[HN Gopher] Sun: The Network Is the Computer
___________________________________________________________________
Sun: The Network Is the Computer
Author : BirAdam
Score : 148 points
Date : 2023-02-12 13:02 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
| Manfred wrote:
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding the story, but I don't think the story
| lines up entirely.
|
| > At 16, Bechtolsheim designed an industrial controller for a
| company that was based on the 8008.
|
| 1955 + 16 = 1971. That means they based their design on a chip
| that wasn't commercially available until the middle of 1972.
| roundandround wrote:
| The 8008 architecture was essentially in use before it was
| bought by Intel and made into a finished chip, I.e.:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_2200
|
| Though this could also just be referring to the start date of a
| project that ultimately was implemented with an 8008.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I was at Sun in the early 1990s working on Sun OS 4 and 5, and
| the slogan "the network is the computer" was still the slogan
| everywhere, and everyone in the company seemed to be on board
| with it. Of course, back then most associated it with Yellow
| Pages (NIS), NFS, and distributed computing using SPARC, but Sun
| was always actively looking for ways to push everything to the
| network.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| It was the slogan till the end. (I was at Sun via MySQL
| acquisition)
| retcond wrote:
| Not the only slogan actually, "The Dot In Dot Com" ran with
| several important campaigns at the beginning of the nineties
| and was a crucial security public service announcement that's
| explained here :
|
| https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2022/05/12/a-tale-of-a-
| trailing-...
|
| _THE_ money quote :
|
| The trailing dot then means the name is to be used actually
| exactly only like that, it is specified in full, while the
| name without a trailing dot can be tried with a domain name
| appended to it. Or even a list of domain names, until one
| resolves. This makes people want to use a trailing dot at
| times, to avoid that domain test."
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042291
|
| DonHopkins 10 months ago:
|
| You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis,
| and it wasn't an isolated incident!
|
| But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I
| started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED
| themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent
| that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate
| divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to
| directly position it against Microsoft. As if.
|
| The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a
| programming language or software platform, they considered
| it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass
| destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and
| they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished
| customers, they considered them to be disposable
| brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against
| Microsoft.
|
| It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed
| that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open
| for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft
| put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM,
| IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!
|
| And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com,
| they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after
| sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on
| Java. Badoom psssh!
|
| https://www.itbusiness.ca/news/ibm-brings-on-demand-
| computin...
|
| Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original
| enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and
| energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after
| SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of
| capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against
| System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to
| their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris.
|
| To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke:
|
| Q: What do you get when you cross Sun and AT&T?
|
| A: AT&T.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Back in the nineties I stumbled over the dot, when a friend
| of mine claimed his mail address was `something@aol.com.`
| insisting on the dot. I proved him wrong, claiming it
| didn't matter. Only a few years later, when dealing with
| DNS config I learned the truth... now it's knowledge I can
| use to be alone in a bar.
|
| But more recently that knowledge got some relevance in
| Kubernetes clusters to me: By default they use the
| `cluster.local.` domain. As that is configurable, now many
| people leave that out and rely on the search domain config.
| In consequence in some situations a broken service may try
| to connect to the outside and with bad choice of i.e.
| namespace names might leak as valid host names on the
| public DNS ... which in worst names can lead to a
| connection attempt from cluster to some foreign system.
| animal-hash wrote:
| "The Sun-1 workstation used a Motorola 68000 CPU at 10MHz. This
| was paired with an in-house designed MMU. It had 256K zero wait
| state memory with parity, and 32K EPROM memory."
|
| I like how these specs are described as if it was a computer in a
| Fast and Furious action flic
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| I think if a lot of computer enthusiasts had been born say 70
| years earlier than they were, they would've been gearheads--
| auto enthusiasts--instead.
| bitwize wrote:
| Now my brain is reading that line in a Vin Diesel voice, and it
| seems to fit.
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| Now imagine it using the tone of voice Pyle used in Full
| Metal Jacket right before the unpleasantness in the washroom.
| thom wrote:
| The fate of Sun just goes to show that 'worse is better' isn't
| just about the superiority of the Unix philosophy, it really
| takes no prisoners.
| lizknope wrote:
| My comment from 2 months ago about Sun
|
| 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)
| seydor wrote:
| wonder what tech of today is way ahead of its time
|
| (To answer my own question, 1) VR goggles etc, 2) Balaji's
| network state, as ridiculous as it sounds in 2023)
| anthk wrote:
| ChatGPT, Whisper C++ running on a netbook to transcribe audio
| in record time...
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Everything we have reverse engineered from nature.
| pjmlp wrote:
| VR googles were already looking for their customers back in
| 1994, when I saw someone using them alongside id Software games
| on a computer expo.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Limb regeneration through bioelectric signals [1] [2], like
| calling an API of the damaged cells to start the
| reconstruction.
|
| [1] "Diverse Intelligence" - a talk by Michael Levin,
| https://youtu.be/iIQX6m2eRPY?t=3097
|
| [2] Acute multidrug delivery via a wearable bioreactor
| facilitates long-term limb regeneration and functional recovery
| in adult Xenopus laevis,
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj2164
| seydor wrote:
| Hopefully these types of interventions will happen sooner
| rather than in the far future. Levin's methods use tools that
| are almost 'conventional' now in biotech and neuroscience. If
| they will work for organ regeneration etc, then it should be
| a matter of engineering to put them to use.
| remote_phone wrote:
| The post is very good but has a huge glaring hole in it.
