The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1TsVW4P5DI

by zdw • 4 years ago

167 107 4 years ago

anyfactor• 4 years ago

I wonder how companies like IBM, Intel and Oracle were able to survive through the dotcom crash and 2008's financial recession, where Sun Microsystems essentially got obliterated. Did Sun Microsystems really had that bad of a management compared to them?

wmf• 4 years ago

Intel is the one who obliterated Sun so that answers that one. IBM and Oracle were diversified and could depend on the enterprise market which didn't crash.

p_l2• 4 years ago

In addition to other events, Sun entered dotcom boom a bit from a wounded position due to high volume of recalls caused by radioactive cache in what was to be flagship processor. Meanwhile IBM had a lot more revenue streams (including still x86 machines on low end, AS/400 on middle size, and Mainframe and supercomputing business at the top) that weren't much impacted by fickle nature of dotcom.

RedShift1• 4 years ago

Radioactive cache? Sun shipped radioactive parts to customers?

znpy2• 4 years ago

Ibm most likely had many multi-years (decades?) long contracts.

Stuff like mainframes assure, at least, decades of support contracts.

PeterStuer3• 4 years ago

Sun was caught by the WinTel (Windows - Intel) engine that commoditized computing. They died because they were unable to rapidly change their businessmodel that relied on an expensive sales staff vendoring relatively big ticket items.

In other words, they died by their own sword.

sateesh• 4 years ago

Didn't also raise of Linux sped Sun's demise. In early 2000's the private compute farm of the org I was working had a mix of Solaris and Linux machines, with Solaris hosts outnumbering Linux hosts. Within couple of years with aim of uniformization all hosts were standardized to Linux.

PeterStuer3• 4 years ago

Not as i recall. Linux at that time was seen as an interesting project, but not yet suitable for the typical workloads ascociated with a Sun workstation.

neilv3• 4 years ago

18m32s

This seems to be a new video, and looks interesting so far (haven't seen the whole thing yet), so hopefully won't fall through the cracks of HN due to Christmas.

herodoturtle• 4 years ago

Good to know, thanks! Compliments of the season.

adg001• 4 years ago

Sun Microsystems could not have a more special place in my hacker heart. In my youth Sun was all over the place; I was dreaming working for them – as I would eventually did later in my life – and, admittedly, I would have done so even only on the basis of their uber cool logo. I remember working on their Sun Ray thin clients for a military contract. Good times. Thanks for sharing this video.

neilv3• 4 years ago

Beware a few of their choices of stock photos are a little misleading. Such as when they're talking about Sun market impact in some era, or their use of off-the-shelf components, and show a photo from a product generation decades later.

ChuckMcM2• 4 years ago

It is a good video but it isn't necessarily "accurate." (I worked at Sun from 1986 to 1995)

Some things I would have said differently;

Sun's biggest potential competitor early on was Digital Equipment Corp's VAXStation. It was only DECs unwillingness to cannibalize the sale of their larger minicomputers that prevented them from sucking a lot of oxygen out of the market.

Sun invested heavily in the i86 architecture, creating the "east coast division" on route 128 outside of Boston. However, the ideas that group had clashed with the "old school" UNIX folks in Mountain View and as a result SunOS actually feature forked between the version ECD shipped and the version Sun shipped.

John Hennessy, who knew Andy from Stanford, convinced Andy and Bill Joy that "CISC" was dead and RISC was the future. Nobody was going to build a new processor at that point and so Bill & Andy decided Sun would design one and make it open (unlike the 68K series or the x86 series). The first workstation, codenamed Campus 1 was the result.

But by the time SPARC was "real", too much of the company was seeing risk in being too open. And so even though SPARC was an open standard, Sun tended to compete viciously with anyone that implemented it. It made for a some weird dynamics.

The UNIX wars were heating up, and Sun, a company that had a high cash burn rate because of its HW business, had a quarter that we "burped" (which was SunOS 4.0 was late (it was the big shared library release and a LOT of code had been rewritten[1])) Anyway we had a quarter were the software delay had delayed the release of the next workstation which had interrupted revenue and as a result we have a quarterly loss (for like the first time ever) and that scared the crap out of the senior management. Berkeley was yelling at us because they felt not enough of the changes Sun were making were making it back into BSD, and AT&T started threatening everyone with lawsuits because, well UNIX System 3 kinda sucked and they didn't want it to. The result of THAT tornado was that Sun struck a deal (codenamed "lulu") with AT&T where AT&T would give Sun a billion dollars (which at the time was a lot of money), and in exchange, Sun would STOP improving BSD, and instead would work with AT&T to make was System 3 (which was going to be System 4 but became System 5) the best of both worlds, and AT&T and Sun would both cross license the IP so that they wouldn't sue each other but they could sue anyone else making a UNIX derivative.

In the opinion of a LOT of my peers at Sun, THAT was the event that killed Sun. They had fully switched to the dark side of "not open" systems and proprietary everything.

Sun made some excellent stuff after that, massively symmetric multiprocessing systems, "Spring" a really creative re-imagined OS, Etc. But none of it, even Java which was leveraged so hard to be a "Microsoft killer" that Sun lost sight of what it was to be a leader.

