How I Arrived at Sun as Employee #8

https://twitter.com/aka_pugs/status/1521489115585421314

by hasheddan • 4 years ago

290 122 4 years ago

ledbettj• 4 years ago

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1521489115585421314.html

Computers as a whole seem so boring nowadays. I get that we all have supercomputers in our pockets, and it should be amazing, but it's just dull.

mhh__• 4 years ago

Computers are boring but system on chips are kind of interesting again now that you need all this compute for AI.

People have made huge mistakes waiting for workloads that have very predictable computation, now with AI we have a need for coprocessors again.

smackeyacky5• 4 years ago

Dull?

You can hang the equivalent of an eighties micro on anything you please and record things nobody has ever seen before, download the data en masse to your pocket supercomputer, sync that to an AI and make accurate predictions that can be used to affect real world outcomes.

You can talk to anyone on the planet with minimal charges.

You can take infinite numbers of pictures of everything at insane resolutions, backyard astronomy is unbelievable compared to the Sun era.

Computing has never been so exciting. If you think you missed out because you weren't in silicon valley in the 1980s, the amount of cool work being done everywhere but the valley needs reconsidering.

I've been doing this since the 80s and its never been better than now.

hulitu2• 4 years ago

And still printing a web page is real challenge. And if you want to compile a programm you find out that it needs 30 libraries. Some things are better. Most of the things are worse. I have a text editor on my Android phone. It cannot do search and replace.

sedatk• 4 years ago

I agree with you fully. It's just that tech stopped giving the same dopamine boost as social platforms nowadays.

eezurr• 4 years ago

For me, I imagine part of the excitement is applying the art of computer science every day at your job back then. When things are taken care of for you, they become boring. Not because those things are inherently boring, but they're boring because you're no longer thinking about them. You can't get excited about things you aren't thinking about. Many jobs transitioned from surgeons with scalpels to supergluing prefab parts together. Which one sounds more exciting to you? I'd rather be a surgeon.

jimbokun• 4 years ago

Yes, but the question then becomes, is it more fun and exciting to use those things, or was it more fun and exciting to build the underlying technologies and products?

theonething• 4 years ago

Hacking on my Commodore 64 in the 80s was much more fun than the web app of the week I'm doing now.

rektide2• 4 years ago

Altogether far too much computing happens in far off mainframes. Aka the cloud. Far too little computing can genuinely be engaged with. The potential has been coopted & occluded & we're left chainrd to the cave again, starting at megacompany's shadowpuppets.

It's worth admitting the formative years are often a lot of fun. Some come-down is expected.

But I also believe collective discontent slowly grows in this deeply consumerized computing climate & eventually we'll push for new terrain, grow tired of this technostratifocation.

B1FF_PSUVM• 4 years ago

Around about as long. It's been reined in and put to work for real. Whips don't hurt much, for now.

yarg• 4 years ago

Computing could be more exciting than it's ever been - were it not for the walled gardens being build all about.

smm113• 4 years ago

You weren't paying attention from 91-95 or so, then. You'd run into Sun, SGI, OS/2, 3.1, Mac, NeXT, and DOS everywhere you looked, and might have heard about Linux. New Netscape versions were released nightly. There was no data mining, or ads.

jjav4• 4 years ago

Dull?

Yes, dull. Technology has been made into a walled garden consumer product. Hosted on remote servers ("cloud") tighly locked away, non-interoperable and no serviceable parts inside as the sticker says. Dull.

Aeolun2• 4 years ago

Computing is less fun exactly because all this is commonplace.

codegeek• 4 years ago

It feels boring because for the most part, we have solved some of the most common problems that we needed computers for. The idea of watching movies, ordering groceries/food, talking to a friend/family 8000 miles away in a second were all interesting and fancy and now it is part of life. So we get bored. Today's personal computers pretty much do everything we need in terms of basic necessities. I was driving earlier today and realized the power of Maps on our phones. Imagine back in the days when you need to print mapquest (remember?) or plain old maps to figure out how to get to the Interstate from this new place you just visited.

Things like VR etc so far (my opinion) have been disappointments for the most part even though we keep trying to innovate. Also, remember 3D TVs ?

I guess we need things like teleportation, real robots (not the one like Rocky IV movie) and some cooler stuff to make it interesting again.

MikeTheRocker2• 4 years ago

I'm biased because I've been working on AR/VR at Meta/Oculus for the last 4 years, but I'm curious what you've found disappointing and whether you've tried the lastest VR software and hardware.

As far as gaming goes, Half-Life: Alyx and Resident Evil 4 are superb AAA experiences. As for hardware, Quest 2 and Valve Index are both great at what they promise for their respective price points.

