Even though I worked for companies that killed Sun, I never stopped admiring the foundational work the company was doing, which was not just cool, but critical for technological progress, and was very sad when the company sold out to Oracle and was gutted alive. HPC stuff Sun pioneered is still very relevant today. In an alternate timeline, Sun fully embraced Open Source and became a key pillar of the internet today.
Unfortunately, while we are well aware of cool tech companies that were ran aground by the finance/sales/management consulting types, Sun felt like a company ran aground by engineers.
Zuck famously kept the Sun logo up for quite a while when Facebook bought Sun's HQ campus, as a warning to the employees of what they could become. In some ways, Facebook/Meta is the spiritual successor of Sun, just like Google became the spiritual successor of SGI when they bought the SGI campus.
But these two ad driven companies never quite became the new Sun/SGI, for better and worse.
I don't disagree that Sun was a company run aground by engineers -- though I certainly like to think of myself as one of the engineers trying to navigate us around the rocky shoals! For whatever it's worth, I broadly stand by my analysis on HN fourteen years ago (!!) of Sun's demise[0] -- which now also stands as clear foreshadowing for Oxide eight years before its founding.[1]
There's a world where Sun did what you hoped (became a systems company) and created Joyent in-house. However, hyper-scaling means going fast and cheap before good comes along. Sun's habit was fast and good and that's an extremely difficult hurdle to overcome culturally. (By fast I mean growing a platform, not raw performance, FWIW).
Solaris 10/11, with all its technologies (zfs, zones, crossbow, dtrace, etc), was the pinnacle of UNIX that came out just when the world changed. At a company I worked at circa 2008-12 (that was a solaris shop) we essentially created a proto-docker with containers and ZFS that allowed rapid deployments and (re)building of our systems. It was a game changer for on-prem.
I'm not sure what Sun could realistically have done to come out the other side of the dot-com carnage. Other companies in roughly equivalent situations come to mind. You start looking at doing a hard reboot when the margins for that reboot aren't there and it's difficult to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe an earlier reinvention involving more open source and alignment with where hardware was headed. Don't know.
Sun did waste a lot of money in buying MySQL, $800 million in cash and $200 million in stock. Certainly a distraction, as well.
Sun never offered any way to inexpensively get onto the on-ramp of Sun hardware and software as they thought they could continue selling high-margin hardware forever; they had their $995 V100 which even included their much-loved LOM which was a remote-management device like iLO/DRAC/IPMI , then followed it up with: nothing.
Some more companies undisclosed and of course in 2000 Cobalt Networks for $2.0B.
But in general, just hanging around on SPARC far to long. Unfortunately the person put in charger of SPARC told Scott that he thought SPARC could be saved but it would need 4-5 years. And that's when they went into mulit-core, selling everybody on the whole 'threw-put computing' nonsense.
Well, in stock market terms the MySQL deal paid for itself. It pushed the stock well up. However turning this in real money wasn't possible in the year they had till IBM and Oracle did their bidding.
That Solaris/Toshiba laptops deal was interesting, but if I recall correctly the price was a bit too much, and maybe it could have been considerd yet another distraction.
I surely would have liked to get one of those laptops, though.
I think the easiest thing would've been to basically ignore dotcom and thus only take a hit from the general financial downturn and not from basing your company around the stock bubble (tortoise vs hare type of deal) , but Platt is the only example I know of and he got kicked out of HP for doing that.
Honestly, it's because of what Sun's innovations in systems software that I look so fondly on their work.
I do ask myself after reading the HN comment you linked, how often is the limiting factor of systems software the hardware? Potentially a case of this with consumer hardware is ACPI issues, like [1] and [2]. You could design the best software, but if your underlying firmware or hardware is faulty, then you would have to design your software around the faults instead of improving the lower layers or accept bugs.
Oxide describes on their website issues with "vendors pointing fingers with no real accountability, even when teams need it most," and I have seen this point discussed online in regards to Oxide's work on designing their own hardware and firmware. Incidentally, I applied to Oxide recently; I think they're cool for the reasons I thought Sun was cool.