When John Hime left Sun (he had been Carol Bartz's boss as I recall) he told me that leaders don't imitate or copy their competitors, they identify what it was they were missing that gave the competitor some traction and improved their understanding of their own path. As I saw Sun become more and more their competitors by following them on their path, rather than blazing their own, it really became clear what he meant.

I remember when Opteron was introduced (AMD's first processor in the AMD64 set) at Microprocessor Forum in 2003 I emailed Scott and suggested perhaps while Sun had become DEC (they were retreating to the machine room with their big iron, and Solaris Desktop was a smaller and smaller part of their revenue mix) that coming out with an open workstation based on the AMD64 architecture using BSD again might not be a bad idea. He thought that was pretty funny and said that train had left the station.

[1] I still have my "4.0 Team Member" sign that we put on the doors of engineers who were working on 4.0 to remind others not to bother us with non-important problems :-).

ggm• 4 years ago

The sun crypto card which did blob in the host, super-enciphered key never leaves card en clair to perform sign.. that wound up running the ICANN dnssec root signing for a while. They also wound up moving to other HSM when spares became an issue IIRC, not wanting to be stranded in Oracle.

The E10k was interesting if you went with 'run this Java process and do millions of iops' non-stop. Like tandem/stratus type stuff, or even IBM. But.. sparc and solaris.

that's two innovative, "nobody else much had it" things.

And ZFS. A good legacy. I really regret sun and apple not getting IPR sorted there.

I liked sunview. The sun-1 was OK, the microvaxen we had was less polished physically but truth be told ran faster maybe. (Happy days in ucl-cs mid/late 80s)

DonHopkins10• 4 years ago

Sun-3's had an empty socket for DES chips (AmZ8068 Data Ciphering Processor (DCP) from AMD) that were never widely used outside of NSA, for export control reasons.

Ironically enough, John Gilmore build the EFF "Deep Crack" DES cracker in Sun 4/470 chassis. I coined the name as homage to Deep Blue and Deep Thought, and to signify that there was a deep crack in the US export control policies, which the project was meant to point out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker

https://cryptome.org/jya/des-cracker.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20040223021545/http://www.eff.or...

https://rescue.sunhelp.narkive.com/ErZgSQER/sun-des-chips

"Bug Id: 1107024 Synopsis: man page for des(1) contains humorous but inflamatory text in RESTRICTIONS. Description: The man page for des(1) contains the following text in section RESTRICTIONS
Software encryption is disabled for programs shipped outside of the U.S. The program will still be able to encrypt files if one can obtain an encryption chip, legally or otherwise.
While this is intended to be funny, the concern is that the State or Defence departments may interpret this as an endorsement (or encouragement) by Sun for users to illegally "obtain an encryption chip". [...]
"The hardware of Sun 3 and 4 workstations supports a data encryption chip (DES), but the federal government pressured Sun to eliminate the DES chips from their products. For this reason the DES chip's IC socket is empty in these workstations." [...]
Now being curious, I went to the Sun 2 Multibus Rev R ROM that Matt Fredette has posted on his Sun-2/120 emulator page (http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~fredette/tme/sun2-120-nbsd.html).

    % strings sun2-multi-rev-R.bin
    <snip>
    @(#)version.c 2.8 85/02/19 Copyright (c) 1985 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
    Rev R
    <snip>
    , DES chip
    Love your country, but never trust its government.
    <snip>

>I doubt the line "Love your country, but never trust its government." is intended to be spit out on the console. It appears someone at Sun added a subliminal protest against the government to the Sun-2 BootROM code...!

The actual story behind the string "Love your country, but never trust its government." in the Sun boot ROMs is that John Gilmore (who wrote the original Sun boot ROMs -- the first ones long before Mitch Bradley's FORTH Open Boot ROMs aka OpenFirmware) put that in there as an easter egg, such that if you typed it at the boot loader prompt, it would echo it back to you instead of printing an error message. That was done so that there was a way to prove if a competitor had copied Sun's boot ROMs, and it was actually used in court to win a copyright infringement case.

yjftsjthsd-h• 4 years ago

In the opinion of a LOT of my peers at Sun, THAT was the event that killed Sun. They had fully switched to the dark side of "not open" systems and proprietary everything.

At the time, sure, but surely OpenSolaris was a redemption arc before the end?

DonHopkins10• 4 years ago

AKA OpenSores. ;)

The Day SunOS Died:

https://www.stokely.com/lighter.side/day.sunos.died.html

    "Bye, bye, SunOS 4.1.3!
    ATT System V has replaced BSD.
    You can cling to the standards of the industry
    But only if you pay the right fee --
    Only if you pay the right fee..."

throwawaylinux• 4 years ago

Very interesting, thanks for the stories.

I think you were right to identify Opteron as a major threat. x86 had taken at lot of market from the UNIX/RISC vendors with Pentium Pro particularly before that, but Opteron really opened a new front in taking the fight beyond the low-end. There were of course big boutique x86 systems from Sequent and Unisys and the like, but those were more like the big UNIX systems -- expensive low volume custom parts. Opteron was the first x86 with scalable, glueless SMP that shared most IP with low end parts. It wasn't until Nehalem 5 years later that even Intel had a comprehensive answer to it either.