Gigachad2• 4 years ago

VR is not a disappointment imo. A lot of people are having a lot of fun with VR chat. The hardware is just still very expensive and has the huge requirement of needing a 3x3m space to play in. The average person doesn't have an empty VR zone ready just to play specific types of games in. 3D TVs only failed because they never worked out how to do it properly without glasses. People will accept a clunky solution for the early adopter version but once it became clear there was no path forward, they just become discontinued.

psyc• 4 years ago

VR is incredible, and it's only going to get better. Meta's stuff has improved by leaps and bounds in the past several years alone. See what happens in another 5, then another 5.

cab111509042• 4 years ago

I remember taping printed instructions to motorcycle tank to drive from NC to OH. It rained. That was good times.

grishka2• 4 years ago

Software engineering is no longer considered engineering these days. People mash abstractions together without even trying to understand what's beneath those abstractions. Knowing what you're actually doing seems to be a big deal in software development now.

hulitu2• 4 years ago

Engineering is trying to underestand things and learn from mistakes. SW engineering is like financial engineering: trying to get profits fast.

georgeecollins• 4 years ago

Right, because micro computers have had decades of investment and development, when in 1982 they were like 15 years old (microprocessors anyway (HN correct me)).

Now the excitement is probably something that new or newer.. drones, recent ML, AR/VR/XR, wearable, or something that I don't know what it is. It's gotta be something where most people think it won't even work.

ghaff• 4 years ago

15 years in 1982 is casting a pretty wide net for actual microcomputers. The Altair 8800 kit debuted on Radio-Electronics in 1975 and the Apple II came out a couple years later. But I was an engineering undergrad in the late 70s and I knew no one who owned a personal computer. They didn't even become geek things beyond a very limited number of people until the early 80s.

gonehome• 4 years ago

One of the things that drew me to urbit is it feels like when I first started playing with linux. It's fun, but in a way that tackles some real underlying issues with the modern web/computing stack.

The ideas are interesting and whatever happens it's definitely not boring imo: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...

walrus01• 4 years ago

I think there was a lot more novelty and shock/awe in amazing new things when we didn't have youtube channels and social media of every new thing immediately poring over ever detail of it.

For instance, when ID first released DOOM to the Internet and BBSes it was something you discovered on your own and among your local community of people who had network access and a PC capable of running it, there weren't hundreds of youtube channels playing full-1080p playthroughs of the entire game, etc.

bovermyer• 4 years ago

Selective ignorance might be something worth cultivating.

When I was young (middle/high school), I devoured print strategy guides for video games and printed (hah) source code in library books. It was hard to come by, and just as nuanced/wrong as solutions/strategies/source you now find on the web/GitHub/etc.

In the last few years, I've stopped indulging in play-throughs, guides, or other experiences-on-rails. My sense of awe at discovering things has increased dramatically as a result. Not quite where it was thirty years ago, but getting there.

ngc248• 4 years ago

Exactly, the novelty of finding something our for yourself. And lots of times the anticipation of waiting for something itself used to be so fun. As you mentioned, with everything being reviewed to the minutest detail, all of that novelty is gone now.

paulcole• 4 years ago

Let me guess, computers were a lot more interesting and amazing when you were a teenager and into your early 20s?

virtual_void• 4 years ago

Sometimes i think this too.

I think part of the joy (for me) used to be in the deep understanding of the hardware and making something out of what felt like nothing.

If I’m doing something with a load of libraries and feel like a plumber more than a programmer then I find that excitement hard to come by.

Playing with modern day microcontrollers, SoC stuff or building software with hard real-time requirements is still a lot of fun - i just don’t get to do it so much these days.

uuyi• 4 years ago

It’s not dull really but I find it laborious and sometimes stupid. The sense of achievement has been sucked away by deep rabbit holes of research required to decipher even the simplest tasks. The retention and value of knowledge has declined due to the transient nature of everything too. Every day is a catching up session for something which is either horrible or will be replaced before you’ve finished the job.

I reserve the label stupid specifically for templated YAML which makes me want to strangle people fairly quickly.

Gigachad2• 4 years ago

Computers have not become boring. You have become old. Kids these days are having more fun than ever with today's computers.

nyokodo• 4 years ago

Computers as a whole seem so boring nowadays.

For most of us everything becomes less exciting as we get older compared to our youth. Our minds are less responsive to novelty and there’s less novelty to be had. Kids still get enthralled by computers these days.

elzbardico• 4 years ago

It is the paradox of choice or abundance. I remember that in the early 90s getting a bootleg copy of turbo C for my PC was something that I eagerly anticipated for the weeks it took me to finally get the disks. Heck, I was excited to install windows 3.1. To be frank even using debug.com to execute some small snippets of assembly code was terribly exciting. Because there was not a lot of much else to do.

superasn• 4 years ago

I think once the VR goggles get more portable, hopefully the size of contact lenses one day, it will make things super exciting once again. I just hope it happens in the next 20 years.

