[HN Gopher] Joining Sun Microsystems - 40 years ago (2022)
___________________________________________________________________
Joining Sun Microsystems - 40 years ago (2022)
Author : TMWNN
Score : 157 points
Date : 2025-04-30 14:57 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (akapugs.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (akapugs.blog)
| LastTrain wrote:
| "There were a bunch of bottom feeders targeting the home-brew
| market"
|
| Yes we all know how poorly it went for those folks lol
| TMWNN wrote:
| Is he talking about Venix, Coherent, PC/IX?
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I think he's talking about hardware. I remember at the time
| there were 68k board kits that would run Unix. I didn't learn
| Unix until a few years later (on a Sun 2), so I stuck with my
| Z-80 SBC and CP/M.
| kjs3 wrote:
| Yeah...he even points it out in the article. There were 100
| companies in that timeframe that were some more or less
| minor variation on 680x0 processor, 10Mb ethernet and Unix
| (usually from Unisoft).
| davidw wrote:
| Even back in the mid to late nineties, you still had a
| bunch of different Unix OS's and their associated
| hardware:
|
| * AIX / POWER
|
| * Solaris / Sparc
|
| * Irix / MIPS
|
| * HP-UX / PA-RISC
|
| And probably some I'm forgetting.
| icedchai wrote:
| DEC Alpha was another big one.
|
| Digital Unix (AKA: Tru64, OSF/1) / Alpha
| crmd wrote:
| That brings back memories. The first time I ever heard of
| Digital Unix was in college looking at netcraft.com's web
| server ranking, where it showed that www.amazon.com was
| running on OSF/1. I figured if Amazon was using it, it
| must be worth looking into. Found an Alphastation in an
| IT storage room and had some fun playing around with it.
| Good memories.
| icedchai wrote:
| Yes, Alpha was incredible for the time. Sparc was a dog
| in comparison. Software wise, Solaris felt more standard
| though. I remember having to tweak open source stuff to
| compile on Digital Unix. Solaris almost always just
| worked.
| kjs3 wrote:
| We're talking about 1982, not 'mid to late nineties'.
| None of those chips even existed. Silicon Graphics Unix
| was running on 680x0 based series 1000 machines (and
| wasn't called IRIX yet). HP/UX was running on 680x0 based
| HP9000 series. AIX was a couple of years away and would
| first run on the RT/PC development of the 801 project,
| not on POWER. In 1982-ish IBM did have a Unix machine
| tho...the 9000 series, which was a 68000 running Xenix.
| DEC hadn't started PRISM, much less ALPHA then...it's
| Unix was Ultrix on VAX and PDP-11.
| davidw wrote:
| Yes, I read what was written. My point was that there
| were still a lot of companies doing Unix systems years
| later.
| rconti wrote:
| Wow. 10Mb ethernet. I even remember in the late 90s "Fast
| Ethernet" (100Mbps) was a feature in small switches; that
| implied 10Mb was the default.
| LastTrain wrote:
| That is how I took it. Xenix, etc, anything not deemed a
| "workstation" in that era's parlance.
| TMWNN wrote:
| I didn't mention Xenix because Lyon is obviously not
| including it in his list of bottom feeders, given that he
| distinguishes Altos (which runs Xenix) from them.
| minitoar wrote:
| Great pictures. lol @ khosla.
| ajross wrote:
| What I find fascinating about Sun is how fast its ride was. They
| launched their MVP in 1982 which was really just a bare 68000
| board with a kluged together software suite. The second
| generation Sun 2's were like a year and a half later, running
| virtual memory on 4BSD, the 68020 made the Sun 3's in 1985 faster
| than a VAX, and suddenly Sun was The Premier Unix that everyone
| targetted.
|
| The next few years (up through 1991 or so) would see the launch
| of SPARC[1] and all the Unix goodness we all still work on:
| shared libraries, NFS, RPC, pervasive IPv4 networking, basically
| everything about the modern datacenter software environment dates
| from these few years at Sun.
|
| And then, sort of out of nowhere in the mid 90's, Linux distros
| running on P6 boards had essentially cloned it all on hardware
| 1/10th the price and the end had begun. Sun would continue to
| make a lot of money through the doc com boom, but their status as
| the thought and innovation center of Unix hit a brick wall.
|
| The story of the end was all about Java and Oracle and datacenter
| markets. And IMHO it's not that interesting. What the hell
| happened to Unix?
|
| [1] In hindsight it was just a flash in the pan, but the RISC
| arrival in the Unix world was shocking at the time. Even though
| in hindsight the workstation vendors had at most a 3-4 year lead
| on Intel at the peak and would rapidly fall behind.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| What happened to Unix? It became part of the background. Sun
| (and then Linux) succeeded so well that Sun didn't matter any
| more.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yeah in retrospect, it feels somewhat inevitable to me that
| Linux (or something similar if that hadn't happen) would
| displace it all and demolish the business model of "Unix as
| commodity", given Unix itself was clearly initially aimed at
| trying to popularize/democratize a set of
| technologies/techniques/concepts that had been previously
| locked up inside larger corporations and projects. The motive
| force of "getting this out there" was there, and was bound to
| escape the workstation maker's clutches.
|
| I didn't live through the minicomputer era, but definitely grew
| up in the "Unix [and then Linux] ascendant" era and was an
| early adopter (as a user) of Linux on my 486. We just wanted
| what all the cool kids [err, adults] had. I spent many hours
| fine tuning my X11 environment to look like the screenshots I
| saw in UnixWorld of real Unix workstations, etc. ... without
| doing any actual "real work" with it...