I think Scott was right about BSD being too late though. Linux just had the momentum at that point that the BSDs would never again match. Particularly in commerical and "enterprise" supported products. Oracle DB for Linux was available in 97 for example. Sun would have been pushing shit uphill to convince Oracle to support a new port for a BSD they would sell on x86 systems.

OpenSolaris was really the last straw response to Linux I guess, but that was entirely a case of trying to imitate competitors. Not that it may not have gone somewhere if it was opened earlier, but for a time they actually threw open a lot of their internal development forums and things I remember reading through some of them and their performance and scalability and feature targets for OpenSolaris were literally "try to close our gaps with Linux". It was too little too late.

OpenSolaris around Opteron timeframe might have been a little more interesting, although 2003 saw the release of Linux 2.6, at which point it had really built a good head of steam. So unlikely to have made much difference in the long term IMO. The iron would have been far hotter in the 10 or so years before that.

justin662• 4 years ago

Sun would have been pushing shit uphill to convince Oracle to support a new port for a BSD they would sell on x86 systems.

That would have been far and away the easiest part of that mission. Oracle will keep an utterly obscure port of the core database product alive for a single customer if they're paying enough money, or at least that is the way it was 20 years ago, and their other products generally just depend on a working JVM. A BSD port in cooperation with Sun would have been extremely easy.

Making enough people in Sun care about desktop computing again would have been the hardest part.

neilv3• 4 years ago

Sun's biggest potential competitor early on was Digital Equipment Corp's VAXStation.

Interesting; I'd never heard that. Was it because of customers already using VMS, just as Sun attracted customers already using Unix?

(I worked on CASE for mil/aerospace/datacom and ICEs at the time, and we developed for almost all the workstation platforms of that era, including the VAXstations. The VAXstations were interesting for software, but if you'd asked me then, I would've guessed that they were one of the lesser-important among our customers. Sun seemed most important to us by 1990, and before that, our founding East Coast HQ was an early Apollo shop, nothing DEC. Though a co-founder did have a PDP-8e as a kind of art display.)

chx2• 4 years ago

Was it because of customers already using VMS,

Certainly. Vaguely in the 80s VAX was massively popular with universities and the government. Today you'd think the twenty grand price of the first PDP-11 (in 1977 dollars, too) was very high but when you compared it to an IBM machine of similar capabilities and there was no one else to compare to, that was pocket change. And then it was pretty much a given there is a VAX supermini somewhere in the building so why not get the workstation from the same company?

They had -- for the time -- pretty good software too. They were absolute trailblazers. X Windows added color support to support the "Caylith" (marketing name VAXstation II/GPX) with its high performance video card. You couldn't possibly get more bleeding edge than that.

DonHopkins10• 4 years ago

You're right, it was Slowlaris that killed Sun, and Java was meant to be a "Microsoft Killer", not a programming language.

Sun was a dead man walking long before Java. And Scott McNealy's me-too obsession with Microsoft was extremely unhealthy, leading to him actually naming the division "SunSoft". Never define and even NAME yourself in terms of your enemy. Scott McNealy knew neither himself nor his enemy.

“If you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle” - Sun Tzu’s “The Art Of War”

Sun could never measure up to Microsoft, and McNealy was totally obsessed with fighting them, to the point that Java was not actually a programming language for solving developer's problems per se, but primarily a weapon in his personal vendetta against Microsoft, and Java developers were considered expendable mercenaries in that war, above all else. Everything they did with Java was measured by how much it would harm Microsoft, not help developers.

Scott McNealy was pathetically and pathologically obsessed with being and beating Bill Gates and Windows, yet so unfit for the task, just as he has been more recently obsessed with licking Trump's boots, raising money for him and his failed coup attempt, and towing his anti-mask anti-vax anti-science line of bullshit.

https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/mcnealy_trump_fundrai...

Michael Tiemann on "The Worst Job in the World":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tiemann

Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...

Subject: The Worst Job in the World
From: Michael Tiemann <tiemann@cygnus.com>
I have a friend who has to have the worst job in the world: he is a Unix system administrator. But it's worse than that, as I will soon tell. [...]

jacquesm5• 4 years ago

Good morning, Don. Between you and Chuck you could probably write a fairly authoritative history of that era. I'd definitely pay to read it.

gonzo4• 4 years ago

Michael Tiemann once worked in Sun’s compiler group.

muststopmyths2• 4 years ago

Interesting tidbit: the windows x64 project was code named sundown.

I think IBM buying redhat and aggressively pushing Linux was also a big factor in killing sun

fexecve2• 4 years ago

A selection of the best Scott McNealy quotes: "When Steve Ballmer calls me wacko, I consider that a compliment." "The only thing that I'd rather own than Windows is English, because then I could charge you two hundred and forty-nine dollars for the right to speak it." "Shut down some of the bullshit the government is spending money on and use it to buy all the Microsoft stock. Then put all their intellectual property in the public domain. Free Windows for everyone! Then we could just bronze Gates, turn him into a statue and stick him in front of the Commerce Department." "Microsoft is now talking about the digital nervous system... I guess I would be nervous if my system was built on their technology too." "It's the good guys versus the bad guys, and the good guys are winning." "W2K (Windows 2000) will be a bigger disaster than Y2K." "A giant hairball." [About Windows NT] "The Evil Empire." [guess who] "The beast from Redmond." [yup] "Anyone heard any good monopolist jokes lately?" "Ballmer and Butthead" [Ballmer and you-know-who] ".Not, .Not Yet and .Nut" [Microsoft's .Net strategy]

(From: https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=184145&cid=15205562 )

gonzo4• 4 years ago

Sun started to turn into DEC when the manufacturing people started getting hired from DEC into Sun.