“ Believe me that some of us understood this: I worked extensively on both Solaris x86 and with the SPARC microprocessor teams -- and I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC.”
Was that before or after you realised the Linux kernel devs were better at squeezing performance efficiencies out of x86 than you guys were?
Why are you hurt? And why does it lead to comments such as above? I think you need to figure that out, because it wasn't a good wholesome comment by any measure.
I'm not. But there was a technical discussion made where the kernel devs at the time explained why they were beating the pants off Sun, and Cantrill replied with "have you kissed a girl".
That's the sort of behaviour I'd sack the guy for if he worked for me.
Oh brother, this again. To bystanders wondering what the hell this is about, it's actually about two things, the most recent of which was over a decade ago.
The first thing is a regrettable quip of mine on Usenet (RIP) from October 29, 1996 -- just over 29 years ago (!!) as of this writing. As I have made clear several (many?) times over the years, I do very much regret it: I was young and it was stupid.[0]
But that's also not what this is REALLY about, because that decades-old quip on Usenet had itself been forgotten for over a decade when it was dug up in 2013 by people who newly discovered that they hated my guts. And they discovered they hated my guts because they vehemently disagreed with my handling of the the Noordhuis pronoun incident.[1] And on this, I have no regrets -- and will have no regrets.
Hopefully that clears up where the (seemingly limitless) venom is coming from -- with my apologies for dragging confused bystanders into decades-old internet beef!
I (obviously) don't agree with your characterization, but given that I don't work for you (and won't) and that you don't work for me (and won't) can we just let a decades-old disagreement live in the past? Not that it will stop or dissuade you, but I would point out that following me around on HN just to leave nasty replies is exactly the kind of harassing behavior that you so frequently decry in others...
You cannot get upset about someone saying that they would sack you if you were working for them when you did the same to someone else.
I would not work for you because you exhibit all the qualities of a bully. You've been exhibiting this behaviour for decades now. Every time I see you say that you needed to "teach the hardware guys a lesson", or you write a blog post that you would sack a non-employee, or you resort to invective when you could calmly address the issue without going full nuclear, then it confirms my opinion of you.
I'm not following you around HN, incidentally. You just happen to comment on posts that I'm also interested in. I know, however, that if I ever did work for you or worked in the same organisation as you, I'd likely become your target.
Interesting. That was not my perception of Sun at all. “The network is the computer” was a marketing campaign. Java was a language developed for IoT/toasters, and then hard pivoted to a write once run anywhere weblet language (ultimately to be replaced by a guy who threw together an integerless programming language that sounded like a skin condition, renamed to ride the crest of energy sun marketing money threw at things).
Sure, Solaris was rock solid, but it was also pretty conservative in its march forward as a Unix, being ultimately trumped by Linux.
Sun had an amazing team of people that worked on Self project led by David Ungar and others (Lars Bak who helped give us V8). They let the whole team go, who then went off and did sime cool things with dynamic optimization, which Sun ultimately ended up hiring/buying back to create the HotSpot VM.
Any NIH and other dysfunctionality went far beyond the engineers at Sun.
> “The network is the computer” was a marketing campaign.
No, not at all. It became a marketing campaing in the very late 90s dot.com boom, but the concept that defined Sun goes back to the beginning, 1984. Back then, that was a radical vision and Sun truly lived it internally for a long time.
Also, the number format is a standard, not only used by JS, and given that it was supposed to be a minimal scripting language it is hard to argue against the initial design choice of choosing one all-encompassing big standard, and not burden the language with a complete set. Since he criticism was on the initial design:
> ultimately to be replaced by a guy who threw together an integerless programming language
I would like to refute it by pointing out that the criticism ignores the initial use case, as well as the actual existence of integers within that larger number format standard. Later, when enough people (and companies) demanded it, a big integer type was added, after all.
Internally runtimes use different paths depending on what kind of number it is.
For many use cases of integers, especially internal ones, like array indexing and counting, those integers are just that, and an extra integer type for extra purity is not much of a problem. For other uses of integers, e.g. finance (using cents instead of dollars), it sucks that you have to pay a lot of attention to what calculations you perform, so not having (had - until BIGINT) a real integer type as aid indeed made it less pleasant to do integer arithmetic.