|
| Looking back, it was inevitable that Unix would become less and
| less a sale-able commodity and more and more a free standard
| that hackers would just ... assume.
|
| I'm not sure how Sun could have saved itself without just
| turning itself into a services company, just too hard to win on
| economies of scale making actual hardware. They made hay while
| the Sun(tm) shone, I guess.
| TMWNN wrote:
| > Looking back, it was inevitable that Unix would become less
| and less a sale-able commodity and more and more a free
| standard that hackers would just ... assume.
|
| I wonder if the operating system[1] has turned out to be the
| ultimate expression of Steve Jobs's quote about Dropbox:
| "feature, not a product". A means to an end, with the end
| being where all the value is.
|
| Everyone talks about Microsoft retaining the rights to market
| DOS independent of the IBM license being the most important
| business deal of all time, but Microsoft producing its own
| applications may be even more important in retrospect.
|
| [1] I wrote "Unix", but of course Windows has been _de facto_
| free, even when not purchased with a computer, for some time
| kjellsbells wrote:
| > Microsoft producing its own applications may be even more
| important in retrospect.
|
| I remain convinced that Microsoft Excel is the most
| important thing they ever built. You could replace Windows
| for Linux or vice versa and the world would hum along more
| or less the same. But entire economies are essentially
| running on what people do with Excel.
| ghaff wrote:
| I did a podcast with ex-Sun Bryan Cantrill and sjvn a few
| years back about the inevitability of open source as part of
| a series. Bryan's take was basically, if not Linux, BSD. Of
| course, there's also the school that Microsoft basically wins
| which many assumed at the time.
| toast0 wrote:
| I mean, if you look at commercial UNIX, well to start it all
| sources from AT&T at some point; they weren't permitted to
| sell it, so they gave it away more or less.
|
| BSD (and others) took it and improved it.
|
| Everyone (including Microsoft) took at least the BSD socket
| stack, at least for a while.
|
| Commercial UNIX competing against free community UNIX is a
| hard battle to win. There's a question of UNIX vs alles, but
| if UNIX lives, it's going to be community UNIX (or well Linux
| which is community UNIX alike).
|
| I suppose there's an angle for commercial UNIX on specialized
| hardware; Apple is doing fine with that model; but it stopped
| being compelling for Sun --- commodified x86 servers are good
| enough that you can't build a business to support commercial
| UNIX on specialized server hardware (x86 or not) alone.
| Oracle Solaris exists, but as a non-customer, it looks like
| development has slowed significantly.
| chasil wrote:
| I know of one total rewrite.
|
| "I couldn't find anything that was copied." -Dennis Ritchie
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)
| chasil wrote:
| I never used it, but the first UNIX port for ARM was called
| RISC iX and it was introduced in 1988.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX
|
| In retrospect, if Sun had acquired Acorn, they might still be
| around.
| ajross wrote:
| This is revisionist. ARM didn't break out as an embedded
| architecture until a full decade later. At the time it was
| entirely forgettable, with no competitive parts in the
| workstation market and no software worth running (again, the
| center of the universe at the time was SunOS).
|
| It's popular _now_ to imagine that ARM had some magic ISA
| back in the 80 's, but it was very much an also-ran through
| most of its life. The magic is inside Apple Computer, and
| quite frankly they could have made anything fast. They simply
| happened to have an ARM OS core running already, so they
| picked the architecture that wouldn't force people to
| recompile their iPhone apps.
| chasil wrote:
| Then how do you explain StrongARM?
|
| Why would DEC indulge in an also-ran? Ken Olsen's folly? Or
| is 1996 far too late?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 1996 was far too early for what they were trying to make
| it for:
|
| > The StrongARM was designed to address the upper end of
| the low-power embedded market, where users needed more
| performance than the ARM could deliver while being able
| to accept more external support. Targets were devices
| such as newer personal digital assistants and set-top
| boxes.
|
| They'd be able to power a faster PalmPilot or proto-TiVo
| with it but this was years before the mobile design
| advances, let alone battery and screen improvements, that
| led to the iPhone.
| ajross wrote:
| > Then how do you explain StrongARM?
|
| Do I need to? StrongARM is pretty much the definition of
| an "also-ran" product, no? It had no particularly notable
| design wins, and while it sold in reasonable volume was a
| distant second to MIPS in the "consumer junk" segment[1].
| DEC unloaded it to Intel, where it becamse Xscale, and
| Intel dumped it on Marvell. At no point did anyone really
| care much about it.
|
| Even within the ARM world itself, it was ARM Ltd's CPU
| cores (also Qualcomm had some decent designs) that
| powered the architecture's way back to relevance on
| phones, out of which Apple would grow to dominate.
|
| [1] Set top boxes, cable modems, stuff like that.
| kjs3 wrote:
| That's a little unfair. StrongARM did well in the WinCE
| market (which I assume you are referring to as 'consumer
| junk') and did very well in the embedded market
| especially as Xscale over several generations (PXA, IOP,
| etc). As an embedded chip with a relatively short
| lifespan that's reasonably impressive.
|
| However, the idea that somehow it (or any of it's
| contemporary ARM kin) could somehow 'replace SPARC and
| save Sun Microsystems'...well, that's just laugh out loud
| silly.
| kjs3 wrote:
| What should we 'explain' about a false equivalence?
