30 years ago today "Netscape and Sun announce JavaScript"
web.archive.org
web.archive.org
The 90ies had quite a few pretty visionary people. CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free on 30 April 1993, enabling its widespread use.
At that time there were still CompuServe, AOL, Minitel and BTX around - not just walled gardens but walled worlds but a handful of people already saw and shaped the future...
Agreed, the tools you learned in school influenced what you use in your job (when you had a chance to influence that), and that was understood by marketers since before Linux. I even know one top CS department that was threatened by a major software company of no internships and other sanctions, if they moved to Linux rather than teach classes with that company's software, and the company seemed to follow through on the threat when the department did Linux anyway. (Nowadays, CS departments are run more like vocational schools, or hoping students do startups, and are generally teaching whatever tools they think industry is using at the moment, rather than leading.)
Related: Apple aggressively getting the Apple II series into schools, influencing what's bought in affluent homes, even before the students are old enough to get jobs.
If Solaris was open sourced say, five years earlier, it would probably have been a major player in the OS space today. (we'll never know, of course, history took a different turn).
> But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world
IIRC i read/heard somewhere that there were also talks for Google to use sun hardware or the solaris OS for their internal infra. I don't remember the source for that though :(
But I think what they were trying to say was "in the future, the data you use will be spread out all over the network," which, yes, was an advanced concept in 1995. And I hope it was a business strategy to try to sidestep MSFT's desktop dominance (otherwise they were doing it by accident.) I think Sun did a great job of helping create a world where your desktop OS didn't matter that much (I use FreeBSD, Linux, Win10 and occasionally macOS on a daily basis.) But it seems to me Sun really missed the mobile revolution. In the late 2000s, we had a Sun guy come and try to pitch the latest SPARC CPUs for mobile designs. IIRC, they had great per/cycle power numbers, but were just CPUs (not SoCs) and it was hard to throttle them down to the point where you could get decent battery performance. Alas, so much great technology, now wasted.
DonHopkins on April 15, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Solaris 11.4 free for non-production personal use
You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident!
But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if.
The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft.
It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!
And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh!
https://web.archive.org/web/20200814053447/https://www.itbus...
Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris.
To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke:
Q: What do you get when you cross Sun and AT&T?
A: AT&T.
I would add things are rarely only one thing. Did Sun cherish Solaris and Oak/Java developers? Absolutely. Did they cherish all of them equally? Absolutely not. Did they also see them as disposable pawns in a war against MSFT? Not as much at the beginning, but pretty much exclusively towards the end.
You still can't pay me enough to use Eclipse. Well, that's not completely true. I got paid to use Eclipse a couple jobs ago. I wasn't happy about it, but I was too lazy to write something better.
And there's probably another discussion in here about how the market changes and if you don't change with the market you turn into IBM or CA. (Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.) IBM came late to the PC party and had to sell it's soul (use an open architecture) in order to not be steam-rollered by Apple (and Commodore and Atari of all people.) MSFT famously came late to the intarwebz and it took Bill Gates to personally beat up some vice presidents to get them to focus on it. I think we just violently agreed that Sun was too focused on defending their web dominance from MSFT that they sort of ignored Leenucks for too long (and as best I can tell just ignored mobile.) Imagine what the landscape would look like if Sun added third-party intel servers as first class supported systems for OpenSolaris (and maybe started OpenSolaris a little earlier.) That was probably too much for Sun management to put their brainstems around at the time.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
But if I squint I can see the strategy. First you got to get rid of the industries dependency on Microsoft, if you can get developers comfortable with Java, Microsoft Windows was not going to focus on making Windows Servers the best place to run Java.
Java could have very well been the “nose of the camel in the tent”.
Javascript was definitely an attempt to commoditize “where you run applications” to get more people running apps in the browser.
IOW, the moral argument comes first, the business case follows.
That's not how I remember it. That's how Sun would have liked to see it but it was Apache on Linux or BSD (or even SGI) that was far more prevalent, at least near me. And I spent a good bit of time in the same building as the local Sun dealership. You could not have paid me to use their warmed over and overpriced hardware. And that really is what I associated both SUN and SGI with: companies wasting money.
But hey, we're in a bubble so party like it's 1999. It's fine if your customers are doing the hype thing, but there is no reason to follow them off the cliff. Someone yesterday asked why Bezos doesn't buy one of the big AI players. That's why.
The VCs I talked to said it was a business decision. They had money to invest, so startups could afford to buy soft & hard-ware that had gone through a QA cycle or two. The VCs figured the exit strategy for most of their startups would be via acquisition, possibly by another startup so they wanted to have a standard environment to make integrating companies tech stacks easier. Or at least less distracting.
I have this vague memory of Yahoo! execs complaining about Viaweb / Yahoo! Store being written in Lisp and management freaking out that they couldn't hire enough Lisp people fast enough. Or at least that's the story that was going around the valley. (Isn't Paul Graham around here somewhere? Or someone who could point to a canonical reference where he talks about Viaweb getting acquired by Yahoo!?)
In 1995 NCSA was running just fine and from December onwards there was Apache. I had the first commercial version of the cam software out (which ran on SGI) and a year later it ran on PCs as well.
In was accompanied by a huge and successful push into universities to make it the standard didactic programming language. Even MIT switched from Scheme to Java.
Can someone fill me in, but is there still the derogatory "Java school"? I find that silly because most jobs in programming use some sort of managed memory programming language so teaching everyone in Java makes a lot of sense.