|
| They say Sun died because of AMD64 but that's incorrect. It was
| Linux. I know this because I was in enterprise software during
| this era and the demise of Sun due to Linux was stunning.
|
| Intel and Windows killed SGI, which was a huge coup. However Sun
| was killed because during that time, Linux went from a toy OS
| into a fully supported enterprise OS that was "good enough".
|
| I remember how at one point in time, Oracle on Solaris was just
| about as rock solid as you could get. But slowly and surely more
| enterprise software moved over to Linux, especially Oracle. And
| within 10 years Sun went from one of the "4 horsemen of the
| Internet" to being sold to Oracle. It was sad because I loved
| Solaris as a technology, I even had a Sun workstation at home.
|
| That said, how quickly Linux killed Solaris/Sun is a great
| reminder of how quickly things change in tech.
| samstave wrote:
| Sun has the best logo ever...
|
| But Intel didnt kill SGI, or MIPS for that matter.
|
| SGI killed themselves for a too-expensive-walled garden.
|
| I dont know who the industrial design team was at SGI for all
| their cases, but their cases are still legendary beautiful
| artifacts of computing (like CRAY)
|
| It sucks that FB now operates out of SUNs HQ...
|
| Fun fact ; when we designed the Lucas' Presidio Complex and
| moved ILM and other Lucas entities in there, they had a
| boatload of old SGI full rack machines (SGI machines that were
| the same size as a 42u cabinet) and several were turned into
| keggerators.
|
| Sadly I could have taken some of these amazing SGIs, but I was
| in an apartment in SF at the time and didnt have space for
| them.... it would have been worth it for me to rent a storage
| space and grab those machines... sadly many ~$500,000 SGI
| cabinets just went to the dump. (2004)
| hulitu wrote:
| > But Intel didnt kill SGI, or MIPS for that matter.
|
| Itanium ?
| jabl wrote:
| SGI managed to hang on for quite many years after their 3D
| graphics workstation market tanked by pivoting from
| Irix/MIPS to Linux/Itanium (later x86-64)(saving a lot of
| SW and HW development cost) and selling those big shared
| memory supercomputers. Sure, those were expensive boutique
| products, but they sat in their own niche that commodity HW
| couldn't easily touch.
|
| I think what ultimately doomed this was that with
| increasing core count CPU's the market that really needed
| much bigger shared memory systems became smaller and
| smaller.
|
| They were finally bought out by HPE, and while HPE still
| sells their Altix brand I hear the development of the
| shared memory supercomputer line has ended and now the
| Altix memory fabric has been utilized in the enterprise
| Superdome line.
| samstave wrote:
| Pricing killed them, not Intel in specific....
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Excerpt from my post about FORTH and Homer and Associates
| from the discussion of Forth vs Lisp:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261868
|
| Coco Conn and Paul Rother wrote this up about what they did
| with FORTH at HOMER & Assoc, who made some really classic
| music videos including Atomic Dog, and hired Charles Moore
| himself! Here's what Coco Conn posted about it, and some
| discussion and links about it that I'm including with her
| permission:
|
| [...]
|
| Flying Logos for 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hIOfEiy4lc
|
| >First shown at the 1989 Siggraph Electronic Theater to a
| rave response, this 3 minute humourous film went on to win
| several top computer graphic awards that same year including
| Niccograph of Japan.
|
| >Coco: This was a show favorite at the SIGGRAPH film show
| that year. The year before the conference committee decided
| that showing demos wasn't the way to go anymore. Peter wrote
| Flying Logos as a way to sneak our demo reel into the show by
| turning it into a story. It worked and we made it into the
| film show.
|
| >Don: I truly believe that in some other alternate dimension,
| there is a Flying Logo Heaven where the souls of dead flying
| logos go, where they dramatically promenade and swoop and
| spin around each other in pomp and pageantry to bombastic
| theme music. It would make a great screen saver, at least!
| Somewhere the Sun Logo and the SGI Logo are still dancing
| together.
|
| [...]
|
| From the discussion of The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134114
|
| 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/
| samstave wrote:
| Thank you!!!
| pjmlp wrote:
| While I use Linux distributions since 1995, starting with
| Slackware 2.0, I only used it in production after 2006.
|
| Until then it was Xenix, DG/UX, Solaris, HP-UX, Aix.
|
| Ironically, when we at Nokia Networks were considering HP-UX to
| Linux migration for some of our software, a parallel effort for
| Solaris was in motion as plan B.
| TristanBall wrote:
| I was a sysadmin in a windows desktops + sun/windows server env
| for about 10 years from 1999
|
| I loved our sun boxes, hated that we could only ever afford
| their "midrange" models, and then only from grey market
| resellers, or outright second hand.
|
| Everything being said here is pretty much true.. but the
| additional factors I'd call out were vmware and to a lesser
| extent "componentised" infrastructure systems.. I'm thinking
| blade servers and sans. If I bought a sun box, it was only a
| sun box. If I bought an intel/amd, then it could be linux or
| windows or both. Yes we could, and did, hook the sun boxes to
| SAN's, but I don't remember sun ever having a particularly
| strong blade offering.. or maybe it was just priced and like
| sun hw, either way..
|
| Dell Blades let me do incremental upgrades at price points
| within individual projects sign off budgets, and dell delivery
| times + San boot + esx meant I could usually have new systems
| up and available in a couple of weeks.
|
| That sounds bad in the cloud era, but before that I'd probably
| still be trying to get quotes or negotiate discounts, so it was
| fantastic.
|
| Linux and the other bits above let me say "yes" to user
| requests more often, with lower friction and shorter deliver
| times.
|
| I can't tell you just how nice that was.
|
| Then I started work at an aix/linux/windows shop and the whole
| cycle repeated...