| Different processors for different markets? It was never
| much other than a mobile and embedded processor. Yeah, I
| suppose some folks thought is could be workstation PC,
| but how many RiscPC 700s were sold? By 1996, Sun had
| SPARC for, what, 10 years, and had just introduced
| UltraSPARC? StrongARM was never in the same performance
| ballpark on any dimension other than performance/watt.
|
| I thought all the uncritical ARM fanbois had defected to
| RISC-V. Good to see some still carrying the torch.
| chasil wrote:
| What is clear to everyone is that ARM survived and SPARC
| did not.
|
| Sun ownership would not have guaranteed survival, as
| management did many foolish things, but it would have
| upped the odds.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| First sentence of the history: they couldn't make alpha
| do it.
| hapless wrote:
| DEC indulged an enormous number of also-rans. It is from
| the perspective of 2025 that we remember some of the good
| stuff and forget all the bizarre mis-fires.
|
| Off the top of my head:
|
| * Two duplicate "high-end" VAX architectures (VAX 8000 vs
| VAX 9000), because no one wanted to choose between CMOS
| and ECL
|
| * Three duplicate systems targeted at the high-end
| (Alpha, VAX 9000, VAX 8000)
|
| * Two duplicate RISC+UNIX systems, because DEC was
| extremely late to market (MIPS 3000/5000 series vs Alpha)
|
| * Two duplicate UNIX software packages, because DEC was
| _really_ late to market (1970s ULTRIX ported to MIPS, OSF
| /1 on Alpha, and the never-fucking-released OSF/1 on MIPS
| because DEC just could not get their shit together)
|
| * Four duplicate low end systems (MIPS, PDP-11, NVAX,
| Alpha were all sold simultaneously at the same price
| point!)
|
| * A dozen utterly-failed microcomputer projects (Pro/3xx,
| Rainbow, etc)
|
| DEC was not a particularly well-managed company. Their
| approach, for decades, was "throw shit at the wall and
| see what sticks." This worked fine right up until it
| didn't work at all.
|
| It is also worth noting that Alpha, the "good" DEC
| initiative, was a failure. It lost a lot of money! market
| share never got out of the single digits.
| timc3 wrote:
| Acorn Archemedes was a great machine for its time, and I
| liked the software.
| ajross wrote:
| Right, but SunOS on SPARC changed the world forever[1].
| It's not really a comparable discussion.
|
| [1] And then promptly imploded, and has been forgotten
| now even by people[2] living and working every day in the
| environment Sun created. That's the bit I was pointing
| out upthread.
|
| [2] Who apparently think that the important story of that
| era is somehow the emergence of ARM?!
| sys_64738 wrote:
| What software? It was starved.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| The magic of super fast ARM cores is inside Apple, but
| ARM's general success has little to do with Apple. It seems
| like a large part of ARM's success is offering licenses for
| good hardware at a pretty low price. ARM doesn't "capture
| value" much, it seems to me.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I recall that in about '92 Intel had launched a project called
| Eclipse which was an x86-based workstation they were developing
| to compete against Sun. As with many Intel projects, it didn't
| get anywhere.
| ajross wrote:
| Never heard of that particular product, but in point of fact
| Sun's original core workstation market had been essentially
| destroyed by the late 90's by x86 boxes running Windows NT.
| Intel didn't have the product in the channel in 1992, but by
| 1996 it was clear SPARC's days were numbered.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I think the root issue here is Joy's Law [1]: "No matter who
| you are, the majority of smart people do not work for you." Sun
| had a whole lot of very talented engineers working for them,
| but ultimately they were building a proprietary, vertically
| integrated system. When compared with the best memory makers in
| Japan and the best CPU makers at Intel and AMD and the loosely
| knit coalition of OS engineers working on Linux and all the
| Linux desktop engineers, they eventually found that the best
| engineers did not work for them.
|
| [1] Ironically coined and named after Sun Microsystems founder
| Bill Joy.
| cryptonector wrote:
| 26 years. Not much shorter than Microsoft's ride so far, but
| much much shorter than IBM's.
| ajross wrote:
| Again though, after 1995-ish Sun just stopped "doing Unix",
| abandoned the community they created (who all trotted off
| happily to Red Hat et. al.), failed in their core workstation
| market, and basically spent their time milking server sales
| to conservative[1] IT departments who wanted to do
| "internet".
|
| Their swan song ended up being Java, an interesting (but
| again poorly exploited) technology that had next to nothing
| to do with the environment on which it was incubated. Frankly
| Sun ran away from it so hard that Java ended up running best
| (!) on Microsoft Windows.
|
| So basically it was 13 years, as I see it, from kids-with-
| soldering-irons-and-a-dream to world-changing-behemoth to
| company-your-grandparents-buy-from. That's fast even in
| Silicon Valley.
|
| [1] The cool kids, obviously, were all running Linux in their
| datacenters already. Only the S&P 500 dinosaurs were buying
| Sparcservers, but there were a lot of dinosaurs.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Sun greatly revitalized "Unix" in the 00s! Need I refer you
| to Bryan Cantrill's screed about how OS research was not
| boring? The list of features that shipped in the 00s is
| amazing: - DTrace - FMA/FMD -
| SMF - ZFS - the unified process model -
| NFSv4 - CIFS - and more
|
| and this was while being hamstrung by a crappy SVR4
| networking architecture that the networking team was able
| to kill off (thank goodness).
