.) I might have inadvertently tried to preserve some of that modestly-paid excellence of the generation before me, but I don't recommend that. Cost-of-living in my area is determined by people making FAANG-like money (well, and real estate investors, and price-fixing), and you have to either play along with that, or move away.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      Mind you, California cost of living was on the high side even in the nineties even relative to at least modestly expensive areas like the Boston area suburbs--there was really very little tech in Boston proper at that time. But a somewhat high-flying (albeit hardware) company was recruiting me for a CA job and they basically admitted it would be a lifestyle downgrade in terms of salary. Some people made a lot of money when dot-com hit. A lot also got wiped out and ended up leaving the industry. I never had the highs or lows. I was probably making something south of $100K in the late 90s.

cdf 1y ago

Even though I worked for companies that killed Sun, I never stopped admiring the foundational work the company was doing, which was not just cool, but critical for technological progress, and was very sad when the company sold out to Oracle and was gutted alive. HPC stuff Sun pioneered is still very relevant today. In an alternate timeline, Sun fully embraced Open Source and became a key pillar of the internet today. Unfortunately, while we are well aware of cool tech companies that were ran aground by the finance/sales/management consulting types, Sun felt like a company ran aground by engineers. Zuck famously kept the Sun logo up for quite a while when Facebook bought Sun's HQ campus, as a warning to the employees of what they could become. In some ways, Facebook/Meta is the spiritual successor of Sun, just like Google became the spiritual successor of SGI when they bought the SGI campus. But these two ad driven companies never quite became the new Sun/SGI, for better and worse.

bcantrill 1y ago
I don't disagree that Sun was a company run aground by engineers -- though I certainly like to think of myself as one of the engineers trying to navigate us around the rocky shoals! For whatever it's worth, I broadly stand by my analysis on HN fourteen years ago (!!) of Sun's demise[0] -- which now also stands as clear foreshadowing for Oxide eight years before its founding.[1] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033 [1] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-computer-company/ https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-new-co...
- ghaff 1y ago
  Bryan, I'm not sure what Sun could realistically have done to come out the other side of the dot-com carnage. Other companies in roughly equivalent situations come to mind. You start looking at doing a hard reboot when the margins for that reboot aren't there and it's difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe an earlier reinvention involving more open source and alignment with where hardware was headed. Don't know.
  - shrubble 1y ago

travisgriggs 1y ago

Interesting. That was not my perception of Sun at all. “The network is the computer” was a marketing campaign. Java was a language developed for IoT/toasters, and then hard pivoted to a write once run anywhere weblet language (ultimately to be replaced by a guy who threw together an integerless programming language that sounded like a skin condition, renamed to ride the crest of energy sun marketing money threw at things). Sure, Solaris was rock solid, but it was also pretty conservative in its march forward as a Unix, being ultimately trumped by Linux. Sun had an amazing team of people that worked on Self project led by David Ungar and others (Lars Bak who helped give us V8). They let the whole team go, who then went off and did sime cool things with dynamic optimization, which Sun ultimately ended up hiring/buying back to create the HotSpot VM. Any NIH and other dysfunctionality went far beyond the engineers at Sun.

FearNotDaniel 1y ago
It's a small side point, but the skin-disease name came later: Mocha -> LiveScript -> JavaScript -> EczemaScript or whatever [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMAScript
jjav 1y ago
> “The network is the computer” was a marketing campaign. No, not at all. It became a marketing campaing in the very late 90s dot.com boom, but the concept that defined Sun goes back to the beginning, 1984. Back then, that was a radical vision and Sun truly lived it internally for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Network_is_the_Computer
nosianu 1y ago
> an integerless programming language Technically true-ish, but deserves an important qualifier. The Javascript number format has a huge "safe space" of integers between Number.MIN_SAFE_INTEGER => -9007199254740991 (-(2^53 - 1)) Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER => 9007199254740991 (2^53 – 1) Also, the number format is a standard, not only used by JS, and given that it was supposed to be a minimal scripting language it is hard to argue against the initial design choice of choosing one all-encompassing big standard, and not burden the language with a complete set. Since he criticism was on the initial design: > ultimately to be replaced by a guy who threw together an integerless programming language I would like to refute it by pointing out that the criticism ignores the initial use case, as well as the actual existence of integers within that larger number format standard. Later, when enough people (and companies) demanded it, a big integer type was added, after all. Internally runtimes use different paths depending on what kind of number it is. For many use cases of integers, especially internal ones, like array indexing and counting, those integers are just that, and an extra integer type for extra purity is not much of a problem. For other uses of integers, e.g. finance (using cents instead of dollars), it sucks that you have to pay a lot of attention to what calculations you perform, so not having (had - until BIGINT) a real integer type as aid indeed made it less pleasant to do integer arithmetic.