The quarter that burped also had the problem that IT was late transitioning the ERP system from the HP3000 setup while a new product mix was brought out: the final set of the Sun 3 line (including the 3/85)powered by the MOV 68030 and the SPARCststion 1.

Marketing had guessed wrong at the mix (SS1 was ordered in far larger volumes than had been built, while 3/85s and their cousins languished on the shelves), but the ERP system wasn’t ready, so Sun management was flying blind.

smackeyacky• 4 years ago

I was working at a university when the sparcstation 1 was announced. My boss hit the roof, It was only a week or so after we were done setting up a lab of diskless 3/80 she was so proud of, the call to the sales rep was pretty spicy.

Sun burned a lot of customers between ditching BSD and dropping motorola.

DonHopkins10• 4 years ago

Sun started to turn into DEC when the manufacturing people started getting hired from DEC into Sun.

That is precisely what happened. Sun also hired a whole bunch of frat boy brogrammers and incompetent bozogrammers from HP and AT&T, too.

I have a lot of respect for the old HP and DEC, but the charlatans that Sun hired from HP and DEC who perpetrated Project DOE (Distributed Object Everywhere) and CORBA were a completely incompetent turkey farm who sabotaged Sun and dragged it into the ground.

https://techmonitor.ai/technology/sunsoft_taps_object_design...

We used to call it Project DOPE (Distributed Object Practically Everywhere), and the OMG (Object Management Group) was better described as OMFG, then it took so long to ship NEO that they should have called it NEOLD.

https://gunkies.org/wiki/Solaris

SunSoft is delivering the first component against its vision of Project DOE. In February 1991, SunSoft and Hewlett-Packard (HP) developed the industry's first Distributed Object Management Facility (Distributed OMF). This was submitted to the Object Management Group (OMG). In June, SunSoft added to its object technology foundation with the introduction of ToolTalk. The product has been endorsed by a number of leading software vendors including Lotus Development Corp., Cadence, Valid and Clarity Software. Other elements of Project DOE will be introduced later this year.

http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-10-1995/swol-10-...

New York City -- Perhaps the only vaporware touted for a longer period of time before its release than Windows 95 was Sun's Project DOE. This ambitious object-oriented programming toolkit and distributed operating environment that offers built-in network awareness has arrived at last. The company chose a hastily planned morning press event during Unix Expo to offer details on the software Sun's talked about for almost five years.
The software and programs making up Project DOE (Distributed Objects Everywhere) are now under the umbrella term "Neo," a word Sun CEO Scott McNealy joked doesn't stand for anything in particular except it being the last three-letter word not trademarked in the US. (Apparently, the second to the last was "JOE," a term Sun picked up for its Java application development tools.)

Then once Java became popular, Sun was overrun by enormous hoards of minions jumping on the Java bandwagon, who just wanted to work effortlessly for a successful company instead of working hard to make a company successful (just as JWZ observed about Netscape, too).

McNealy's worst enemies weren't at Microsoft, they were only himself and the other useless idiots he hired after selling out to AT&T, letting all those DOEZOS on the bus, and rolling out the Java Juggernaut.

The only misguided lesson Scott McNealy learned from his tragic failure driving Sun into the ground was to put all his wood behind one arrow of Putin's useful idiot Trump, instead of so many useless idiots from AT&T, DEC, and HP.

I wrote:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22460313

DonHopkins on March 1, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-se...

Yes you're definitely in the ball park with a beer and a hot dog -- there was a huge amount of corporate baggage. The hype and corporate bullshit that surrounded Java is a good example of what that corporate baggage would have been like if it had been deployed for NeWS's benefit instead of Java's.

If Sun had put as much energy into promoting and supporting NeWS as they did with Java, we would probably live in a very different world today.

Sun turned a corner when they abandoned their Berkeley hippie BSD roots and got into bed with AT&T / SVR4 / Solaris, and that changed a lot of stuff for the worse, making it a lot harder to do things like give away the source code to X11/NeWS. A lot of people from different companies who used to be Sun's enemies, and who had extremely different philosophies and antithetical approaches to "open software", joined Sun and started influencing and managing its policies and projects. A disastrous example was the Distributed Objects Everywhere project and CORBA fiasco, which was originally the crazy idea of a bunch of people from HP and DEC, Sun's former nemesis's, who then came to Sun and started pushing it into everything, to the detriment of NeWS and other older projects at Sun. Some of the problematic people and armchair architectural astronauts that Sun imported and put in charge of DOE/CORBA, like Steve MacKay and Michael Powell, were worthless corporate bullshitters whose main goals were to establish and maintain a hegemony, and they kept their grandiose plans in their head and never wrote anything down or made any hard decisions or came up with anything concrete, because they didn't want to be pinned down to committing to something, when they were actually in way over their heads. The whole point of the incredibly complex software they finally developed was interoperability with other company's compatible software, but in reality none of it actually worked together. It only talked to itself. SLOWLY.