|
| Some of these are things not yet re-invented elsewhere,
| others re-invented poorly: - systemd is a
| bad SMF - SystemTap is a bad DTrace - eBPF is
| pretty cool but in some key ways not as good as
| DTrace - ZFS remains unparalleled
| ajross wrote:
| Yeah, this turns into senseless flaming very quickly. But
| to be blunt, the fact that puts the lie to your point
| that all those technologies are "revitalizing" or
| whatever is that basically _no one uses them_ [1].
| They're interesting ways to win an argument on the
| internet (with which I won't engage), but not evidence
| that you're doing something actually important.
|
| [1] Obviously people use them! But not at scale and not
| in such a way that it provides meaningful advantage over
| the people who _don 't_ use them. Again, they're fun
| things to argue about but not transformative in the way
| that early SunOS was.
| cryptonector wrote:
| The fact that they've been copied is telling enough:
| others needed things like those. Either Sun was too early
| with some of these or Sun couldn't capitalize on them, or
| both. Sun definitely was too early with certain things
| like cloud (the Sun Grid). Was SunOS 4 as transformative
| as BSD?
| mzs wrote:
| $ uname -srm; which dtrace; mount | head -1; apropos zfsd
| FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE-p3 amd64 /usr/sbin/dtrace
| zroot/ROOT/default on / (zfs, local, noatime, nfsv4acls)
| zfsd(8) - ZFS fault management daemon
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| mzs wrote:
| I still miss mdb.
| gopalv wrote:
| > But let's talk about my unfair advantage - my Lyon family
| mafia. I was living with my brother Bob and his wife. Bob was
| working at Xerox SDD developing the Xerox Star workstation. And
| my brother Dick was at Xerox PARC with an Alto on his desk
|
| Sometimes, I feel like the whole downwards trend having a single
| kid loses the family aspect of my previous generation - I meet
| enough people who don't have uncles, aunts, nieces or nephews for
| nepotism (literal) to work sideways on.
|
| Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not
| dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways.
|
| I got into Linux because my uncle's brother in law worked in
| computer repair when I was 14, back when India still needed to
| fill in an export control form to download software. Another
| uncle sent me extra 32Mb of RAM from Dubai and a modem which
| wasn't a winmodem (& my dad hated him for the phone bills).
|
| > We were just managing a house mortgage with 3 full time
| incomes. Interest rates then were well above 10%.
| Take8435 wrote:
| > Sometimes, I feel like the whole downwards trend having a
| single kid loses the family aspect of my previous generation
|
| There are many reasons folks have no kids or only one kid. I
| don't think opining for a larger family 'for the chance' of
| having a family member with similar tastes is really...
| compelling.
|
| > Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not
| dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways.
|
| Are you saying friends cannot provide support in minor ways?
|
| In my view, it's more compelling to solution the many downsides
| of nepotism (esp. in governments not just private entities)
| rather than endorse or perpetuate it.
| ghaff wrote:
| I pretty much agree. All of my jobs since grad school have
| come through professional connections--none remotely through
| relatives.
| geodel wrote:
| > In my view, it's more compelling to solution the many
| downsides of nepotism
|
| The solution is endless growing bureaucracy to implement and
| enforce fairness at every level and it is happening
| everywhere I can see.
|
| > Are you saying friends cannot provide support in minor
| ways?
|
| From my experience family members have some sort of
| obligation towards other members( though maybe less true or
| just untrue in modern day US) whereas friends can say yes or
| no to any request purely based on convenience.
| mulmen wrote:
| > The solution is endless growing bureaucracy to implement
| and enforce fairness at every level and it is happening
| everywhere I can see.
|
| Really? Endless? Everywhere? "I can see" is doing a lot of
| work there.
|
| > From my experience family members have some sort of
| obligation towards other members( though maybe less true or
| just untrue in modern day US) whereas friends can say yes
| or no to any request purely based on convenience.
|
| Ostensibly the United States is a meritocracy.
|
| Nepotism is a form of corruption. It's fine to help your
| family and peers with their career development but it's not
| ok to hire them based purely on your relationship.
| pcl wrote:
| I don't think that's really fair. Nepotism has a lot of
| negatives, but also positives. It's a form of management
| and hiring, not a form of corruption. It can be bad for a
| business, but it also can be good, especially once you
| take the owners' goals for the business into account.
| Take8435 wrote:
| It's actually considered a form of political corruption.
| Not necessarily illegal corruption but corruption in the
| "normal" sense of decision making and dealings of the
| organization.
| no_wizard wrote:
| >Ostensibly the United States is a meritocracy.
|
| I have yet to see any of this purported meritocracy. I
| see lots of nepotism (as well as adjacent behaviors
| similar to nepotism) and things typically associated with
| oligarchy, even in the world of business.
|
| Who you know and your background have so much to do with
| success that outliers are rounding errors for a reason.
| It has nothing to do with ability or any accepted
| definition of merit as related to meritocracy.
| Take8435 wrote:
| I am not who you replied to, but this is why I find it
| odd that people want nepotism to continue.
| geodel wrote:
| Indeed. So many things look meritocratic once one is born
| in right country, right city, right zip code , right
| family and so on.
| geodel wrote:
| > Really? Endless? Everywhere? "I can see" is doing a lot
| of work there.
|
| You seem to think it is just rhetoric. But ensuring
| fairness is one of the core job of bureaucracy. After all
| they are not supposed to be related to people they are
| serving or rulers/politicians they work for to ensure
| fairness. It is growing because people want fairness in
| more and more aspects of life.
