I think all the well-known ones have been thoroughly covered by this point. I can think of one or two obscure ones. For example, 3D workstation companies Stellar and Ardent were acquired by the same investors, who forced them to merge into Stardent--did they manage to achieve anything interesting before fading into oblivion? Then there were Alias and Wavefront, who also combined together. You don’t hear much about these any more (though the memory of Alias|Wavefront lives on in the “.obj” format, still popular for 3D data interchange, because of its sheer simplicity).
When I came to study at my uni in 1994, all their services (DNS, mail etc.) ran on lone SPARCclassic workstation. Since they had no one familiar with Unix and I already knew Linux, they hired me to take care of that server and I eventually ended up working full time in their IT and this set up me for my career in networking. And it all started with that small Sun computer. Good memories.
I worked at Sun from 2006 until the Oracle acquisition. A company who were truly, tremendously good to their employees, with incredible internal resources and staff. But every year after the first was one crisis after another. Amusingly Sun was, like all other enterprises at the time I joined, a total Blackberry shop. How quickly RIM's empire collapsed after the iPhone was released was interesting to view from that perspective considering how things were going internally.
I worked for Oracle in Hillsboro after the Sun acquisition. I envied my coworkers who were on the old Sun employment contracts. Oracle tried EVERYTHING to get them to quit but quitting meant losing a lot of the severance benefits, which were absolutely insane, so literally nobody from Sun would quit. The Sun folks were hilarious and would stand up to Oracle's nonsense management because they knew they were untouchable. Oracle sucks. If anyone can avoid working for them do it. Don't let Oracle take advantage of you. If you can get in and get some experience then move onto another company go for it but never stagnate at Oracle. They don't care about you. They'll make that very known very quickly.
@@CRneu oh, when the deal closed an Oracle exec turned up at our plant in a suit (Sun execs exclusively wore Midwest uniform of jeans and a flannel shirt when doing Doom Tours) and cheerfully announced in a site-wide all-hands that a) Sun were famous both for being great to their customers and great to their staff, b) Oracle cared about neither of those things, only the bottom line, and c) from that day forward the company would proceed on that basis. Our management fought like tigers for our severance deals and i hope that a dozen years later there are still accountants at Oracle pissed off with what they had to sign away.
I worked with Sun/Oracle packaging engineers on a 3D packaging concept to integrate memory & processors chips to solve memory latency bottlenecks. Regrettably our approach was deep-sixed by Oracle in the Proof-of-Concept stage, and I moved on to work on stacked memory and pioneering SiP work back home in Asia. SoC ultimately proved to be a better if vastly more expensive approach, but current trends for chipsets are driving back to packaging solutions and 3D structures. NO package technology ever dies, it just morphs. STORY OF MY LIFE.
I recall reading Johnathan Swartz’s blog explaining why SUN had to be sold and why the chose Oracle’s bid over IBM’s. The reason was employee protection. With IBM there were already existing and competitive product lines in hardware, OS and development software. Oracle on the other hand had no such offerings. In fact adding hardware into their portfolio would help them with bigger contracts and projects. Some former SUN engineers and sales I knew years ago, still work for Oracle now days.
@@CRneu I contracted at Oracle for a little while and all the Oracle employees were like "you need to quit and try to get a job for Intel, this company is dying" Luckily I managed to do just that. There were actually things I really like about Oracle though and at the time I was desperate to become an employee even though they were known to pay badly. I really liked how organized they seemed to be and there was a process for absolutely everything that was very easy to find through their intranet. Intel is ridiculously disorganized in comparison but they are much more generous to the employees.
Sun vet here, ‘99 to 2004. The video doesn’t really get what happened. First, the “sharp elbows” were replaced around the time I got there. We were winning for many reasons, but two of them were the safe and solid OS, Solaris, and partnerships with industry Allies: Sun, Veritas, and Cisco. The performance advantages were still there, and winning deals was pretty easy. Unfortunately, hiring enough people was getting tough, and the culture was changing. Lower to middle management got taken over by a bunch of political parasites many who had learned survival tactics at DEC and Compaq. When things turned, these people completely quit working on keeping the company afloat, and started scheming to be the last thrown overboard as there really wasn’t any place left to go. Scott had seemingly lost control of the culture. Zander, who had been a decent COO totally threw Sun under the bus as he departed for Motorola, where he showed his inability to be a CEO which then surprised no one at Sun. Morale crashed, even though we still had an excellent platform. Perhaps there was no way forward, but it seemed to me the ingredients were there for a better solution than the world ended up with. Open systems are too open, and thieves reach right in.
You sound awfully bitter about the move to open software. By all accounts, the open systems that replaced you were more stable, more compatible, and drastically more user friendly.
@@jrshaul I’m bitter, and it’s not just about open systems. Open systems have lots of advantages, but none of them are stability (quite the opposite. I had customers with systems that had been forgotten about because they had simply run for YEARS without attention), and this has nothing to do with user friendliness which isn’t a factor for operating systems, and has not been for thirty years. Most users never see the OS anymore. I’m also bitter about all sorts of things mostly thrust on us by an education system that teaches amazing amounts of trash without bothering to teach the importance of prioritizing value over price.
