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 :-)
> 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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Indeed. So many things look meritocratic once one is born in right country, right city, right zip code , right family and so on.
I am not who you replied to, but this is why I find it odd that people want nepotism to continue.
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.
I pretty much agree. All of my jobs since grad school have come through professional connections—none remotely through relatives.
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!
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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.
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
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.
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.
What happened to Unix? It became part of the background. Sun (and then Linux) succeeded so well that Sun didn't matter any more.
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
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 unparalleledThe 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?
$ 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
Oh yeah, how can I not have listed mdb!
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.
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.
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.
Then how do you explain StrongARM?
Why would DEC indulge in an also-ran? Ken Olsen's folly? Or is 1996 far too late?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
>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.
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Yeah, in my 40s, but I always daydream about having a job at early Sun, DEC, or Cisco.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Those are great! I picked up a copy of Nokia: The Inside Story at a thrift store and was pleasantly surprised. I will add more if something comes to mind.
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.
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.
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
- 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)
- ...
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.
> 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.
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.
And here we were running a large regional ISP on it in 1997.
> 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'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.
Joyent was a reaction to Sun's acquisition by Oracle.
> 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?!
> 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.
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.
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, 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.
Open source licenses is one. He tried to (chuckles) kill MYSQL (laughter). After paying a billion for it (ROTFL)
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/
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.
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.
If you want to see the included images, jump back to 2022: https://web.archive.org/web/20221218011802/https://akapugs.b...
A 280Z with a "UNIX" plate. So basically you're the coolest person of that decade. Thanks for the post! Amazing.
The "Live Free or Die" NH plate really makes it.
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.
"There were a bunch of bottom feeders targeting the home-brew market"
Yes we all know how poorly it went for those folks lol
Is he talking about Venix, Coherent, PC/IX?
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.
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).
Commercial ethernet switches weren't a thing until 1990 (Kalpana), and 100Mb ethernet is from 1995. So, yeah, a lot of ethernet in the late 90s was 10Mb. It's still a thing today in some embedded applications, and switches still support it.
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.
DEC Alpha was another big one.
Digital Unix (AKA: Tru64, OSF/1) / Alpha
That is how I took it. Xenix, etc, anything not deemed a "workstation" in that era's parlance.
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.
Every Sun alum that I had the pleasure of working with was brilliant.
Truly learned a lot from them, especially when pair programming. Must have been a special place to work at.
Nice. I always wondered how Java grew out of all this.
Great pictures. lol @ khosla.
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I always wondered why it was sold to Oracle.
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.
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.
IBM would have killed the hardware immediately. They wanted JAVA not the HW.
I was there. IBM tried to buy Sun. Lawyers said no.
Whose lawyers? IBM's, or Sun's? And why?
IBM. Regulatory risk issue.
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.
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.
What happened to this world? How do we get back to it?