Since DOE was intended to run everywhere and talk to everything but actually didn't, they should have called DOPE for Distributed Objects Practically Everywhere.

DOPE was a complete failure at its stated mission, and it had ridiculously costly overhead and complexity. When they finally delivered something years behind schedule and lacking crucial promised features, it actually required TWO CDROMs to install. (You'd think they could have distributed a distributed network object system over the network, instead of via CDROM, but nooooo: it was just too big to download.) And in the end, nobody actually used "DOE" or "NEO" for anything consequential. They wasted a spectacular amount of time, energy, money, careers, and good will on that crap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere

https://www.javaworld.com/article/2077168/distributed-object...

And then when Java finally came along, the same meddlesome corporate baggage handlers and armchair architectural astronauts went into overdrive to evangelize and promote the Java Juggernaut. And even more of them flocked in droves to Sun to jump on the Java bandwagon. If it was bad after the invasion of System V / AT&T / HP / DEC minions, things got much worse once the Java zombies started arriving in teaming brain-eating hoards to get their part of the action in response to all the hype. The original Java team was brilliant, and there were some extremely excellent people working on it, but they were totally outnumbered by the dead weight of all the hangers-on who didn't want to work hard to make a struggling company great, but just wanted an easy job at a secure company that was already great.

If Sun had shown the commitment and dedicated the resources to NeWS that they did to DOE and Java, things would be a lot different. And it would have probably also turned out terribly, for all the same reasons.

JWZ said the same kind of thing happened at NetScape, too.

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/05/03/10/146234/mozilla-foun...

This is starting to sound familiar (Score:4, Interesting) by gothzilla ( 676407 ) on Thursday March 10, 2005 @11:10AM (#11899790)
I remember reading JWZ's blog back in the Netscape days. I remember one entry in particular where he noted that Netscape had changed. It used to be full of people who wanted to help create a great company. It turned into a place full of people who just wanted to work for a great company. The people who live to help create get replaced by those who want to ride on their coat-tails. This happens when businesses become successful. Everything changes. Like the band that was good friends and partied together every night. They get signed, shit gets serious, and suddenly they're fighting and arguing about things till they break up and go their separate ways.
From an old post in his blog:
What is most amazing about this is not the event itself, but rather, what it indicates: Netscape has gone from ``hot young world-changing startup'' to Apple levels of unadulterated uselessness in fewer than four years, and with fewer than 3,000 employees.
But I guess Netscape has always done everything faster and bigger. Including burning out.
It's too bad it had to end with a whimper instead of a bang. Netscape used to be something wonderful.
The thing that hurts about this is that I was here when Netscape was just a bunch of creative people working together to make something great. Now it's a faceless corporation like all other faceless corporations, terrified that it might accidentally offend someone. But yes, all big corporations are like that: it's just that I was here to watch this one fall.
Perhaps the same fate awaits Mozilla. Hopefully not, but when your product becomes as successful as Mozilla and Firefox have, things do change and change is inevitable. It all comes down to how the people involved with the projects handle the change.
Mozilla did rise from the ashes of Netscape though. Hopefully some of the original Netscape people are still around to help lead Mozilla in the right direction, using their experience from the crashing and burning of Netscape in the late 90's.
JWZ's rantings can be found at http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/ [jwz.org]

(Just click on the testicle!)

``I have yet to come across so much self-righteous bullshit as when I gaze upon the massive heap of crap that is the jwz web experience.''

-- an anonymous poster to slashdot.org, 1998.

I'm not saying it always has to end in tragedy: C# and TypeScript turned out beautifully, given the constraints they had to deal with, in spite of the fact that they came from a giant corporate behemoth like Microsoft. (Although I'm sure there's a lot of bullshit going on behind the scenes, the trend is to make them more open and community driven.)

----

Chuck McManis also wrote:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993818

ChuckMcM on Jan 1, 2013 | parent | next [–]

Yes, I am aware. I was at a Usenix conference where Rob Pike presented a paper on it, back when it was a bright idea out of Bell Labs. It is the curse of brilliant people that they see too far into the future, get treated as crazy when they are most lucid and get respect when they are most bitter [1]. I was working for Sun Microsystems at the time and Sun was pursuing a strategy known as "Distributed Objects Everywhere" or (DOE) but insiders derisively called it "Distributed Objects Practically Everywhere" or DOPE, it was thinking about networks of 100 megabits with hundreds of machines on them. Another acquaintance of mine has a PDP 8/s this was a serial implementation of the PDP-8 architecture, Gordon Bell did that in the 70's well before serial interconnects made sense. It was a total failure, the rest of the world had yet to catch up. Both Microsoft and Google have invested in this space, neither have published a whole lot, every now and then you see something that lets you know that somebody is thinking along the same lines, trying to get to an answer. I suspect Jeff Bezos thinks similarly if his insistence on making everything an API inside Amazon was portrayed accurately.