@@Baronvonbadguy3 Sure. Name a subject. 🤣😂🤣😂 You know who else had rants? Scott McNealy. No kidding. He used to do a podcast for the employees, and he would do a rant on each one. One time, he went off on the money the company wasted buying vegetarian pizzas which were mostly thrown away. It was hilarious. Unfortunately, I’m not blessed with his talent for humor. Sorry.
@@jrshaul > You sound awfully bitter about the move to open software. Open Software killed off a lot of companies. Nobody ever thought that making a free version of UNIX was a sound business case for the companies that made proprietary HW and OSs. How they got away with copying and mimicking the UNIX code and didn't get sued is beyond me.
Once Redhat appeared and Oracle certified itself on Redhat it killed a lot of Sun accounts. We had an significant investment in Sun hardware and within a year it was all replaced with Redhat on Compaq servers. The saving in yearly licence costs was eye-watering.
As a former Sun reseller and support contractor, I'm very happy for you covering my favorite company for your christmas video. Thanks! I'm still working in Solaris support today and have a large collections of systems around. So sad that Oracle has ruined what was once a great company.. but that's what happens when a software guy buys a hardware company and has no idea what they actually do or how to run them. When Ellison swooped in, the first he did was double the system prices and triple the support contract fees, and struck down any special deals that Sun had going with their largest customers for decades. This lead to most of those customers taking the jump over to Linux clusters, that were just about becoming mainstream enough at that time.
Was it that Ellison is a software guy, or simply that he's a greedy b****rd who makes decisions motivated by short-term profit (or delusions thereof) and that alienate the customer? Seemed to me it was the latter, though being a software guy I could be biased :)
I wonder if killing many of Sun technologies was Oracle's plan all along. Afraid that some of the technologies Sun had could pose threat to Oracle dominance in the enterprise markets.
Consider doing a video on _Borland_ the seminal software tools and applications company. It was a huge part of the software industry from the mid-1980's through mid-1990's. Borland revolutionized and democratized software development by bringing its integrated software development environment (IDE) concept/tool to the masses. In 1990, Borland and Microsoft were the biggest software tool makers. Philippe Kahn was a swash buckling figure, ambitious and capable enough to challenge Microsoft on all fronts. It's quite possible Microsoft only defeated Borland because of anti-competitive, monopolistic actions (e.g. Windows ain't done until Lotus won't run), which it was later convicted of. It's worth noting that Anders Hejlsberg, inventor of C# and TypeScript, was Borland's langugage designer. Thanks for your edutaining videos. Best wishes.
@@tracyterpstra You and Ryan are right. These are more interesting stories of the short-lived PC software empires of the late 80's and early 90's before Microsoft executed flawlessly/brutally and the other leading players (including Novell) self-destructed, mainly by not realizing that windowing GUIs were the future.
Man, what a walk down memory lane. My first experience with computers was using a terminal to log into a mainframe just to play Star Trek. Sun was always in the background somewhere over the next decades. So many companies have crashed and burned.
Ahh, TIT Trek was it? Texas Institute of Technology Star Trek? I started on an old ITT Teletype with a 300 baud acoustic coupler dialing into a Honeywell GCOS machine or XEROX CP-V. Even then that crash and burn was going on. Honeywell, mostly controls then (and now), acquired GE's computer division, supported NASA space stuff. My ex father in law co wrote Honeywell's COBOL 74 compiler. I guess they were pushing into business, in competition to IBM. They developed Multics though, which, became part of the predecessor to UNIX as we know it today. Once upon a time, Multics was the most secure computer in the world. One or two of them used to sit in the basement of the White House. Back when PL/I was a popular programming language.
@@richardboulanger3393 I don't know what version was available in 1979 to 1981 but we were all under pressure to not only beat the enemy but get it done before our allotted time was up! Still went through a LOT of paper on the teletype.
I have some issue about how 'openness' is discussed in the video. Context is really important here. During the mid to late 1980s, most server companies supplied hardware with their own OS and tools. For example, my experience was with Data General MV series computes. You got AOS/VS, INFOS II, DG COBAL, DG Business Basic, etc. They also had their own terminals that were their own standard. You could find third party hardware but it needed to support the Data General hardware in some way. Basically, you were tied to a closed set of standards. Open systems (as was the term used at the time), was about using open standards rather than vendor specific closed standards. No one, at least at the time, was expecting the software to be open source as it was generally expected to be closed. What it was important that you would have common and agreed standards. Granted there was competition in this area which is why we had the UNIX wars but it's important not to confuse open systems with open source. The arrival of Sun was with open systems, not open source. I do appreciate that some people were interesting in open source at that time but it was a small minority and it was not a thing within the market at that time. Open source was much more of a 90s thing.