This was also back when you could walk into the library and get the email credentials of a random professor and then use it to hide behind when you took down a network of another in state university because an engineering professor didn't think computer science majors were as smart as he was.
Yeah, man, good times.
My buddy got a visit from the feds and lost his computer lab access for a semester.
Not sure why anyone would think that stealing someone else's data and attacking a network is funny. The only difference between then and now is that now you would get a criminal record for that. It was as morally wrong to do that back then as it is now.
I'd note that a huge amount of the work at those companies was hardware (and a lot of theory in the case of Bell Labs)--though there was, of course important software as well, a lot of it related to Unix.
Doesn't mean it might not have been a blast but not hacking on software and playing in the open source world as is the case at at least some companies today.
Well I still think that software like DTrace, ZFS, NFS, IRIX and Solaris, IrisGL, and the like are cool, even if there was a lot of hardware engineering. I realize that there are disadvantages to it, but the variances in ISAs (MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, etc) seems like it could have posed challenges for software people.
Sun did a lot of great software too and I know a lot of the folks involved. I just think many people look at the innovation through the lens of software (especially open source) hacking which a great deal of it wasn't.
When I was in the minicomputer business, it was maybe 50/50 hardware and software (and that mostly assumes you considered software to include low-level things like microcode). And software people weren't mostly paid more than those in hardware--which is to say generally a good middle class professional wage.
> which is to say generally a good middle class professional wage.
Working with Suns and other workstations as a teen (so my perspective was limited), I caught the very tail end of software as a modest middle class professional wage for everyone doing it (right before the dotcom boom hit).
The people I worked with were really good at what they do, but not strutting like newcomers started doing pretty much the instant the dotcom boom started, and not rich. (Well, one guy did buy a used MR2, and get his private pilot license, but he also lived with his wife in a trailer on an undeveloped parcel. He was a very solid software engineer, working on important stuff.)
I might have inadvertently tried to preserve some of that modestly-paid excellence of the generation before me, but I don't recommend that. Cost-of-living in my area is determined by people making FAANG-like money (well, and real estate investors, and price-fixing), and you have to either play along with that, or move away.
Mind you, California cost of living was on the high side even in the nineties even relative to at least modestly expensive areas like the Boston area suburbs--there was really very little tech in Boston proper at that time.
But a somewhat high-flying (albeit hardware) company was recruiting me for a CA job and they basically admitted it would be a lifestyle downgrade in terms of salary.
Some people made a lot of money when dot-com hit. A lot also got wiped out and ended up leaving the industry.
I never had the highs or lows. I was probably making something south of $100K in the late 90s.
> But a somewhat high-flying (albeit hardware) company was recruiting me for a CA job and they basically admitted it would be a lifestyle downgrade in terms of salary.
I've been given second hand accounts of similar situations. One was team consolidation, and the business was offering Boston-area engineers positions in San Jose. One of the folks who moved with his family was back in MA within 5 years. His salary was not adjusted as much as it should have been for the cost of living difference.
If it meant that people who didn't want to do software didn't ans people who wanted to do software did software, then it sounds nice. I was never interested in making a lot of money in software.
A question, though. Was software designed at Sun closely with hardware teams and vice versa, or were they mostly disjoint? Presumably many hardware companies that have succeeded have built good tooling around said hardware (like NVIDIA).
I didn't actually work there; I knew a lot of the folks from the perspective of an IT industry analyst both during and after a lot of the work there. I certainly saw some level of integration with things like Dtrace (how couldn't you) but when you were a systems company, it's probably the case that software folks couldn't really just divorce themselves from hardware.
The low-level software work at Data General where I was prior to the analyst biz was certainly integrated to a certain degree--read Soul of a New Machine if you haven't. The software folks for the minis were also mostly in the same same location. As things migrated to Unix, most of that team was in RTP and it's probably fair to say that there was less integration though probably wasn't something I thought about a lot of the time. Hardware stayed in Massachusetts.
I'm not even out of college, and I feel the same way. Especially for Sun, everything they did was so cool. "The network is the computer" and all that.