|
| You've provided a definition of nepotism not solution.
| mulmen wrote:
| The solution is the bureaucracy. I just don't agree it is
| endless or ever present or that nepotism is the only
| reason for bureaucracy.
| geodel wrote:
| Well I see it in schools, universities, hospitals,
| government offices, public companies and so on. Small
| businesses have full discretion on how to do things so
| they don't need it.
|
| Also I don't see it is the _only_ reason but one of the
| _core_ reason.
| mulmen wrote:
| Your claims just don't align with my experiences,
| anecdotes, or information.
|
| My mayor hired his niece to run a department. My cousin
| hired my nephews at a school district. I worked at a
| hospital where the IT director and the network admin were
| married. My dad worked at a family owned car dealership
| that's in the third generation of ownership. I don't
| think any of those cases were corrupt.
|
| Meanwhile "the bureaucracy" in the form of OIG has an
| excellent track record of eliminating waste. The mayor of
| my hometown has personally visited each department to
| ensure they are operating responsibly and uncovered and
| eliminated widespread waste.
|
| I just don't see what you're seeing.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| It's somewhat intrusive to suggest that my business
| should run according to your principles. Are you familiar
| with the strongest form of business, the family firm?
| Take8435 wrote:
| By whose measure is it the 'strongest'? That suggests
| it's somehow more effective.
|
| Counterpoint: It's intrusive to a worker's life, career
| prospects and their family if you decide to hire a family
| member over someone who (and I'm adding this in
| purposely) - objectively more qualified - than the family
| member.
| mulmen wrote:
| It is intrusive. You are also not allowed to utilize
| slave labor or employ children. We accept some
| restrictions for the smooth running of society.
| Take8435 wrote:
| Your experience is typical only for your region, I'll just
| say that.
|
| > The solution is endless growing bureaucracy to implement
| and enforce fairness at every level and it is happening
| everywhere I can see.
|
| You are advocating for fairness - but for it to be fair -
| you need to be allowed special treatment and that treatment
| (positive mostly, from your stance) to be applied only to
| family members. E.g., "It's only fair I hire my brother. So
| I can enrich my family. He may not be qualified, but I'm
| the founder."
|
| But then in the same breath, you say it is unfair to
| bolster nepotism and cast aspersions on the vast majority
| of workers who feel opposite of you.
|
| Your argument is flawed and flimsy, with all due respect.
|
| You may have a business that works but no one outside your
| family would want to work with you and especially working
| with inept family members. At least no one I know.
|
| I'll edit to add: I think it's a sad state of affairs you
| see friends as just a convenience. Nothing more. Sure seems
| like there's no investment in relationships outside
| families which seems very exclusionary.
| geodel wrote:
| I did not advocate fairness, neither I am berating
| nepotism. Maybe you don't read comment but feel urge to
| respond nonetheless.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| The author used Nepotism tongue in cheek. It's clear he was
| pretty talented. He was just saying his family was also
| talented and knew people in Silicon Valley.
| lysace wrote:
| > I meet enough people who don't have uncles, aunts, nieces or
| nephews for nepotism (literal) to work sideways on.
|
| In terms of optimizing for happiness and life fulfillment, I
| think less nepotism is probably good, even in the literal
| sense.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Nepotism is not a great reason to want larger families...
| roywashere wrote:
| In this case, the Lyons were not providing each other jobs.
| But they shared insights into which companies had cool tech.
| And they inspired each other with the nice work stations!
| Much different. And not really 'nepotism'.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Fair!
| DogRunner wrote:
| If you want to see the included images, jump back to 2022:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20221218011802/https://akapugs.b...
| jmwilson wrote:
| Working for a great company in its heyday is a gift - one that I
| wish for everyone. Stories like this are a comfort when the
| industry is near its nadir, and reminder that the industry moves
| in cycles, and all glory fades. I got my turn at Facebook in
| 2010. A bunch of times I'd see a name I'd recognize pop up in
| internal discussions: an esteemed classmate or colleague had
| joined, and you knew with all this talent concentrating in one
| place, good things were to come.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I think the author is also very skilled, considering porting
| part of UNIX to a new architecture almost all by himself as a
| sophomore.
|
| I admit everything is simpler back then, but again tooling is
| bad and docs was just Lyon's book.
|
| Putting myself in the shoes. I don't even know where to start.
| Honestly it would be an interesting project to port xv6 from
| RISC-V to another architecture WITHOUT the help of Internet and
| AI.
| loas wrote:
| Was he very skilled back then when he did it?
|
| Or was it the grit and pushing through the pain of banging
| his own head against the wall many times while dealing with
| mysterious errors and compiler warnings that made him very
| skilled?
|
| I fear the current state of our industry eliminated the
| possibility for not-great, not-skilled juniors to embark in
| these journeys such as these to become great and skilled
| seniors. And I'm afraid that sooner or later we will all
| regret it.
| geodel wrote:
| As usual I think it is combination of skill, luck and hard
| work. There are people who do enormous hard work but just
| do not have skill to create impact. And there are many
| highly skilled people but not motivated enough or likely
| they just not in right place at right time to create
| consequential things.
|
| > I fear the current state of our industry eliminated the
| possibility for not-great, not-skilled juniors to embark in
| these journeys
|
| It is just that industry would be 100 or 1000 times larger
| than it was in 70s or 80s. Now not-great not-skilled people
| can get IT jobs in Accentures/IBMs of today which pays well
| enough for mediocre computer skills. When thousands of new
| PhDs in Computer science, electronics and semiconductors
| etc are available every year it is infeasible that mediocre
| folks can land in hardcore engineering roles.