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| It was not merely Linux, but it was also PC commodity hardware
| that rapidly caught up to workstation-quality. Toward the end,
| you had Suns with PCI buses and stuff. The UEFI frameworks, and
| high-quality peripherals that could make it to the mass market,
| were poised to beat the pants off all the bespoke stuff coming
| out of workstation manufacturers like Sun, HP, Digital, SGI,
| and IBM.
|
| Sun was very much a hardware VAR, and they made great software
| because people would purchase premium hardware to run that
| great software on. The dual prongs of Linux plus commodity PC
| hardware damaged both of those selling points simultaneously,
| as it were, and no Unix workstation vendor could survive. The
| more adaptable ones embraced Linux and they embraced that
| commodity hardware (IBM, RHEL...) but even with their Java
| initiative, Sun could not survive the onslaught.
| samstave wrote:
| Heh.
|
| I was Head of IT for a company that manufactured the physical
| media for all SUN OS products. (meaning if you bought any SUN
| software, and it came on a CD and in a box- we manufactured all
| of that, and shipped it as if we were SUN)
|
| We would receive updates to the releases via FTP.
|
| We had several FTP servers which SUN would PUT their files on
| and we had a nightly batch job grab the files and transfer to
| the machines that burned the CDs...
|
| I implemented Linux on those machines with the help of hiriing
| a few Linux consultants I knew...
|
| Dave Sifry, Chris DiBona and a few others.
|
| I called Dave in and told him "If I were you, I'd start a Linux
| support company/consulting company"
|
| A few weeks later he came to me and stated that they had
| founded a company "LINUXCARE"
|
| At one point he was worth $100 million off that...
|
| Chris was/is huge at google...
|
| but yeah, another annecdote was that this is also when XML
| became a thing, and we were one of the first companies to adopt
| XML out of SUN because they wanted to PUT XML docs on our FTP
| server for their releases... and LINUXCARE was tasked with
| creating our CRON job scripts for watching the directories for
| updates and batch jobs....
| lizknope wrote:
| Linux was most of it but it needed hardware to run on.
|
| I wrote in another comment in this thread that our
| semiconductor design software was all on Solaris. We started
| shifting to Linux around 2002. We still needed some Suns for
| the large jobs that required over 4GB RAM. When AMD64 came out
| that was the end of Sun for us. The chip design software
| vendors quickly ported to it.
| BirAdam wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > SPARC didn't keep its edge. The x86 platform became extremely
| competitive with the arrival of AMD64. The 64 bit x86 machines
| were cheaper than SPARC machines, and when coupled with Linux
| they could run all of the UNIX software any web company needed.
| This fact was proven by the likes of Google and Facebook. The
| core of Sun's business was destroyed.
| sn1de wrote:
| The x86 hardware _and_ the Linux OS _both_ had to make the jump
| to 64 bit. Sun was still able to make hay in the period where
| Linux was well established because 32 bit memory restrictions
| kept if from being a viable option for a lot of higher end
| computing needs. It was inevitable that Linux would eventually
| make the migration to 64 bit once the hardware was there, but
| Sun got there first on both the hardware and software fronts.
| Why Sun didn 't react more radically when 64 bit Lintel was
| able to go head to head with Sun's precious 'enterprise'
| solutions is unknown to me. Maybe they were just in mass
| denial? Maybe they thought the technical hight priests within
| their organization would manifest new technical advantages?
| Maybe they just knew that if they dropped their pricing to
| address the new price/performance reality that their company
| was no longer economically viable? There was a lot of denial
| about Linux at the time, and there were plenty of legitimate
| reasons to question whether or not Linux could really make the
| leap to compete head to head with the leading commercial Unix
| offerings. Meanwhile, major efforts were being made by the
| likes of IBM and, ironically, Oracle, to contribute to efforts
| to make Linux a 'no compromise' commercial offering. Remember
| that companies like IBM had watched their own Unix offerings
| suffer from Solaris on the high end and Linux on the low end.
| The smart ones realized that Linux could be the answer to the
| hard sell they were running into with their own Unix and put
| engineering efforts towards making that happen. I'm not saying
| Linux wouldn't have gotten there without them, but there was a
| strategic shift that happened to accelerate the technical
| ascension of Linux, and that also caught Sun off guard. I
| suspect they had looked at the historical trajectory of Linux
| and over estimated how long it would take Linux to 'catch up'
| to Solaris. Linux went 'hockey stick' on Sun.
| pavlov wrote:
| Around the turn of the millennium Sun was talking a lot about
| grid computing, which was essentially what we call public cloud
| now.
|
| In a slightly different universe Sun would be AWS.
| DamonHD wrote:
| Sun kept touting a service that we would call cloud, and I kept
| trying to buy it for one of my financial clients, but it never
| happened...
