The Sun Has Set. Maybe it will rise again | Hacker News Reader

The Sun Has Set. Maybe it will rise again

sun.com

A little sad to see sun.com redirecting to oracle.

Edit: Consoling myself that this is a better fate than just dying off like SGI

That's an understatement.

SGI is still around, http://www.sgi.com/. They were recently purchased by Rackable who took the SGI name.

My 1st job in the valley was working for SGI. Seeing our one-time rival become a forgotten memory makes me a little sad all over again.

Some of the best OS Kernel engineers that ever walked, walked the hallways of those two companies.

Yes, I got somewhat emotional(?) too. It was a birthplace of so many great ideas-- Java being the least of them. I personally feel "The network is the computer" was one of the most important ideas of the last century (the other being "a computer on every desk"), and one that Google and others are capitalizing on today.

It's really sad to see such a company dissolve away.

In addition to being a bit sad, I'm having a technical problem with the website. It redirects me to oracle.mobi, which I guess is the mobile version of the site. Not good for the company image, I guess.

Note: my user agent is "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 Slackware Linux".

Sounds like slackware hit the end of their switch statement ;)

I've said it before and I'll say it again; anyone using MySQL in new projects is living dangerously. PostgreSQL is the future. This makes me happy and a little sad. :/

I liked Sun's branding better.

I did too. They had one of the cleverest logos I've seen. With this redirect dies one of the oldest sites on the web. Sun.com had the 11th oldest registered domain name (tied with IBM.com) https://www.iwhois.com/oldest/

I tried to do some rudementary research, but without more work it is hard to know if the current owner is the original owner, or just a corp with the same name. I caught ISC as one of these abandoned domains, there may be more.

Oldest Domains:

1. Symbolics.com => Domain Squatter

2. BBN.com => Owned by Raytheon

3. Think.com => Owned by? Oracle

4. MCC.com => Domain Squatter

5. DEC.com => HP.com

6. Northrop.com => Northropgrumman.com

7. Xerox.com

8. SRI.com

9. HP.com

10. Bellcore.com => Telcordia.com

11. IBM.com

11. Sun.com => oracle.com

13. Intel.com

13. TI.com

15. ATT.com

16. GMR.com => Broken?

16. TEK.com

18. FMC.com

18. UB.com => ultimatebet.com

20. Bell-ATL.com => verizon.com

20. GE.com

20. Grebyn.com => broken?

20. ISC.com => Aquired by Kodak who abandoned domain

20. NSC.com

20. Stargate.com => latisys.com

I liked their logo as well. I used to work there and I was the lead on a long dead product called sparc cluster I. The logo we created for that was a play on the Sun logo and the product itself.

Hand written postscript (jesus, I'm old) here: http://bitmover.com/lm/sun-clust.sh

and the logo here: http://bitmover.com/lm/sun-clust.gif

A little cheesy but I always liked that logo.

Remember the Solaris screensaver, how they used to blink around in a Conway game of life simulation?

I'll miss those little guys...

I think these are the oldest .com names, but I'm pretty sure there were plenty of older .edu names.

Anyone know what's happening to the Sun research department?

Oracle said no one will be laid off and they will dramatically increase R&D spending.

As a general rule, don't trust anything that's said during an acquisition. Those communiqués are designed to assuage shareholder, employee and fan fears and usually get, uhm, reinterpreted within the first year.

Sounds like campaign promises.

I'm going to miss Sun.

OK, I take it back:

http://blogs.sun.com/kevinschmidt/entry/oracle_and_sun_middl... http://blogs.sun.com/HPC/entry/watercooler_signing_off_hire_... http://blogs.sun.com/chienr/entry/farewell http://blogs.sun.com/katysblog/entry/goodbye_sun_it_s_been http://blogs.sun.com/raskin/entry/so_long_farewell_auf_wiede... http://blogs.sun.com/jessie/entry/good_bye

Looks like the pink slips have gone out.

Here's something: "But the really eye-opening thing about Wednesday's presentation was just how much Oracle actually had to say about Java. I expected superficial affirmations like Ellison gave at OpenWorld; what I got was almost too much to process." http://infoworld.com/print/111021

I guess there is no more "dot" in "dot-com".

Maybe they can do something with sunsolve next. That site and the backend has been terrible for at least a year due to the failed backend change they were working on forever. No one on the Sun side knew where my cases were half the time.

If you think Sunsolve was bad, wait 'til you try Metalink.

What happened to all the online tutorials?

For the moment I wouldn't worry and would expect them to come back ... although maybe they'll need some prodding for some of the things that fall through the cracks.

The Java stuff is still here:

http://java.sun.com/new2java/

When Oracle acquired BEA, they took them offline for awhile.

This sucked, as the BEA products seem to demand frequent trips to the online references, and troubleshooting guides. Actually, it still sucks, because although they have replaced most of the documentation that was available (the most valuable bits were the dev2dev and forum areas) they often link back to BEA, which redirects you to Oracle's front page, or to the front of their BEA documentation section, but absolutely never to anywhere resembling where the link was intending to go.

The docs are still up: http://docs.sun.com/

The same site, just rebraded.

Java was the first real language that I learned, back in the days of BufferedReader and no generics ... I'm still young in the programming world, but to see my first and favorite programming language's developer being bought out is ... most sad, to me.

I suspect it is because I'm in a period of mourning, but ... Java just doesn't feel the same to code in right now... like it's been killed, even though it's still around...

Eric Schmidt (former Sun guy) could have bought Sun with his Google money (note: not quite).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com