| varunnrao wrote:
| > Was he very skilled back then when he did it?
|
| > I fear the current state of our industry eliminated the
| possibility for not-great, not-skilled juniors to embark in
| these journeys
|
| I think both sentiments are a product of their times.
|
| Was porting an OS to a new architecture an extremely
| skilled thing? 100% then and 1000% today. With each new
| stage of advancement and increase in the layer of
| abstraction away from the core metal, newer developers no
| longer need to know how to program at the lowest level like
| targeting a processor architecture directly.
|
| Software development from the 1950s till the rise of
| Windows as the standard was targeted not towards systems
| like we do today but towards processors and architectures.
| Processors at that time were simpler to write for. You
| could get the datasheet for whatever was the latest
| processor from a magazine, understand it inside and out and
| start writing software for it. Today I do not think there
| are more than a few dozen people who understand the x64
| line of Intel processors at the same level. So times have
| changed. We write for operating systems now and not
| processors anymore.
|
| I think that this is neither good nor bad. It just is
| simply how it is. I'm sure that people who worked on
| computers in the 1950s at the assembly level would have
| been complaining in the 1970s about people writing programs
| in C/Pascal. And so the cycle continues.
|
| In fact, I think that the current state of generative
| models that output code is the perfect scenario to separate
| the wheat from the chaff. Their power function nature gives
| a clear divide between people who worked in software for
| the paycheck and those who love technology for it's own
| sake.
| compiler-guy wrote:
| There are so many more dimensions than "for the paycheck"
| vs "technology for its own sake". This is a pretty bad
| false dichotomy.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Judging from his biography, he should be skilled when he
| started working on it, but I don't think he knew very much
| about OS and compilers because these were pretty tough
| topics.
|
| Also it took him around 2 years to get a basic port done
| (75-77) with a bit of help in the first year.
|
| Anyway I believe there were a lot of head banging but he
| came out in pretty good shape.
|
| Damn wish I had the time to do something like this. I'd
| like to rely ONLY on printed books and specifications for
| such a project (say port xv6 to some 32-bit arm processor),
| or something even simpler. But I really don't have the
| capacity sadly.
| TMWNN wrote:
| >I think the author is also very skilled, considering porting
| part of UNIX to a new architecture almost all by himself as a
| sophomore.
|
| And which formed the basis of a full-fledged commercial
| product sold by Amdahl, a big-name company selling big iron
| to big-name customers.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Yeah, that's pretty impressive. It's a privilege to work
| among those people if one gets the chance.
| parrit wrote:
| I wonder what stopped me being at that level. Mostly
| attitude, fear and perhaps aptitude. I liked things that were
| easy to install and follow tutorials. I got into Visual C++
| as it actually installed as opposed to a magazine cover Linux
| distributionn that barely run. I think having the main system
| (gotta get those grades) takes most of the energy for most
| people. Either those who are happy to drop out or genius
| enough to both study and hack survive to do really cool
| stuff.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I think you have to do it when you have a project or on
| job. Since it takes a couple of years for him to get a
| working kernel, this type of long term commit is not
| available to many people.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Even working at Sun during the 00s, when it was declining, was
| a gift. I know; I was there.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Agreed. I was there also and can say I've never been so
| invested in a single company. Sun was the best company I ever
| worked for.
| hondo77 wrote:
| I worked at Disney Animation during the 90s. Yeah, my career
| may have peaked 30 years ago but not everyone gets a peak like
| that. "A gift" is the best way to describe it.
| otras wrote:
| I enjoy historical books about the rise, fall, and everything in
| between for companies in the industry -- things like _The Idea
| Factory_ about Bell Labs, _Dealers of Lightning_ about Xerox
| PARC, and _Soul of a New Machine_ about Data General.
|
| Are there any books folks would recommend like that about Sun?
| ecliptik wrote:
| I haven't read it, but High Noon[1] comes up in recommendations
| about Sun Microsystems history.
|
| 1. https://archive.org/details/highnoon00kare
| otras wrote:
| Great, thanks for the pointer! I see it was published in
| 1999, so I imagine it'll be a good time-capsule read too,
| even if it predates the dot com bubble burst and the eventual
| Oracle acquisition, though maybe that's where the "Larry
| Ellison lawnmower" talk fills in well.
| zombiwoof wrote:
| Jonathan Schwartz was the downfall of Sun
| rbanffy wrote:
| Not sure anyone could save the company, but he didn't help
| one single bit.
|
| Sun never decided whether they were a hardware company of a
| software company. They had great hardware and software, but
| couldn't make much money with the latter. Failing to
| recognize software as a way to sell THEIR hardware was the
| biggest issue. When they decided to launch x86 workstations,
| I knew they were doomed. When they exited the workstation
| business, I knew it wouldn't be long.
|
| When you destroy all the on-ramps to your highway, it's a
| matter of time until the toll booths are empty.
| asveikau wrote:
| Solaris got disrupted by Linux, and their hardware was
| disrupted by Intel machines. When Linux on x86 is working
| well, there's little reason to shell out money for Solaris
| on SPARC.
|
| They had Java but that's also challenging to monetize. When
| it was introduced it was novel to have a portable C-like
| workhorse that has GC and bounds checking, but now there
| are many free options for that.