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

I'll share a controversial opinion: I think computers were always boring, even if you worked for Sun Microsystems, yes even in 1981. In 1981, the Intel 8086 had been on the market for 3 years, and the 68000 had been on the market for 2 years. There were probably a hundred startup companies trying to make a workstation to compete with Sun. If you went to work for one of those companies, you crashed and burned or were acquired, and got to watch the project you worked so hard on become abandoned.

drfuchs• 4 years ago

When we were undergrads, I remember looking over Tom's shoulder at some Unix code he was studying, and I worked up my courage to ask what "*cp++" meant. He said something about about "pointers" and "post-incrementing", but I couldn't figure out what he was talking about; he was a true wizard. Hi, Tom!

teaearlgrey_hot• 4 years ago

A wizard never uses the base pointer or the stack pointer by compilation: he moves the stack precisely as he means to!

pugs78• 4 years ago

Thanks, Dave. You're no slouch yourself.

trevcanhuman2• 4 years ago

Using the post increment operator for pointer operations ? Would have never imagined that. I've only seen it used in for loops for no reason at all, really.

pubby• 4 years ago

It's common enough, like in a typical memcpy implementation:

    while(size--)
       *dst++ = *src++;

Annatar9• 4 years ago

It's very common, like ABC of pointer arithmetic. Especially if one has coded in assembler first, then took up C, it's the most natural thing to do.

jjav4• 4 years ago

I miss Sun so much. Nearly all the happiest geek-out years of my career were spent there. A great technology company all about the technology.

Today the so-called tech giants are not really tech companies. Advertising, online shopping, more advertising, toxic social networks, movies. None of them are selling technology as the actual product. Apple is the sole exception, but they are a locked-down walled-garden consumer products. Contrast with Sun which was all about interoperable open systems.

I wish a company as remotely as cool as Sun still existed. I'd drop everything and go there right now.

salgernon• 4 years ago

I was #12386 at sun - circa 1990 but I don’t remember the exact date. The day I showed up I was given a cardboard box of VME boards with a sun 4/400 chassis, an Ethernet drop and and a SunOS tape and and left to myself to make it work. I think that might have been their way of hazing the new guy - and I’m sure I got nowhere without help. But it was a lot of fun.

While I’m there in memory lane and apropos of the pointer post increment discussion - one of my first source checking there was when I “optimized” a bit of graphics code by rewriting it to use pointer arithmetic rather than array indices like the “idiot” that wrote it had. Then the “idiot” in question, who happened to have designed the chip the code was taking to, explained how his code took exactly so many cycles with such and such cache consideration and then I learned how to revert a change in SCCS.

MichaelZuo• 4 years ago

That’s some great stuff! Thanks for sharing. One thing that really stuck out was that the startup boom bust cycle was already in full swing by the early 80’s.

robotresearcher• 4 years ago

Of which century?

TMWNN2• 4 years ago

As robotresearcher implied, the startup boom/bust cycle has existed as long as capitalism has.

In the past 200 years:

* Railroads, 1830-1850

* Telephones, 1880-1920

* Automobiles, 1890-1930

* Radio, 1920-1950

* Aircraft, 1910-1950

* Airlines, 1930-1985

* Television, 1945-1960

* Computers, 1950-1990

* Internet, 1995-present

The computer cycle can be subdivided into

* Mainframes (1945-1965)

* Minicomputers (1965-1980)

* Microcomputers (1975-1990)

And/or

* Vacuum tubes (1945-1955)

* Transistors (1955-1975)

* Microprocessor (1975-1990)

umeshunni• 4 years ago

Slight correction:

* Internet, 1995-2010

* Mobile, 2010-present

alberth• 4 years ago

Off topic: I wonder if Google will ever end up like Sun.

The pinnacle of engineering, but their golden goose dried up and was acquired for pennies on the dollar.

—

EDIT: why the downvotes? I genuinely don’t understand. Why not just comment below your thoughts instead.

Mikeb85• 4 years ago

No. Google uses the dark forces of advertising and free products. Sun was trying to sell products.

achow• 4 years ago

Except that Dark Forces can change its allegiance. Product search is/was moving towards Amazon.