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Sun was very much enterprise, nice reliability and support
| but commodity hardware completely blew them away for most
| purposes. They were still selling $10k workstations when a
| cheap consumer PC running Linux would run laps around it.
| unxdfa wrote:
| Linux didn't even dent it in my universe back then. Between
| 1996 and 1999 we switched our internal systems from Solaris
| to NT. Even our Oracle on HP/UX estate got eaten by SQL
| Server 7.
|
| Our 1999 capex and opex was 25% of what it was in 1996 and
| we delivered more benefits to our users.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| It was nigh impossible to find on their website a place where
| you could pay them to sell you things, it was sad but not
| surprising that they were going under.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Around the turn of the millennium Sun was talking a lot
| about grid computing_ [...]
|
| Not (just) talking, but offering:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Cloud
|
| Also:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Grid_Engine
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| I still have fond memories working at Bear Stearns in the early
| 90s in Fixed Income, every developer had a Sun workstation on
| their desk instead of a PC, initially running SunOS and
| eventually transitioning to this weird thing called Solaris.
|
| I felt like I was living in the future.
| blantonl wrote:
| I remember in the late 90's working as an enterprise systems
| management architect (Tivoli) for a large financial services
| firm, and we were deploying the entire project on Solaris and
| Sun Boxes that were crazy expensive.
|
| Because of this, I was given a Sun Workstation at my desk
| alongside my Windows machine, and I thought it made me look
| like the baddest mfr on the floor with that big monitor, the
| sun workstation with the logo, and that antiquated x windows
| environment. It was like voodoo level stuff for your regular
| Netware lan admins etc that were my neighbors.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| Yep.
|
| Correction on my above post though, only the IT side of Fixed
| Income used Sun boxes. The analytics guys in the FAST
| department were all on HP-UX. A definite Sun vs HP rivalry
| going on there, and very eye opening to me seeing HP-UX and
| Sun were both "Unix" but very different in so many details.
| CalChris wrote:
| T-shirt wars. Sun had a t-shirt with their slogan, _The Network
| Is The Computer_. So DEC had another t-shirt, _The Network Is The
| Network and The Computer Is The Computer. We regret the
| confusion_.
| eternalban wrote:
| Saw the name Kim Polese and remembered Marimba and Bongo. I
| actually liked Bongo a lot - it was great for quickly prototyping
| an idea. I haven't had any luck finding it.
|
| (In case you're curious:
| https://archive.org/details/officialmarmba00good)
|
| P.s.
|
| > "Behind and the Green Door"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Green_Door
| codetrotter wrote:
| > I actually liked Bongo a lot - it was great for quickly
| prototyping an idea. I haven't had any luck finding it.
|
| Not familiar with Bongo, and not sure if this fits what you are
| looking for.
|
| > IBM Developer Connection Release 2 Volume 2
|
| > June 1998
|
| > Discontinued Software
|
| > This is a complete list of the The IBM Developer Connection
| Release 2, Volume 2 content.
|
| > [...]
|
| > Bongo, Castanet Tuner & Transmitter (Marimba) (M9)
|
| https://archive.org/details/IBMDevConR2V2#ia-carousel
|
| Might be worth to download CD_09.zip and have a look
| https://archive.org/download/IBMDevConR2V2
|
| You'll need a way to mount bin and cue files.
|
| ---
|
| Edit: So I just had a look at the contents of the CD 9. I had
| to convert the bin and cue file to iso in order to mount it.
| Did so using a cli tool called "bchunk".
|
| When you mount the CD, there is an "index.htm" file that you
| can open in your web browser. This page is a little confusing
| because it has no other navigation than a link to the license
| agreement.
|
| On the bottom of the license page, you see:
|
| > Enter the Catalog
|
| > Select a catalog option below to explore the variety of
| content available from the Developer Connection. Select the
| appropriate Java catalog based on the Java level supported by
| your browser. For Java 1.1, be sure to obtain the latest
| browser updates.
|
| > Java catalog (Java 1.0)
|
| > Java catalog (Java 1.1)
|
| > Pure HTML catalog
|
| Click that link for the Pure HTML catalog.
|
| From there, click the link "Bongo, Castanet Tuner & Transmitter
| (Marimba) (M9)"
|
| There we find the following description:
|
| > Bongo, Castanet Tuner & Transmitter (Marimba) (M9)
|
| > This product is located on Member Disc 9.
|
| > Bongo is a visual interface builder for Java. Bongo includes
| a wide variety of interface "widgets" to enable rapid
| development of rich user interfaces. Widgets are pre-written
| visual controls, ready to immediately insert into Bongo. Simply
| drag and drop Bongo widgets to create a stunning visual
| interface, then use Bongo to add intelligence behind the
| interface via scripts written in Java.
|
| > Unlike widgets in most builders, Bongo widgets can be
| transparent or opaque, offering developers a great deal of
| flexibility and ease of use. Features such as these make Bongo
| an extremely powerful development tool. Bongo can produce
| visual interfaces for stand-alone Java applications as well as
| applets.
|
| > Best of all, Bongo's output can be directly published as a
| Marimba Castanet channel, and the presentation is then
| automatically distributed and maintained by Castanet within a
| company or across the Internet. Bongo is not required for
| developing Castanet channels, but if you're looking for a great
| tool that makes it easy to create Castanet channels, Bongo is
| for you.
|
| > Castanet automatically distributes and maintains software
| applications and content within a company or across the
| Internet. The Castanet Transmitter (server) and Castanet Tuner
| (client) work together to keep software and content always up-
| to-date. Create a "channel" and place it on a Castanet
| Transmitter. Castanet automatically distributes, installs,
| maintains, and updates the channel, all via the internet.
| Castanet can support any type of channel: internal corporate
| applications, multimedia consumer channels, and more.
|
| And the install instructions:
|
| > Installation Instructions:
|
| > To install from the CD:
|
| > 1. Change to the \marimba\bongo directory on the CD and type
| bongo1_0.
|
| > 2. Change to the \marimba\tuner directory on the CD and type
| tuner1_0.
|
| > 3. Change to the \marimba\transmit directory on the CD and
| type trans1_0.
|
| These files are all Windows exe files.