| hylaride wrote:
| It seems most things in tech (OS's, databases, languages,
| etc) _eventually_ become a race to zero unless you can
| provide some long-term service-level support for it the
| way most cloud computing vendors have.
|
| Sun should have probably bought Joyent and gotten their
| rather huge corporate client base (financial
| institutions, etc) onto it, but even then it was probably
| too little too late.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Joyent was a reaction to Sun's acquisition by Oracle.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > They had Java but that's also challenging to monetize.
|
| Apple killed J2ME with the iPhone.
|
| Every success story Sun had was defeated by others. SPARC
| by Intel, Solaris by Linux (really, Google), and Java by
| the iPhone. Ditto for smaller products like Sun Directory
| Service.
| dboreham wrote:
| Sun actually lasted much longer than they would have
| except that Linux was terrible, basically unusable for
| commercial purposes until about 2005.
| kstrauser wrote:
| And here we were running a large regional ISP on it in
| 1997.
| rconti wrote:
| I worked at several x86 Linux + SPARC Solaris shops
| between 1999 and say 2011. Linux was always on the app
| servers, and Solaris on the DB servers.
|
| The Sun hardware was just better, more robust, and the
| machines tended to have hot-swappable bits. Better
| support for fast storage. Hot-plug in Linux was bad and
| took time to get good. The hardware was cheap, and took
| time to get good. Ditto driver support. It just got
| better and better until there was no reason to buy Sun.
|
| And then Oracle bought Sun, and there was now a reason to
| _avoid_ Sun.
| varunnrao wrote:
| I think what ultimately led to Sun's downfall is a
| combination of what ESR [1] and joelonsoftware [2] have
| previously covered.
|
| 1. Sun didn't become the defacto desktop platform because
| they lost out to WinNT. So they lost out on the consumer
| market. 2. Custom server hardware and software makers like
| Sun and Silicon Graphics were the fashion till Google and
| later on Facebook came around and built their own data
| centers with consumer hardware and specialized software to
| overcome the inherent unreliability of that hardware. And
| anyway ever since web-based software became a thing your
| device is practically a console a la Chromebooks. So they
| lost the server market.
|
| The only option left was to serve the high end HPC market
| like labs or even banks but that didn't make business sense
| since that's increasingly niche because those customers
| would eventually also want the effects of commoditization.
|
| [1] - http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6279 [2] -
| https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/08/30/platforms/
| dboreham wrote:
| They didn't lose to NT. The loss in the consumer desktop
| market occurred in the DOS era.
| cryptonector wrote:
| The real losses were against Windows 2000 (specifically
| Active Directory) and to Linux.
|
| The loss to Linux was greatly accelerated by Sun's
| failure to make a deal with Google for Google to use
| Solaris on their servers. The story I heard was that
| Scott wanted a server count for the license while Google
| believed server count was a top secret datum.
|
| If Sun had made a deal with Google in 2002 and worked on
| OpenSolaris starting in 2001, then Linux might not have
| been quite the success it became.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Sun made a bunch of serious mistakes in 2002 before
| Jonathan that it never fully recovered from:
| - not making a deal with Google - the
| [temporary] cancellation (suspension) of Solaris 8
| on x86 - the closing of Sun professional
| Services
|
| These three mistakes were ultimately the ones that ended
| Sun, but there were many many other horrible mistakes along
| the way, like: - sitting on its laurels and
| doing vendor lock-in monetization of -
| J2ME - SPARC - Sun Directory Service
| - not building an Active Directory clone
| - spending $1bn on MySQL (wtf) - ...
|
| Then Oracle overreacted to the Greenbytes' shipping of ZFS
| dedup before Oracle and killed OpenSolaris when OpenSolaris
| was the only hope for Solaris itself. And now Solaris is a
| tiny operation.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > Sun never decided whether they were a hardware company of
| a software company.
|
| Ouch. And actually they were a _systems_ company. Their
| storage appliance product was fantastic, and their
| UltraSPARC systems (the systems; forget the CPU) were also
| fantastic. Sun was the first systems company to prioritize
| space and power consumption -- they were really empathetic
| to folks who build and pay for data centers!
|
| But no one seemed to understand how awesome their position
| was circa 2007 regarding systems design, and their
| advantages were allowed to fizzle.
|
| Larry Ellison doesn't understand mindshare -- the very
| thing that made Oracle successful. He only understands
| lock-in. He doesn't understand that you need to build
| mindshare first. He's not alone in that. This is why Sun
| saw starts in SPARC when it was pretty much garbage. Sure,
| UltraSPARC was neat, but still way too slow. It showcased
| great ideas and execution, but SPARC was just dead, so what
| was the point besides an obscene waste of resources?!
| sys_64738 wrote:
| > Larry Ellison doesn't understand mindshare
|
| Given Larry is the third richest person on the planet, he
| understands everything way better than us.
| abyesilyurt wrote:
| Are there any other books about the Bell Labs you would
| recommend?
