Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago (2022)

akapugs.blog

196 pointsTMWNN169 comments

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 :-)

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.

> 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).

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).

> Now it feels like getting paid comes first.

Understandable given the cost of living in SV.

In the blog, he commented on his brother being distressed as they were barely managing a mortgage on 3 full-time incomes.

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.

What happened to this world? How do we get back to it?

> 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%.

> 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.

I pretty much agree. All of my jobs since grad school have come through professional connections—none remotely through relatives.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

>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.

I am not who you replied to, but this is why I find it odd that people want nepotism to continue.

Indeed. So many things look meritocratic once one is born in right country, right city, right zip code , right family and so on.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Prohibition of slavery is a shared principle, unlike preference for the stranger over my brother.

There are no universally shared principles.

I love my siblings and they are intelligent successful people but I wouldn’t want them as coworkers because they don’t have the necessary skills and experience to do what I do.

Slavery is legal in the US in the case of prison labor.

I’m sure someone exists who would employ minors given the opportunity.

> There are no universally shared principles

That’s a bleak perspective. I’m not sure how we are having a conversation in the absence of universally shared principles. Perhaps we aren’t!

As I said: bleak.

Edit: > We accept some restrictions for the smooth running of society.

I don’t suppose we accept those restrictions universally…

There can be mutually shared principles but there are no universally shared principles.

> there are no universally shared principles

Careful…

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.

I did not advocate fairness, neither I am berating nepotism. Maybe you don't read comment but feel urge to respond nonetheless.

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.

> 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.

Nepotism is not a great reason to want larger families...

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'.

Fair!

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.

What happened to Unix? It became part of the background. Sun (and then Linux) succeeded so well that Sun didn't matter any more.

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.

> 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

> 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.

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.

Do you have a link to that podcast?

https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/05/podcast-was-open-sourc...

There's also a link to a transcript of the whole series at that link. https://grhpodcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/Opensourceinevitability...

I did the series early in the pandemic as an activity until things blew over in a couple months. :-(

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.

I know of one total rewrite.

"I couldn't find anything that was copied." -Dennis Ritchie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

First sentence of the history: they couldn't make alpha do it.

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.

Acorn Archemedes was a great machine for its time, and I liked the software.

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?!

What software? It was starved.

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.

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.

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.

Wrecking the workstation market was easy, because workstations had small numbers of CPUs, and small pools of RAM. Intel started fucking up that market in the late 1980s.

x86 wasn't competitive on the server side until K8 (AMD) and Nehalem (Intel).

So you have a real long stretch -- 1987-ish to 2008-ish -- where proprietary UNIX on proprietary architectures owns the server side, even though the workstation market is eroding the whole time.

> x86 wasn't competitive on the server side until K8 (AMD) and Nehalem (Intel).

Google and Amazon launched world-beating datacenters before 2000 on P6's, that's just silly.

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.

26 years. Not much shorter than Microsoft's ride so far, but much much shorter than IBM's.

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.

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

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.

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?

Again, 100% not going to engage on another senseless ZFS/dtrace/whatever platform flame. But this point is worth responding to:

> Was SunOS 4 as transformative as BSD?

SunOS was BSD! 3BSD was absolutely transformative. But 4BSD launched after Joy and much of the team were already working at Sun, and almost all future "BSD" innovations of note were actually SunOS features.

Sun took a historically important but otherwise obscure academic platform (total VAX BSD deployments as of 1982 were what, in the dozens?) and turned it into an industry-defining software environment that we still use today (albeit in cloned form).

  $ 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

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I still miss mdb.

Oh yeah, how can I not have listed mdb!

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

There are so many more dimensions than "for the paycheck" vs "technology for its own sake". This is a pretty bad false dichotomy.

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.

>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.

Yeah, that's pretty impressive. It's a privilege to work among those people if one gets the chance.

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.

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.

Even working at Sun during the 00s, when it was declining, was a gift. I know; I was there.

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.

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.

Yeah, in my 40s, but I always daydream about having a job at early Sun, DEC, or Cisco.

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?

I haven't read it, but High Noon[1] comes up in recommendations about Sun Microsystems history.

1. https://archive.org/details/highnoon00kare

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.

Jonathan Schwartz was the downfall of Sun

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.

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.

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.

Joyent was a reaction to Sun's acquisition by Oracle.

I'm getting into the history of Palm who seemed to be the pass around project for 20 years before hp burnt it to the ground. Are there any good books or something about the full history? Feels like all of these companies are woven together like a bowl of spaghetti...sun, oracle, google, apple, etc

> eventually become a race to zero

Free and open source software commoditised almost every sliver of the market. A lot of the investment in cloud and AI is to recapture some margins by using access to training materials and high capital investments as entry barriers.