The place where the world is catching up is that we have very fast networks in very dense compute. In the case of a cell phone you see a compute node which is a node in a web of nodes which are conspiring to provide a user experience. At some point that box under the table might have X units of compute, Y units of IO, and Z units of storage. It might be a spine which you can load up with different colored blocks to get the combination of points needed to activate a capability at an acceptable latency. If you can imagine a role playing game where your 'computer' can do certain things based on where you invested its 'skill points' that is a flavor of what I think will happen. The computers that do shipping, or store sales will have skill points in transactions, the computers that simulate explosions will have skill points in flops. People will argue whether or not the brick from Intel or the Brick from AMD/ARM really deserves a rating of 8 skill points in CRYPTO or not.

[1] I didn't get to work with Rob when I was at Google although I did hear him speak once and he didn't seem particularly bitter, so I don't consider him a good exemplar of the problem. Many brilliant people I've met over the years however have been lost to productive work because their bitterness at not being accepted early only has clouded their ability to enjoy the success their vision has seen since they espoused it.

systems_glitch• 4 years ago

Indeed, the SunOS -> Solaris transition left a lot of hackers keeping SunOS 4.1.4 patched until very very late in the game! And then you give up and run your stuff under NetBSD's compat layer, still on SPARC.

college_physics2• 4 years ago

Will the sun ever shine again or will it forever remain obscured by dark clouds?

It feels strange that the professional unix workstation has gone the way of the dodo precisely when many of its genes are triumphant

jacquesm5• 4 years ago

The professional Unix workstation now runs Linux and there are lots of them.

I've used SGI and Sun Microsystems hardware (and long before that Apollo, which probably means very little to people today). They were fantastic in their day and the degree of stability that you could get out of those boxes was something that I'd love to have now. But almost all of the functionality with maybe some degraded performance for edge cases (yes, 30 years later...) is now available for free + an old laptop or desktop.

If I had the choice between a modern day Irix workstation or Linux I'd most likely pick Linux, but Irix will always have a special place in my heart in that it was the first OS that made me feel like everything was just right and it enabled me rather than limited me at almost every step. Powertools for the mind.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

The professional Unix workstation now runs Linux and there are lots of them.

Come on, macOS is Unix certified. Linux is not.

college_physics2• 4 years ago

Do it yourself linux workstations with off-the-shelf hardware offer a decent emulation of the 30yr old original but the fair comparison would be with a current design that packs an amount of innovation proportional to the lapsed time.

Funny to see that people are so resigned to what is on offer they cant even imagine what really good might look like today.

mpweiher• 4 years ago

the professional unix workstation

...runs on your desktop in the shape of macOS (via NeXT) and in your pocket via iOS and on your wrist via watchOS. And Android as well.

pjmlp• 4 years ago

Android less so, there is no UNIX exposed to userspace.

Also on iOS some POSIX APIs are no longer useful, like the new networking stack.

theCrowing• 4 years ago

I still catch me sometimes thinking about the sun workstation I used in the 90s. My favorite was probably still a Silicon Graphics SGI 02 even the color schemes were matching :)

zeruch3• 4 years ago

I was at SUN in the mid/late 90s, when Java and the E10K were released. It was a glorious place to work, with an amazing corporate culture.

Their sale to Oracle was a tragedy.

chii2• 4 years ago

would they have been better had their sale been to google? Coz that was the only possible alternative outcome tbh.

At least it seems oracle's stewardship of java is good enough (atm at least...).

gonzo4• 4 years ago

Sun once tried to merge with Apple

That would have been nice.

yakak• 4 years ago

IBM was the other offer on the table. Scott managed to scuttle the deal but his ability to do so was far from a certainty since he was already out as CEO.

Google was pretty much incompatible, they had no interest in workstations or paying for quality as their focus was redundant arrays on inexpensive machines.

Fujitsu was the best actual option for commercial compatibility, but everyone felt it would be a waste of time to pursue that as the USG would almost certainly block a foreign sale.

pron2• 4 years ago

I work at Oracle's Java Platform Group, where most of the managers and senior engineers came over from Sun. They all tell me that, despite the normal big-corp issues, work under Oracle's control is better than it was under Sun, where management was more chaotic, strategy unclear, and resources shifted erratically from one project to another, often wasted on unreasonable goals with bad prospects. Not only that, but the commitment to open-source has, at least so far, been stronger (although I can't speak for other parts of the company that I know little about). And because the work has yielded more success, it has resulted in more resources that are, in turn, invested more wisely in projects with better prospects.