| burningChrome wrote:
| A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information
| Age
|
| _In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched
| biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon's
| full story for the first time. It's the story of a small-town
| Michigan boy whose career stretched from the era of room-
| sized computers powered by gears and string to the age of
| Apple. It's the story of the origins of our digital world in
| the tunnels of MIT and the "idea factory" of Bell Labs, in
| the "scientists' war" with Nazi Germany, and in the work of
| Shannon's collaborators and rivals, thinkers like Alan
| Turing, John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Wiener._
|
| I also loved this one:
|
| Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and
| Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell
|
| _Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first
| time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and
| the telephone, the rise of AT &T's monopoly, the creation of
| the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the
| discovery of Ma Bell's Achilles' heel. Phil Lapsley expertly
| weaves together the clandestine underground of "phone
| phreaks" who turned the network into their electronic
| playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the
| feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the
| counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone
| company, and the FBI._
| plapsley wrote:
| Thanks for the mention and honored to be in the same
| mention as Soni and Goodman's book on Shannon!
| mzs wrote:
| not a book but 2hr talk w/ QA: https://youtu.be/dkmzb904tG0
|
| There was a blog by a lady who was an early HR employee, but I
| can't find it anymore.
| mh-cx wrote:
| You might like
|
| The Dream Machine: J.c.r. Licklider and the Revolution That
| Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop
|
| Not really about a company, though.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| If you like the Lyons (and you should, they are good guy hackers)
| be sure to listen to Tom on the On The Metal podcast from Oxide.
| berlinbrowndev wrote:
| Nice. I always wondered how Java grew out of all this.
| zkmon wrote:
| I always wondered why it was sold to Oracle.
| trollbridge wrote:
| A fire sale where Oracle got IP they could figure out how to
| make money off of.
|
| IBM should have bought Sun, or at least Java; it was a much
| more natural fit.
| crmd wrote:
| I was there. IBM tried to buy Sun. Lawyers said no.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Whose lawyers? IBM's, or Sun's? And why?
| matt_heimer wrote:
| Given that IBM has turned Redhat Linux into the next Solaris
| after what they did to CentOS, I'm not sure that Java would
| have been better with IBM. At least Java has been getting
| updates and things still get released under OpenJDK.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| IBM would have killed the hardware immediately. They wanted
| JAVA not the HW.
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| I was at SGI during its heyday. Best time of my career. The
| highest density of insanely smart people I've ever worked with, I
| learned so much from them.
|
| One thing overlooked from that era was that the customers were so
| cool - they were building virtual wind tunnels, flight
| simulators, protein visualizers, etc - not running payroll or
| inventory management.
|
| We used to say our customers used our products to make money, not
| count money. Joke's on us because it turned out the market for
| counting money is much bigger :-)
| jahnu wrote:
| Like personal computing up through the 90s to the .com boom
| everyone was trying to have fun and make cool stuff at the same
| time. Being able to get paid for it was an amazing bonus. Now
| it feels like getting paid comes first.
| TMWNN wrote:
| > Joke's on us because it turned out the market for counting
| money is much bigger :-)
|
| Even that turned out to be not as large a market as expected.
| _PC Magazine_ and _InfoWorld_ in the 1980s ran many, many
| reviews of packaged accounting software at various price
| /size tiers. 70% of them died against QuickBooks, a product
| that didn't even exist then. 15% got bought by SAP, Sage,
| Infor (for some reason, Europeans dominate the "legacy
| accounting rollup" space), or Microsoft. 15% survive by
| selling the same software for 40 years to small customers
| local to them, and/or very specialized verticals (pawnshops,
| watercraft rental).
| mrandish wrote:
| I _think_ the expression the GP was referring to (which
| would have been common in 90s workstation vendors selling
| to engineering /scientific customers) wasn't so much about
| accounting software specifically as big finance and
| business systems in general. This would include the high-
| availability, data center big iron supporting things like
| transaction processing, inventory and business processes in
| general. The kind of stuff companies like SAP can sell at
| $5M a year to one customer with so many modules I'd have
| trouble even remembering how they all fit into the overall
| global operations of a F500 firm. IBM and others could make
| stupid amounts of money selling computers, storage,
| networking, services and consulting around this stuff (and
| they still do).
|
| None of that software was "packaged" in the way desktop and
| workstation-centric people like me think of it and unlikely
| to be reviewed as products by PC Mag or Infoworld. For
| example, I had a friend in the 2000s who worked at Intel in
| "operations" try to explain the project he was working on
| to me. It was a multi-year, multi-million dollar software
| module + integration + customization contract with SAP that
| was focused on tracking, managing, projecting and
| optimizing Intel's product SKUs, which apparently number in
| the tens of thousands across variants, versions and geos. I
| never really got a thorough understanding of what it
| actually _did_ but it was expected to take five years to
| implement and hundreds of people across multiple divisions
| worked hours a day in it and it was 'mission critical'. I
| asked what would happen at the end of five years and he
| told me it would certainly run at least a year or two over
| and then they'd probably start a new contract to work on
| the next iteration of a system to replace it (because that
| was, apparently, pretty normal).
| okdood64 wrote:
| > Now it feels like getting paid comes first.
|
| Understandable given the cost of living in SV.
| rconti wrote:
| In the blog, he commented on his brother being distressed
| as they were barely managing a mortgage on 3 full-time
| incomes.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Is 30 years too late to say thankyou? I was an SGI customer in
| the UK. Genetics research and bioinformatics. I remember when
| we bought our Power Challenge XL, (size of a refrigerator),
| some guy with a PhD showed up to install it _and spoke
| biology_. I was impressed.
|
| SGI absolutely rocked it in those days.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| A 280Z with a "UNIX" plate. So basically you're the coolest
| person of that decade. Thanks for the post! Amazing.
| rconti wrote:
| The "Live Free or Die" NH plate really makes it.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-30 23:00 UTC)