> 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.

Sun actually lasted much longer than they would have except that Linux was terrible, basically unusable for commercial purposes until about 2005.

And here we were running a large regional ISP on it in 1997.

In the PNW, eskimo.com was using Sun machines at least in 1994 when I joined, and I assume for some years earlier. Oz.net was using Irix on SGI machines :)

That stuff was surely popular, too! But we were running LAMP stacks in the late 90s to host customer content on cheap x86 boxes, and it that was an enormously popular hosting solution for many years before 2005.

Sun boxes were very nice machines, but an entry level Sun Fire V480 debuted for $20K, and that would buy a whole tabletop of x86 servers in tower cases.

There was a much greater variety of plausible server options back then, to be sure. I'm mainly arguing against the idea that Linux+x86 was useless until 2005 or so. I had personally worked in 5 different ISP/hosting companies by then which all used that exact combination.

Oh, absolutely, fair point. I used linux exclusively on the desktop from 95-02.

Even commercially; I worked at a decent-sized digital services company in 99-02 that, from the day I started, had 2 ALR 6x6 pentium pro machines as database servers (6 proc, 6 hot swap drive bays). When they crashed, our main issues were with really long-running `fsck` because journaling filesystems were not a thing.

All the app servers were white label intel boxes. We had issues, sure -- the one that comes to mind chiefly is that we were doing IP-based virtual hosting (I don't think name-based virtual hosting was a thing yet), and Linux seemed to get unstable and randomly drop the virtual interfaces once you exceeded maybe a few hundred per NIC, and you'd have to restart the i/f to fix it. I don't think these were behind LBs yet, but I can't really remember.

All that stuff was on RedHat, the first time of 2 or 3 times that Redhat went through the v7 -> v8 -> v9 period :)

Even in much later years (eg, 2008-ish), I remember that too many vendors (HP, Dell, etc) would ship these prosumer grade RAID cards that absolutely fell over (locked up) at sustained high util %. You could (probably correctly) argue that was because we didn't pony up for the true high-end x86 hardware, but the fact that enterprise server companies shipped this stuff at all meant it made the x86 option look less robust compared to the big iron.

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.

> When Linux on x86 is working well, there's little reason to shell out money for Solaris on SPARC

They still had the high-end gear. I remember SPARC boxes with more than 60 sockets and mainframe-like partitions (and mainframe-like availability). And, if you wanted to develop for those, it’d make sense to buy a SPARC workstation running the same OS.

Sun could be in the same niche IBM carved for itself in the POWER and mainframe space, but while IBM continued investing in POWER and Z, Oracle shut down SPARC development.

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/

They didn't lose to NT. The loss in the consumer desktop market occurred in the DOS era.

NT ate the technical workstation space from below. Once NT was good enough on commodity hardware, they were toast.

Unless they went the Apple route and made “luxury workstations” average people would buy. Hindsight is always 20-20, so we now see all the things they could have done then to prevent now from happening.

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.

It wasn’t Google’s investment that made Linux a viable OS for enterprise applications. Google using Solaris would have made little difference.

Active Directory was a huge win for Microsoft. We’ll see them milk that product for generations. Sun could have captured a part of that, but it’d need to compete against Microsoft when 99.9% of the clients using AD were Microsoft. I doubt they would succeed.

Another fun alt-history branch is the one Sun manages to sell thousands of Amigas as low-end Unix workstations, moving Unix down into the personal computer space, and saving Commodore.

Sadly, none of that happened and we live in the crappiest timeline.

Sun selling Amgias would have been quite interesting.

As for AD, Sun had an opportunity to buy u/lukeh's XAD, which was compatible, and it could have done the whole embrace-and-extend thing to MSFT. Instead Sun passed on the deal, Novell bought it instead, and then MSFT acquired Novell. At the time the Sun DS folks were not particularly interested in taking on AD -- they had a cash cow and they were milking it, so no need for innovation.

As for Google using Linux or Solaris, it certainly would have been a PR boost for Sun, and one way or another would have improved Sun's position while denying Linux important resources (contributions from googlers).

Anyways, these things didn't happen.

>Another fun alt-history branch is the one Sun manages to sell thousands of Amigas as low-end Unix workstations, moving Unix down into the personal computer space, and saving Commodore.

