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.
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.
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
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 couldn't find anything that was copied." -Dennis Ritchie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX
In retrospect, if Sun had acquired Acorn, they might still be around.
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.
Why would DEC indulge in an also-ran? Ken Olsen's folly? Or is 1996 far too late?
> 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.
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.
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.
I thought all the uncritical ARM fanbois had defected to RISC-V. Good to see some still carrying the torch.
Sun ownership would not have guaranteed survival, as management did many foolish things, but it would have upped the odds.
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.
[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?!
[1] Ironically coined and named after Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy.
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.
- 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 unparalleled[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.
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%.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
In terms of optimizing for happiness and life fulfillment, I think less nepotism is probably good, even in the literal sense.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Are there any books folks would recommend like that about Sun?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
- 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)
- ...
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?!
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.
There was a blog by a lady who was an early HR employee, but I can't find it anymore.
The Dream Machine: J.c.r. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Not really about a company, though.
IBM should have bought Sun, or at least Java; it was a much more natural fit.
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 :-)
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).
LastTrain•5h ago
Yes we all know how poorly it went for those folks lol
TMWNN•4h ago
anonymousiam•4h ago
kjs3•3h ago
davidw•3h ago
* AIX / POWER
* Solaris / Sparc
* Irix / MIPS
* HP-UX / PA-RISC
And probably some I'm forgetting.
icedchai•3h ago
Digital Unix (AKA: Tru64, OSF/1) / Alpha
crmd•2h ago
kjs3•2h ago
davidw•1h ago
LastTrain•4h ago
TMWNN•4h ago