The intro CS curriculum stayed on Scheme until it switched to Python something like a decade after the Java hype cycle.
What I believe did change was the intro software engineering lab (6.170) switched from CLU (?) to Java around that time.
Fun fact: Java was also renamed from formerly Oak.
I was doing a whole lot of Netscape plug-in development around then. And traveled to Netscape's and Sun's offices in CA several times.
Exciting era it was.
So basically everywhere in Santa Clara County and more.
Ken Thompson built Unix over a 30 day period.
Youth - go forth and build us something cool! It might work out.
> He served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer before he was appointed chief executive officer, but resigned shortly after his appointment due to pressure over his opposition to same-sex marriage. He subsequently became the cofounder and CEO of Brave Software.
> JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications
Which is probably somewhat true now in the GenAI + over-engineered framework age.
DEC launched its own RISC architecture, Alpha, in 1992. I'm pretty sure DECstation was discontinued by 1995. DEC never did deliver OSF/1, its next-generation Unix, to DECstation despite promising to do so.
I built a lot of server side javascript web apps in Netscape enterprise server, and a built a windows shell in javascript with netscape (I had to get a code signing certificate to remove the chrome in Netscape). Over 300 public workstations in the libraries ended up running that funky javascript shell (replacing all the green and amber screen terminals).
Writing the server side apps and hacking together that shell is basically what taught me programming. That plus I had to migrate a bunch of perl 4 code to perl 5.
When Javascript first came out in Netscape, my prayers were answered, and there was no looking back. I've been coding Javascript every day since it was released in Netscape.
data Intranet = Intranet [Intranet]But yes, capitalized "Internet" refers to the "Connected Internet," of which there is only one. The first rule of SIPRnet is no one talks about SIPRnet. But if we did talk about it, the comment would likely be that it is like "the Internet" but not "the Internet."
If you spend time in academia or academia-adjacent industrial research, you sometimes hear "an internet" (always with lower case to signal it's a common noun) to describe a network of networks. But you are right... that use is not growing and if anything shrinking.
The only other period I have experienced that comes close is what is happening now. What an incredible time to build.
"AT&T;'s support for JavaScript is more than support for cool technology -- it is support for an open standards process."
Of course, there was the infamous `document.write()`, when the document was loading and the document stream was still open, but this was more of a hack than an interaction model.
I'm also not too sure, if LiveConnect (the connection between JS and Java applets and vice versa) was already a thing, when JavaScript was announced. (I think, this came a little later.)
Edit: I've a Netscape JavaScript book from when this was still in beta. (My first reading on the subject.) It does mention applets on a single page and that you may address them per ID via LiveConnect in a single sentence. So this was already implemented, but it wasn't advertised prominently. The book is all about form based examples.
(The applications in this book were the same that were demoed as showcase applications by Netscape on their website – and probably represent a significant part of what these voices reacted to.)
I remember using Netscape Enterprise Server suite, but didn't realize it had a JS engine in it. I do remember Rhino from a little later (though the wikipedia says it emerged in the late 90s.) And I have relatively horrible memories of the Netscape guys integrating the Visigenic ORB in both the enterprise server and Navigator. I wonder if Rhino was what they stuffed into NES/iPlanet/Sun ONE.
It's time has come...
/s
(my 2c, an ex-JS guy. Sometimes I still wrangle with it)
Standards made by accident.
Lies at the time. More accessible popular examples of extension languages already existed at the time (e.g., VB, Python, Tcl, various 4GLs, even COBOL), and none of them looked like this.
They gave it the syntax to look much like a systems programming language, and a semantics that wasn't all that great for this purpose. (Syntax inherited from Java, which was actually a very nice applications language at the time, but had to replace the C++ that embedded developers would have otherwise used for set-top-like boxes that Sun was targeting at one point for Oak (Java). And, hey, random non-programmers can totally pick up a semantics that's a mix of functional and block-structured imperative, with a prototype-delegation object model that almost no one has seen before, and lot of error-prone pitfalls.)
This is what happens when marketing, product management, and engineering aren't working together, or are thrown together much later in the timeline than you'd prefer.
> Netscape and Sun plan to propose JavaScript to the W3 Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an open Internet scripting language standard.
But first, press release! Because we've assembled an industry gang of endorsements, to plow right over the W3C on a central Web standard, with this hasty kludge that one programmer whipped out from bad requirements and rush constraints, in literally a few weeks, knowing at the time it was a poor approach and he would've done better with even a little more time or better requirements.
"We'll deal with the tech debt later." We know how that played out for the industry. Now we have an entire field that is incapable of building a reasonably secure system for anything involving the Web. (Security isn't the only effect; it's just a harder-to-ignore example of what happens when everyone has to poke at big shoddy messes to do anything, and no one sufficiently understands what they're doing.)
And it didn't even selfishly benefit Netscape or Sun for very long. Maybe some people got their bonuses and promotions that year, but both companies were soon ruined, after some great earlier engineering and product work.
"Designed by committee" as the alternative is a false dichotomy.
There was already much better work in languages for this kind of purported requirement of non-programmer (or less-programmer) use. JS obviously didn't even try to address those users.
And there were certainly better languages for letting full-programmers accomplish the same things.
Even Sun themselves internally had better work on multimedia Web browser at the time.
Instead, some team just threw anything at being able to make the press release they wanted to make, ASAP, not caring whether it was trash, or they could've even done better within the press release time constraint if they cared.
Think of all the other "worse" languages that triumphed over their purported betters.