Again, I can't speak for other parts of the company, and maybe Java's successful integration into Oracle has been a fluke (given Java's immense success and that it's at the cutting edge of compilation and runtime technology; I do know that the experience of Sun engineers in other areas has not been anything like that of the Java folks), but the Sun people in JPG have been very pleased with how it's been going overall. The work culture in the JPG and the mix of talent and personality, also compare very favourably to Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Netflix (based on reports of friends or hires that came from those companies), and at least on three occasions engineers that left for some of these companies have come back.

sangnoir3• 4 years ago

It makes sense that those who've stayed on under Oracle have a favorable opinion of how Oracle does things: one might say they are self-selected for it.

severino• 4 years ago

Wait a minute, an opinion of somebody working at Oracle not bashing Oracle? You deserve downvotes, the only interesting opinions about working at Oracle are those from people who never worked at Oracle! :)

zeruch3• 4 years ago

"They all tell me that, despite the normal big-corp issues, work under Oracle's control is better than it was under Sun, where management was more chaotic, strategy unclear, and resources shifted erratically from one project to another, often wasted on unreasonable goals with bad prospects."

What you describe is the post-McNealy era (although I'd argue the last few years of McNealy started to decline as well). Zander was utterly lacking in dynamism and largely just a numbers guy, and Jonathan Schwartz was a total bungler with delusions of "thought leadership".

SUN after 2001 was a very very different animal from prior.

zeruch3• 4 years ago

"Again, I can't speak for other parts of the company, and maybe Java's successful integration into Oracle has been a fluke"

They only cared about Java, and to a lesser extent controlling MySQL (the latter being one effectively stupid gambit, but one that's held on some tertiary value). The HW business has been slowly circling the bowl, they borked the OpenOffice, Jenkins and other projects, and their OS side is AWOL.

I know a few folks that went to Oracle to "hide" in the jungle, while they figure out what they actually want to do next. I've had Oracle recruiters call me before over the years, and I just have a long running disdain for their licensing/business approach, to the point that I have either prevented or ripped out every attempt for them in places I've been at.

LeFantome• 4 years ago

Very interesting. Nice to get some insider info.

Java came pretty near the end for Sun during a massive time of upheaval for their traditional business model, a massive economic downturn, and a historic change in leadership. Those could also be factors.

It would be interesting to get the same take of before and after from somebody working on SPARC or Solaris.

s5300• 4 years ago

Not sure what year they arrived, but Ohio University still has an entire lab equipped with old Sun systems. Intro to programming or whatever all engineering majors have to take have their class in that lab… have been there for at least 15 years to my knowledge.

detourdog• 4 years ago

Sun had a System adminstrator 1 class that lasted a week. I was lucky to be sent by an employer and it was fantastic and granular. Essentially the class was bring up a Solaris install in such a granular system the we started with Inodes or just below Inodes. The entire OS and it’s supporting abstractions were revealed.

If this lab is used for that type of class it would be worth the trouble to keep it running.

jasoneckert• 4 years ago

I worked for Sun in the early 1990s when they were widely seen as an unstoppable force. It was wild. Even around 2000, I felt as if they were leading the Web into the future.

But after the dot com bubble burst, it was sad to see how quickly they declined and how Solaris and SPARC faded into obscurity.

I still have a lot of old Sun machines in my basement as a reminder of those amazing times. I can't get rid of them, because as Marie Kondo points out, they still SPARC joy ;-)

hinkley• 4 years ago

I worked at a company in about 2002-5 that was selling software to mobile phone carriers. They were still exclusively Sun hardware. And that was probably the last time I used Sun hardware.

I have no recollection of why McNealy left, but I’m not sure Schwartz was the right person for the job. He did some good work for forwarding the case for FOSS, but it always seemed to come at the expense of Sun.

sangnoir3• 4 years ago

I don't see how Sun's could have successfully navigated the Linux on commodity x86 onslaught without becoming a services company. Google and Facebook would have been huge Sun customers pre-dotcom-bust, before Linux/x86 got a solid foothold. Both server hardware and software got commoditized, leaving Sun no complement to monetize.

exabrial• 4 years ago

Everyone complained openly about sun while they were around. They didn’t do everything right, but they were very generous with their open source contributions, all the way to a fault.

pclmulqdq• 4 years ago

Absolutely to a fault, although it has helped humanity a lot. Sun's best work is all open-source, and the proprietary work isn't very compelling in comparison.

fexecve2• 4 years ago

Everyone has good things to say about Sun, but let's not forget that they tried to monetize Java (even trying to take money from open-source communities like FreeBSD) long before they were acquired by Oracle.

znpy2• 4 years ago

I don’t see the problem with monetising tour own products.

Keep in mind those were different times, and development tools were one of the things that costed a lot of money.

Microsoft still does a large amount of money off the visual studio tooling.

twblalock• 4 years ago

God forbid! A company trying to make money? How awful!

Maybe Sun would still be around if it was better at monetizing the things it invented. Maybe that would have been a better outcome than Oracle owning all of it.

Should we also be mad at Red Hat for trying to monetize Linux (which they didn’t even invent)?

DonHopkins10• 4 years ago

It's not just that they tried to monetize Java. That's one thing that's debatably good or bad, but not the worst thing that's objectively terrible: Sun tried to MILITARIZE Java DEVELOPERS as disposable mercenaries in Scott McNealy's personal war against Bill Gates and Microsoft.

See me other post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34125284

You're right, it was Slowlaris that killed Sun, and Java was meant to be a "Microsoft Killer", not a programming language. [...]
Sun could never measure up to Microsoft, and McNealy was totally obsessed with fighting them, to the point that Java was not actually a programming language for solving developer's problems per se, but primarily a weapon in his personal vendetta against Microsoft, and Java developers were considered expendable mercenaries in that war, above all else. Everything they did with Java was measured by how much it would harm Microsoft, not help developers. [...]