This never would have happened with the 3000UX, and various websites are guilty of passing on nonsense (like Sun actually having designed the darn thing). Amiga by this time had already fallen behind Apple's 68K offerings. There is no time in history when the 3000UX was competitive with Sun's own products. By this time Sun had three separate offerings (SunOS on SPARC, SunOS on 80386, and PC/IX on 80386) and would not have added another which, again, was technologically behind and incompatible with Sun's own products.

Maybe. Sun could have acquired Commodore in 1984 or 1985 and Dave Miner and the blitter/copper, and gone a bit more the SGI route.

Also, Commodore did the first SVR4 port outside the Labs, and Sun ended up doing the first commercially successful port of SVR4 (Solaris). So it's not that crazy.

(I think the SVR4 porting was probably a mistake. At Sun we had a pejorative for a lot of the garbage in SVR4: "it came from New Jersey".)

> Maybe. Sun could have acquired Commodore in 1984 or 1985 and Dave Miner and the blitter/copper, and gone a bit more the SGI route.

You mean acquire Amiga. Commodore in 1984 was far larger than the brand new Sun. But yes, that is a very intriguing path not taken.

>(I think the SVR4 porting was probably a mistake. At Sun we had a pejorative for a lot of the garbage in SVR4: "it came from New Jersey".)

You obviously are on the West Coast side of the Berkeley/Bell Labs divide. Was there a lot of internal discussion/dissension before/during the SunOS/Solaris transition?

> You obviously are on the West Coast side of the Berkeley/Bell Labs divide.

No, I joined Sun long after the SunOS 4 -> Solaris 2 transition. The "it came from New Jersey" thing was just a pejorative phrase we used for ugly code with ugly code smells that came from SVR4. It was certainly not my coinage, but rather something Sun's greybeards would say. I had occasion to say it myself.

Basically STREAMS and XTI were disasters that took two decades to eradicate. But there was plenty of stuff in userland that wasn't great either. I recall a bug in eqn once that elicited that comment from someone.

> Was there a lot of internal discussion/dissension before/during the SunOS/Solaris transition?

There was plenty of evidence of internal dissent still a decade after the transition. SVR4 just wasn't all that great. And really, Solaris did not resemble SVR4 that much anymore 20 years after the transition. However, Sun was able to make Solaris quite good in spite of SVR4.

Ultimately I think the transition was good for Sun though. More than anything the user-land of SVR4 was fundamentally different from that of BSD primarily because of ELF, and I think ELF was a fantastic improvement over static linking (at the time, and even now because the linkers haven't adopted any of ELF's semantics wins for static linking, though they could).

> Maybe. Sun could have acquired Commodore in 1984 or 1985 and Dave Miner and the blitter/copper, and gone a bit more the SGI route.

Another path not taken is the Commodore 900 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_900> running Coherent. If Sun buys Amiga, perhaps Commodore goes ahead with it and eventually dominates the world via Unix(like)!

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.

> 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?!

> Larry Ellison doesn't understand mindshare

Given Larry is the third richest person on the planet, he understands everything way better than us.

Never underestimate the value of luck and of being in the right place at the right time. Larry doesn’t have to understand everything - he pays people to understand the things he doesn’t. His main expertise now is with racing boats.

If that makes you feel better then good luck with that. I'd love to have his luck then.

Remember he bought Sun in part to be able to kill MySQL? I do.

Oracle was kinda sponsored by the U.S. government initially, IIUC (but maybe that's just conspiracy theories floating around?). They had the best SQL RDBMS for a long time, which created mindshare. Back then Larry knew better or didn't think of milking his customers, either way Oracle back then built customers and mindshare. Eventually Oracle began milking their customers. The Sun acquisition experience seems to bear out the idea that they are no longer interested in building mindshare, just acquiring products they can milk, then milk them for as long as possible, and let them die of attrition.

Oracle is here. Sun is not. Sorry, what exactly does Larry Ellison not understand?

Open source licenses is one. He tried to (chuckles) kill MYSQL (laughter). After paying a billion for it (ROTFL)

Oracle is here, but all new DBs are PG or Couch/Duck/WhateverDB. When was the last time you heard of someone choosing Oracle for a new greenfield app? It doesn't happen. No one wants to be beholden to Oracle. Oracle is just milking their cow and eventually it will run dry.

> SPARC when it was pretty much garbage

I don’t remember that time. SPARC was pretty awesome when it came out. Eventually it was surpassed by others, but that happened later.

Are there any other books about the Bell Labs you would recommend?

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.

Thanks for the mention and honored to be in the same mention as Soni and Goodman's book on Shannon!

UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Kernighan is also good, a lot of the happenings of Bell Labs is interwoven through the narrative.

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.