|
| I tried to run bongo1_0.exe in Wine, but nothing happened.
|
| I don't usually use Windows anymore, not since many years. But
| I do have a laptop that I recently installed an old copy of
| Windows 7 on because I needed to use another piece of software
| that was also Windows only.
| eternalban wrote:
| Your post has earned my 2nd uttering of OMG on the internets.
| Thank you so very much!
| codetrotter wrote:
| yw :)
| msla wrote:
| Since the archive.org link isn't readable, what were Marimba
| and Bongo?
| eternalban wrote:
| Marimba (iirc!) was a Java startup by a Java insider set. It
| was definitely promoted/hyped along with Java. Bongo was this
| cool fun silly thing that I can only describe as a kind of
| REPL for UI :) You basically started out with a blank canvas
| for your app, and could switch between design mode and run
| mode. In design mode you would layout widgets (box layout
| with springs and stuff iirc) and you could script its actions
| with Java (fill in the callback blank, etc.) Components were
| named and one could invoke e.g. disable a sibling component,
| etc. Then you went to runtime mode and voila, you had a
| working GUI. I also vaguely recall a 'bongo' sound that it
| actually made when you switched to run mode.
|
| It was designed by Arthur van Hoff (who also designed
| Castanet). (Not sure why refs. to this company and its
| products are so obscure now. It's almost memory holed.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_van_Hoff
|
| Yes, he wrote AWT (not mentioned in wiki /g):
|
| https://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/marc/hotjava/doc/api/a.
| ..
|
| p.s.
|
| Old brain. I actually prototyped a SPA with Bongo in late 90s
| for a telco company. I was pushing them to have their apps --
| think network cabinets, field engineer control panels, etc.
| -- ported to the browser. They thought it was a very strange
| idea..
| drmpeg wrote:
| I worked in the same building where Bechtolsheim's company
| Granite Systems was located (3450 Hillview Ave in Palo Alto). My
| company was on the 2nd floor and Granite was on the 1st floor. We
| didn't even know he was there until they were sold to Cisco in
| 1996.
|
| 3450 Hillview was in horrible shape when we first moved in. But
| the owners refurbished it a floor at a time. When we moved to the
| second floor, there were four big corner offices. There was so
| much fighting as to who would get the 4th corner office that the
| CEO got pissed off and gave it to me and another engineer (we
| worked together as a team and designed all the products).
| lizknope wrote:
| I worked at an semiconductor foundry that was doing chips with
| Cisco's Gigabit Switching Group which was the former Granite
| Systems team. I was 23 and all the guys there were millionaires
| and all under 30.
|
| All of our chip design software ran on Sun workstations which I
| had been using since high school in 1991. I wanted a Sun so
| badly in 1993 when I started college. Then I learned about
| Linux and got a PC just for Linux.
|
| Andy Bechtolsheim's office was just around the corner from the
| guys I was working with. I walked by a bunch of times just to
| see him inside his office talking on the phone.
|
| The first time I went on a business trip to Silicon Valley I
| literally searched for all the company's headquarters and drove
| around to see them and the signs out front on the weekend.
|
| It sounds super geeky and it was but I loved it.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| > We wanted computers to go away, to instead become an everyday
| thing. We thought the third wave of computing would be driven by
| consumer electronics. The hardware would come from Circuit City,
| and the software would come from Tower Records.
|
| Interesting. He was half right: hardware did commoditize, but
| software got so cheap that it completely vanished: consumers just
| use whatever's bundled with their phone/laptop, occasionally
| buying games on Steam or the PlayStation store. (Itself
| commoditized: they're not really buying de-novo "software" but
| more a basket of content that plugs into Unity engine)
| jkmcf wrote:
| Every time I look at developing a GUI, I think back to using
| DevGuide and wonder why the present DX sucks so bad.
| bluedino wrote:
| The early 1980's were an amazing (yet strange) time in computing.
|
| On one hand you have these $10,000 UNIX workstations that almost
| seem futuristic.
|
| Then you have the IBM PC for 1/4 the price. 16-bit CPU, DOS,
| enough memory to be usable.
|
| And at the bottom for 1/4 of that price, you had the Commodore
| 64. Minimal memory and storage, 8 bit CPU, almost a game console
| on steroids.
| daitangio wrote:
| And with C/64 there as also some business application (Geos,
| VisiCalc...).
|
| The 8BitGuy noted usually business computers have 80-columns,
| whereas "home" compueters 40-colums.
|
| Neverless C/64 could run a small database for a 'VHS Store'
| without troubles (I made it in basic... :)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The 40 columns limit derives ultimately from most video
| output in home computers being low-quality RF to a TV screen.
| You can try to output 80-column text to a TV, but you'll get
| tons of arfifacts that make it barely usable. Especially if
| you also insist on color output.
| pklausler wrote:
| There was a lot of other stuff going on that wasn't
| microcomputing.
| anthk wrote:
| You forgot the Amiga and the Atari, in between, except the
| Amiga was superior to the IBM PC at a much cheaper price.
| ajross wrote:
| You both forgot the Apple II, which did all that stuff much
| earlier. Any history that writes out Woz is missing the
| point. Fundamentally the Atari 800 was an attempt to make a
| better Apple and target it at the home market. The C64 was a
| better Atari and won the fight. But the paradigm for how both
| those systems work was settled in the summer of 1978 when the
| Disk II shipped. That was _four and a half years_ before the
| Commodore reached market. (Four and a half years _after_ the
| C64 release we could buy 32 bit PCs and Macs. It 's a long,
| long time in this context.)