_448• 4 years ago

Anyone know who designed the SUN logo. It is a very clever arrangement of the characters S U and N. You can see SUN from any angle; and it also looks like electronic circuit. Very clever design.

lizknope6• 4 years ago

https://1000logos.net/sun-microsystems-logo/

The emblem was created in 1982 by Vaughan Pratt, professor of computer science.

DonHopkins10• 4 years ago

That's right: Vaughan Pratt designed the original square Sun logo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Pratt

And Sun Science Officer and Nixon Enemy John Gage is the genius who rotated it 45 degrees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage

Nixon Enemies List entry for John B. Gage:

https://www.enemieslist.info/enemy.php?ID=463

Another one of the greatest logos of all time is the SGI logo, designed by none other than Scott Kim!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kim

http://xahlee.info/UnixResource_dir/sgi_logo.html

https://www.amazon.com/Inversions-Scott-Kim/dp/1559532807

https://scottkim.com/

lizknope6• 4 years ago

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)

guenthert2• 4 years ago

Then the AMD 64-bit Opteron came out and it was all over. We never bought a Sun after that.

Sun actually sold an Opteron based workstation, reusing the 'Ultra' name, for a quite reasonable price then. A buddy of mine, interested in Java development, bought it (and a few years later gifted it to me). It was a well engineered PC (could run MS Windows), with Solaris installed (I only ever used it with Linux).

cryptonector2• 4 years ago

Sun was done in by the following mistakes from around 2002:

- Failure to license Solaris to Google (reportedly Sun wanted to have a license count, while Google considered the number of systems they ran a secret).

- The "termination" of Solaris on x86, which was really (or became) a pause in development for six months -- whichever the case, it was a disaster as it gave Linux a huge boost.

- The closing down of Sun Professional Services (presumably in order to preserve R&D). Compare to IBM, which did the opposite, and whose professional services division became hugely valuable to IBM. Professional services organizations sell their services and their parent companies other products and services. Losing the professional services organization meant losing sales.

That was all in 2002. Many more mistakes were made later (and before), but these are the ones that really killed Sun.

Other mistakes after 2002:

- Treating J2ME as a cash cow and thus failing to get it on competitors' handsets when iPhones came about. This failure being one of limited R&D and mispricing the product. Compare to Android essentially adopting Java not that much later.

- In general treating x86 as a second class citizen to protect SPARC. Now, this one is not very fair because after the cancellation of Solaris on x86 was reverse, internally x86 was a first class citizen, and Sun built a great systems group around x86, but Sun was quite the cash cow milker and put too much effort to keep SPARC from falling too far behind x86, and from the outside it probably looked like Sun just didn't really mean x86 support until around the time of the Oracle acquisition (at which time Sun had great x86 systems for its storage appliance). You have to know when the cash cow is dying and when it's beyond rebuilding, and Sun just didn't.

- The MySQL acquisition. $1bn out the window. There were others, like Cobalt.

Oracle too made mistakes, chiefly killing OpenSolaris in response to Greenbytes' shipping non-release OpenSolaris ZFS dedup code before Oracle. There were other ways to handle this. Oracle is a company built on mindshare, but it didn't understand that Solaris was now the underdog and needed to build mindshare, and the way to do it was to loss-lead. Friends of mine immediately told me they'd no longer run any new Solaris systems and would migrate from existing ones ASAP because of shades of the 2002 cancellation of Solaris on x86 -- they felt they could not trust Oracle.

This could be my bias because 2002 is when I joined Sun. Clearly there were other mistakes made before 2001. But the Solaris team at Sun did incredible things in the 00s with a smaller team than in the 90s.

The Sun culture that created ZFS, SMF, FMA, and other things in the 00s doesn't exist anywhere now. It was a culture of internal openness and skunkworks projects that paid off.

cryptonector2• 4 years ago

I should add that Sun died of its contradictions:

- Java, "write once run anywhere" meant openness. SPARC meant closedness. Conflict.

- Java, "write once run anywhere" meant openness. J2ME and J2SE cash cows meant closedness. Conflict -- in the same team!

- x86 systems division meant openness. SPARC meant closedness. Conflict.

- The Sun directory services product was profitable and then Active Directory came along, but rather than acquire or build AD interoperability in the early 00s the Sun DS team chose to keep milking their cow, which led to closedness in what originally had been an openness tool.

There's a lesson in here for business schools. Something about how short-lived cash cows can be in software and even hardware (now that platform portability has become so much easier). Also maybe about how if you want to charge a premium and get customers to want to pay for it, you have to live up to a reputation for constant innovation. A comparison to Apple almost seems apt, but Apple sells to a different class of customer (consumers), so maybe not.

catmikk• 4 years ago

I worked with and around a lot of the Sun folks, including founders. I just ran into this and enjoyed the reading. Thought I'd add this document. Sun brought some awesome culture to the Silicon Valley with their pranks. https://www.sunreunion.com/pdfs/Facts-at-a-Glance-April-Fool...

The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems [video]

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