Hypothetically, if 'Metaverse' or 'Web 3.0' becomes a reality, not sure whether GOOG can do anything much there - as it is they are poor in innovations.

ceeplusplus• 4 years ago

Google is also crippled by employees who demand the firm follow the latest social justice whim (which has prevented them from entering big markets in the past, like defense and China). Sun had employees actively trying to build things, even if they were the wrong things.

sangnoir2• 4 years ago

Sun failed because something "better"[1] came along (Linux and good-enough commodity x86). There's no telling if something better than Google (the product) will arise in the future; which is why Google (the company) doing it's darndest to ensure they are the ones to invent it.

1. Or hard to profitably compete with. Additionally, the dot-com bust sealed Sun's fate.

gaws• 4 years ago

Why not just comment below your thoughts instead.

Cowards downvote.

prepend2• 4 years ago

The world is full of cowards. I try to adopt cowards compensating strategies (while at the same time working on increasing bravery).

ninkendo2• 4 years ago

why the downvotes? I genuinely don’t understand. Why not just comment below your thoughts instead.

Ok, sure:

I downvoted because you’re complaining about downvotes. Have a nice day!

gpvos• 4 years ago

Please don't complain about downvotes. If people see a downvoted post with merit, it will gather extra upvotes. When I saw it, it was not downvoted, but I downvoted it because of the complaint.

Aeolun2• 4 years ago

I’m glad to see that all people that disagreed disagree with your request for an explanation, not with the content of the message :facepalm:

Anyway, I think it’s because comparing Sun to Google feels uncharitable (towards Sun).

Annatar9• 4 years ago

Because thinking of Google in those terms shows genuine ignorance: Google is an advertising company where the privacy of the users is the product to sell. Google could not be more anathema to Sun Microsystems or Silicon Graphics.

No company has ever reached the standards set forth by Sun Microsystems or Silicon Graphics.

Whether 0xide Computer will, remains to be seen. In the absence of working there, one can only hope.

criticas• 4 years ago

Apple?

Or do you argue Apple doesn't count because they're not in the business computing space, or that they're essentially a consumer products company that also makes personal computers?

bogomipz2• 4 years ago

The author has had some great experiences. I was struck by this post a few down from the Sun one:

"Sometime in late '80 I moved over to Amdahl's architecture group to work on data communications - X.25, SNA, etc. But that work wasn't too satisfying."

I believe X.25 would have been pretty cutting edge in 1980. A bit of trivia regarding this protocol AOL's network was built on X.25 and many ATM machines still use X.25. If you look in the back of any of those standalone crappy offbrand ATM machines you will see they are connected to an RJ 11 phone jack. Minitel in France also used it X.25 as well. It's almost hard to get your head around packet switched networks today with our ubiquitous Ethernet. If your curious:

https://www.historyofdomains.com/x25/

dan-robertson• 4 years ago

There are a few things leftover from those networking protocols that are still common:

- X.509 for certificates

- parts of LDAP

- the 7 layer networking model, which at least made sense with the protocols it was modelling before it was jammed into tcp/ip networking.

I think we should be thankful the list is relatively short.

bogomipz2• 4 years ago

Forward Error Correction and ASN.1 as well. I think it's kind of impressive though that those things survive more than 40 year later.

Taniwha3• 4 years ago

That whole network stack was based on a simple premise from the telco world ... that you should charge by the byte for a virtual end-to-end connection (just like we used to charge for a phone call - N bytes and M bytes/min).

IP sort of busted that whole idea - the idea that you could (should!) just drop packets when things get tough ran against this whole idea - but it made TCP/IP easier to implement, and perform better, and most importantly move faster and be adopted as the standard we use today

smm113• 4 years ago

One other thing. 20-something years ago I kept getting in trouble at work, because every night I'd take my G3 laptop home and get a dual-boot Linux/OS8 thing going.

Then 10 years ago I'd root all my Android phones and run spectacular roms.

Now I'm paid to keep a Linux network running, and I use my phone as-is.

ggm• 4 years ago

Pre Solaris? amazing. Did a lot with SunOS, on Sun-1 and Sun-2. SunView was ok, coded some nice things in it, helped PhD art students at the slade.

Post Solaris? If I wanted System V I would have asked you for it.

The 68000 was an amazing chip. Sparc was good too, but what really kicked Sun off was 68xxx series, and BSD

sydthrowaway• 4 years ago

If this doesnt convince you to join a startup, nothing will

2sk21• 4 years ago

I used Unix for the first time in September 1984 on a Sun 120 workstation. It had a huge monochrome monitor and an optical mouse. I was so entranced by this amazing machine that I spent nights and weekends learning C and trying to program it. Was a wonderful experience. Nice memories!

eternalban• 4 years ago

TIL of Sun co-founder Andreas Maria Maximilian Freiherr von Mauchenheim genannt Bechtolsheim's most awesome full name!

How I Arrived at Sun as Employee #8

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