| jdswain wrote:
| Plus the Apple //e (January 1993) had 80 columns and lower
| case, which coupled with the disk drive made it useful for
| business. But I guess the IBM PC (August, 1991) already had
| all that by then (and the Apple ///, November 1990).
| bluedino wrote:
| I didn't mention a lot of computers
| sn1de wrote:
| Agreed. In my mind, the M1 Mac I'm typing this on is a direct
| descendent of the NeXT workstation that launched while I was
| still a student with no hope of ever owning. As much as I love
| the progress, it does make me wonder where/how the next true
| breakthrough will come from, or will we just continue to evolve
| what we have for another few decades?
| Romen_b wrote:
| Sun microsystem disappearing was/is a saddest case of a business
| failing for me. I wish they have done the correct marketing and
| partnership back in the time.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| They got absorbed by Oracle.
| ericvsmith wrote:
| It would be hard to argue that Sun has not disappeared.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Consumed by a black hole of legal wrangling and excessive
| billing.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| One of the most innovative companies absorbed by the company
| whose only innovation is finding new legal loopholes to screw
| more money out of their customers. Some fates are worse than
| disappearance.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| At least they began iterating more quickly on Java, I
| remember as years went by and Sun's OOP purists were still
| saying that they were considering anonymous functions but
| just couldn't decide on the syntax.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| That's not entirely fair to Oracle. Their original database
| had a big impact. It was only later that their business
| model switched to screwing their own customers as hard as
| possible.
| ajross wrote:
| It wasn't marketing. Their products were just bad. Late model
| SPARC devices were trying to compete with Intel Coppermines
| that were literally twice as fast and three times cheaper.
| There was a brief moment where it looked like a pivot to
| software (via Java) might save them, but Microsoft killed that.
| Then very late they tried moving to x86 hardware themselves,
| but by then Linux had reached feature parity and passed Solaris
| in performance.
|
| The final knife was the cloud. AWS was a huge paradigm shift
| for how one provisions hardware to Unixy software, and Amazon
| was a Linux shop and Solaris had nowhere to fit.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Ironically, Sun had Utility Computing for a buck a CPU hour
| way before anybody grasped the concept in the mid-2000s. When
| Oracle took over then they immediately killed this (became
| known as Sun Cloud) and had to start way late with Oracle
| Cloud. If Sun had kept going then they could have been where
| AWS eventually ended up. Oh well.
| ayewo wrote:
| IIRC, it wasn't the cloud per se that did them in, it was the
| 2008 financial crisis.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| _General Magic_ [1] is also a contender.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic
| CalChris wrote:
| General Magic never really accomplished anything. Sun did. GM
| was more famous for people who worked there than anything
| else. Did they work on things early? Yeah, so did Ted Nelson.
| But did they ship product real people used? Not really. I
| don't think anyone outside Silicon Valley remembers them.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| "Magic Link PIC-2000 was released in 1996." [1], 11 years
| before the iPhone. Sure, they didn't have the success of
| Sun, some could say that would make General Magic's case
| sadder: wasted potential hurts more than the inability to
| follow the future.
|
| I have never been in Silicon Valley and I remember General
| Magic.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Link
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I often wonder what would have happened if Sun hadn't been bought
| by Oracle and innovation had continued. They were very far ahead.
| They invented things like containers in Solaris way before
| Kubernetes and Docker popularised them on Linux.
| ajross wrote:
| > They were very far ahead.
|
| They weren't, though, not really. The tech industry just moves
| too fast for that kind of pronouncement. It's absolutely true
| that a Sun-3/75 in 1986 was a revelation[1], but every one of
| those features was cloned as free software and running on
| sub-$1000 hardware by 1994. They likewise had a brief moment
| with SPARC in the early 90's where their machines were the
| fastest you could buy, but Intel demolished those hopes too[4].
| Their swan song was the early dot com boom, where they still
| held onto the reputation as "The Best Unix" and sold a ton of
| web server hardware to the more conservative outfits. But we
| could all see the writing on the wall even then.
|
| I mean, it's true they had some great stuff toward the end. But
| not _that_ great, and generally not marketed in a way that
| would help them. Containers are actually a good example.
| Solaris Zones were... just a weird circus act[2]. I don 't know
| any major players who made bets on the technology. And, again,
| within 2-3 years Linux had cgroups and LXC running[3] in a more
| performant (and much cheaper to deploy) environment and that's
| what Docker picked.
|
| [1] Faster than a VAX, which was still the reference Unix box.
| Megapixel framebuffer with windowing and competent terminal
| emulation. Every box was on the Internet. Every box could see
| the rest of its network over NFS (and most were deployed
| diskless). FWIW: anyone know where I can get one? Would love
| one for the collection, but most seem to have disappeared
| (government and university equipment tends not to end up on
| eBay...)
|
| [2] Edit because this was misunderstood: I'm saying it was an
| oddity with minimal uptake, not that it was chaotic or bad as a
| matter of design.
|
| [3] This too got misunderstood, though I don't see how. I'm
| really not interested in a flame war about whose container
| technology is better. I'm just saying that to Sun in the
| early/mid 00's, it wasn't much of a competetive advantage (as
| evidenced by the fact that it lost to Docker).
|
| [4] Ooph, this one too. I'm saying that in the early 90's SPARC
| was dancing with MIPS for the fastest CPUs on the planet, but
| by the release of the P6 core that was over and Intel had
| essentially won (though DEC kept the dance going a while longer
| with Alpha). I'm just amazed at the propensity for folks here
| to jump in to argue stuff that in my mind was settled decades
| ago.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I think conceptually they were really good and innovative.
| They just had a hard time making money off it.
|
| By the way what are you looking for? A VAX or a SPARCstation?
| VAXes are indeed very hard to come by, and I didn't realise
| they were ever the "reference unix box" - weren't they more
| common for VMS? But somehow I never came across them back in
| the day. I think part of the reason is that they mainly sold
| servers, they weren't that big on the workstation market.
|
| Sun, SGI and HP-UX I used a lot, HP-UX the most. I still have
| two HP-UX workstations at home.
| ajross wrote:
| I have a few SPARCs, actually. Those are fairly easy to
| find. I want a Sun-3, because to my mind that's the truly
| transformative device. In principle I could sit at a
| 38-year-old Sun 3 today and do my actual job productively,
| with pretty minimal workflow changes. It's one of just a
| handful of Devices That Changed Computing Forever, and in
| principle one that should be accessible to a collector. But
| they're rarer than I'd have expected, especially given how
| many I saw sitting around at school in the 90's.
|
| And yeah, the desktop VAXen were almost exclusively for
| VMS. But the standard Unix box in the early-mid 80's that
| everyone talked about when they
| discussed/benchmarked/whatever the platform was a 11/780
| running 4.2BSD. Those aren't meaningfully collectible for
| an individual, obviously.
| hanche wrote:
| There is also the MicroVAX. We got one (a MicroVAX II) at
| my place of work shortly before I left in 1986. It ran
| Ultrix, a BSD derivative. As I recall it, the box would
| not have been too big for personal use, though the price
| tag probably was on the steep side.
|
| From before, we had a VAX 11/750. It, too, was a
| freestanding box in the computer room, possibly close to
| a cubic meter in volume. Not something I would want at
| home! It ran VMS, which I found clunky and difficult to
| work with. But we got a Unix emulation layer called
| Eunice installed on it, which made it more bearable.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I love collecting old machines also <3 I have a PDP-8 and
| 11 replica (from obsolescence guaranteed), some of my
| first computers, a G3 iMac of which I just love the
| design, HP-UX boxes because they were really formative
| for me with Unix. I also owned some Sun hardware (a
| SPARCstation 5 and an X-Terminal) but sold it when I
| moved to a small apartment. I still regret this.
|
| But indeed the servers are really hard for collectors
| because of the size. Similarly with the real PDP's of the
| day. We had a real PDP-11 at the computer museum where we
| volunteered though we never turned it on. Too afraid of a
| cap blowing and damaging more.
|
| HP had some nice small servers later on, but they were
| not very influential so like you I don't really see a
| benefit in collecting them.
| ayewo wrote:
| When you say:
|
| > _Solaris Zones were... just a weird circus act. I don 't
| know any major players who made bets on the technology._
|
| Joyent [1] readily comes to mind. IIRC, that kind of
| isolation was one of the selling points of their hosting
| service before they eventually shut it down.
|
| (Of course I'm fully aware that one of Joyent's founders was
| ex-Sun and comments around here too :) )
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyent
| bcantrill wrote:
| Presuming that you are referring to me, I am _definitely_
| not a founder of Joyent! That said, my rationale for coming
| to Joyent was not at all unrelated to some of the parallels
| I saw in Sun[0] -- and it is probably worth reading my own
| farewell to Sun as well[1]. (Also, because I can 't resist
| completing the arc into the present, see becoming an ex-
| Joyeur[2] and starting Oxide[3].)
|
| [0] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/30/hello-joyent/
|
| [1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2010/07/25/good-bye-sun/
|
| [2] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/07/31/ex-joyeur/
|
| [3] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2019/12/02/the-soul-of-a-
| new-com...
| ayewo wrote:
| My bad! I must have equated your high profile association
| with Joyent with being a co-founder.
|
| Thanks for swinging by to make the correction!
| bcantrill wrote:
| Ha, no worries! You're not the first to make the
| assumption, so I wanted to be sure to clarify. ;) And
| thank you for pointing out Joyent's use of zones in
| production. Indeed, it was Joyent's use of zones that
| attracted me to the company, and not the other way
| around...
| eduction wrote:
| > every one of those features was cloned as free software and
| running on sub-$100k hardware by 1994
|
| ?
|
| Zones weren't released until nearly 10 years after 1994. Same
| for dtrace and zfs. Solaris was embryonic in 1994. Linux
| existed but wouldn't take over servers until c2000-1 (as
| evidenced by Sun's massive profits through the end of 1999).
|
| What features are you referring to?
| [deleted]
| shrubble wrote:
| Solaris Zones are _still_ far superior to LXC. It 's hardly a
| circus act and SmartOS is being heavily used in many places.
|
| Solaris 10 vs contemporary Linux 2.6-era kernels handled
| memory-pressure situations so much better, that you
| essentially needed more RAM on the Linux system just to avoid
| low-memory situations to begin with. Been there, done that :)
|
| Linux won because it was a) free and b) aligned (simply
| because so many had and were using Linux) with Intel x86, and
| Intel's fabrication technology is/was world-leading. SPARC
| CPUs on the same fabrication node would still be amazing -
| but it isn't on the same node...
| pjmlp wrote:
| I really would like to know which Linux or BSD distribution
| did containers before Tru64, HP-UX and Solaris.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| FreeBSD had jails way before Linux had containers, but they
| did come after Solaris Zones.
| pjmlp wrote:
| The point discussed here is how FOSS did it first.
| shrubble wrote:
| OpenVZ and Solaris Zones both came out in 2005; however
| OpenVZ was never accepted into the kernel.
| pjmlp wrote:
| HP-UX containers came out in 1998, if I still recall it
| correctly, and Tru64 already had some stuff into that
| sense with its microkernel and secure processes design.
| hulitu wrote:
| > They likewise had a brief moment with SPARC in the early
| 90's where their machines were the fastest you could buy, but
| Intel demolished those hopes too.
|
| Intel was slow in the early 90s. Intel (or more specifically
| amd64) started to become competitive on the lower end in the
| early 2000s when the Itanium hype reached its maximum. If you
| look at SpecInt 2000 an 1.4 GHz Intel is equivalent with a
| 500 MHz PA-RISC.
| [deleted]
| tambourine_man wrote:
| And Dtrace, NFS, ZFS... truly a shame.
| matt_heimer wrote:
| What would have happened is the company would have folded.
|
| Sun's problem's happened long before they were purchased. Their
| number one problem is that they were a hardware company and
| never figured out how to be a software company. It was Linux
| and cheap Intel hardware combined Sun's lackluster support for
| x86 Solaris that doomed them.
| jabl wrote:
| Yeah. Sometimes I wonder how everything would have turned out
| had they gone all-in on x86 starting with the Sun386i in 1988
| and never developed SPARC.
| ghaff wrote:
| Or someone like Motorola could have done RISC sooner. (They
| did eventually with the 88K but Sun, IBM, etc. had all gone
| with their own RISC chips by then.)
| kjs3 wrote:
| Someone did do RISC sooner; for example, MIPS shipped
| R2000 in 1985 and Clipper shipped C100 in 1986. SPARC and
| 88k were introduced within a year of each other as I
| recall (87/88).
| sn1de wrote:
| They were already doomed at that point. I was involved in
| several major purchase decisions during that period and Sun
| were totally out of touch. If they were quoting hardware that
| had an x86 equivalent, then they were overpriced. If it was
| something that didn't have an x86 equivalent, like they had for
| a while with 64 bit, the prices were atrocious. Then Lintel
| moved to 64 bit and it was all over. The price/performance
| equation was broken, but Sun, for whatever reason, kept on like
| nothing had happened. I, and I'm sure many others, tried to
| show them that they were uncompetitive, but you were dealing
| with reps working from a price sheet and citing the same old
| mantra that Sun was inherently superior. For years when I would
| tell peers that the Sun equipment was just throwing away money
| they wouldn't believe me because they hadn't done the
| benchmarking. Really, if people did proper benchmarking and
| didn't just 'buy what they know' without questioning, it all
| would have unwound even more quickly. They certainly had some
| good tech, and were not wrong about the advantages of
| containerization, which came full circle with linux
| containerization and docker, but IBM mainframes had similar
| virtualization capabilities in place long before Solaris zones,
| so it wasn't something that was a game changer. Ironically, it
| worked against them because even though they were right, it was
| seen by some as Sun touting their way of doing it because they
| didn't have a viable solution for the prevailing VM direction
| of hardware virtualization. Basically, they began by offering
| the best price/performance and innovation, but then died trying
| to be a 'premium provider' without the goods to back it up, and
| market forces then do what market forces do.
| jasoneckert wrote:
| I agree that they were doomed by that point as well primarily
| due to Linux on faster and cheaper x86 hardware. My
| UltraSPARC-III-based Blade 1500 that was an incredibly
| overpriced workstation that only ran Solaris well, and wasn't
| on par with the performance of x86 at the time.
|
| However, I do remember buying an Opteron-based Ultra 20
| because it was cheaper from Sun than anyone else and had 100%
| Linux support, which everyone seemed to be migrating to from
| Solaris. By that time, I'm sure there was no clear market
| direction for Sun software- or hardware-wise, and everything
| was too little too late.
| blantonl wrote:
| Sun's sales guys were killing it right up until their last
| breath. I can clearly remember thinking to myself "why does
| this Sun/Solaris node cost $32k when this equivalent Intel
| costs $10K?" One day it was the in-thing, the next pooof
| Solaris was GONE.
| ghaff wrote:
| Before Docker came along though, containers were mostly just a
| more lightweight partitioning techniques than VMs which they
| had largely lost out to. See also Virtuozzo, BSD jails, and
| some of the early container work on Linux. But Docker followed
| by Kubernetes really made containers into a different cloud-
| native development and deployment model rather than just a
| lighter form of VM..
| pinewurst wrote:
| They were bought by Oracle for salvage as an imploding
| shambles. If not Oracle, they would have ended up as SGI -
| merely a name for some white box vendor.
|
| The problem here is the confusion between the wonder of late
| 80s workstation computing and the harsh realities after the
| Internet Boom.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Oracle's primary interest was suing Google over Java in that
| acquisition
| pjmlp wrote:
| They would have gone under, Java would have been fossilized at
| version 6, GraalVM would never have happened, CLR would be left
| as the only high end polyglot runtime with top GC and JIT
| compilation algorithms.
| icedchai wrote:
| Sun was a innovator throughout the 90's. Many colleges,
| universities, and startups used Sun hardware. By the mid
| 2000's, they were on the way out. The market was flooded with
| barely used Sun hardware after the dot-com collapse. At the
| same time, Linux was now "good enough" that less-and-less
| people needed Solaris. Of course, some enterprises still needed
| it. The only thing Sun was hanging on to - Java - was freely
| available.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| What innovation was still happening at Sun by the time Oracle
| stepped in?
| pjmlp wrote:
| GraalVM was known at the time as MaximeVM on Sun Research
| Labs, for example.
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