Thank you for the clarification. As both a Red Hat user (both) and early Ubuntu user (loyalist). Red Hat had some Enterprise that required contract agreements and payment.📝
This is not completely true. I used DEC computers at that time. When you bought the machine, you got the schematics. When you bought the software, you got the source code. If you found a bug, hardware or software, you documented it, and circulated the fix through the User Group. If you wrote software - including compilers for Pascal, Algol, etc) you circulated them too. Everyone benefited from this - much of the software originated as student projects in universities, but - as today much was written by companies for their own use, and then made open source to avoid paying to support it. From what I understood, it was the same with other manufacturers, including IBM, until Bill Gates stuck his oar in with an article about how "programmers deserve to be paid". Sun was originally a supporter of this too AFAIK. I am still using Sun Sparc kit, but with OpenBSD - which is actually open source, unlike Solaris. Oracle killed Sparc by being obstructive to the open source community, and failing to support its users - they are extremely unpleasant to their customers. I plan to switch to ARM. Incidentally, I was chief hardware architect for the GEC model 21 - which was almost identical to the Sun workstation (68020 in a VME bus crate) but with superior thermal management (for which I was not responsible), and also used BSD Unix and very high performance graphics, based on work by Cambridge University. However, GEC decided "there is no future in technology" - Although I believe the GEC model 21 was used at ESRO (European equivalent of NASA). This was the time when Margaret Thatcher decided Britain's future was in "Financial Services" and publicly rubbished the British computer industry (failing to support ICL - which had the Content Addressable File System (a hardware database engine) , a world-beating OS and business software, and died of the poor publicity. Her government also failed to support the Transputer, which sold to France). To this day, Britain's "world beating" financial services are incapable of understanding the concept of venture capital for innovation in the way that America does.
Thanks very much for this. I was a Sun engineering workstation customer, and later worked at Sun until the acquisition by Oracle. The thing that amazed me was, while all you presented here was happening, there was an eerie sense of calm internally. There is a saying by, I think, Euripides that goes, "Whom the gods wish to destroy, they send 40 years of success". Despite the precipitous decline, I saw no sense of concern or panic in my VP peers.
They didn't listen to their engineers, that's why they weren't concerned. I recall one long time lead eng, Chuck someone or other? When he left he sent a company wide email listing known problems with the company . It was ignored.
I miss Sun. I still have a couple SPARCstations sitting in the spare bedroom, a SPARC 20 and an Ultra 5. I haven't powered them up in years, though. I was given the 20 and I bought the Ultra 5 new, way back in the 1990s. They, and the IPC and IPX I used to have, made a nice little home network.
For years while maintaining Sun servers in NJ/CT/NY, I traded/bought used Sun parts from a company in New Jersey...I once spent 2 days upgrading two Sun E6800s by hand (3 quad CPU boards and four 8-card PCI "I/O boats" each). The CPU boards had 32 DIMMs per board (96 per server, 192 DIMMs over both servers)...I had bought 6 newer CPU board and new I/O cards. But I needed to transfer my RAM from the old CPU boards to the newer CPU boards before handing the old boards in as part of the trade up. So 192 DIMMs out, 192 DIMMs back in.
@@carlschumacher5510 Weren't these sun hardware incredibly expensive, and hard to maintain? Didn't they fail all the time? Those sun E series servers were designed wrong. Or that they never notified anyone how to properly mount them. The E4000 and up units had the air intake on the right side and exhaust heat to the left side instead of normal servers that do front to rear. So if you end up putting 2 E4500s next to one another then the one on the left would be constantly hot. Stupid design, and add to the fact that they never told anyone on how to properly mount them. Our company had these and they were always hot. I was a datacenter tech told to look into it. but the company had onsite sun techs to replace parts and they never said anything.
@@xcen1 From 1994 thru 2012 I worked with many models of Sun boxes (from ~$5K up to ~$800K models) but only a handful for E4000/E4500s...Every now and then I'd run into a popular Sun model that had a major flaw I had to work around. The E450 was a perhaps 10U very deep model that I don't think was meant to be racked (it had wheels iirc). The E450 was a model that could have 1 to 4 CPUs, one or two 10-drive bays I think, and various levels of RAM. It had a huge motherboard mounted vertically in iirc the middle of the chassis. Said MB was not supported well (it was easy to crack when installing parts). I wasn't the only one killing said motherboards, the local Sun techs were also...My solution?: I convinced management to let me only order fully-loaded E450s (all CPU & RAM slots filled, both drive cages installed, all the PCI cards I'd ever want). This was during the Doc Com era. In the early 2000, working with E6500s / E6800s / E6900s was a step up in Sun boxes (but not quite to the E10K). These were "I am a rack" frames that you kept for 5 - 7 years, adding CPU/RAM boards over time (for example as more Oracle databases were added). The E6800/E6900 were true monsters. They had two internal power planes, the OOB management computer was actually a cluster of two small computers (PowerPC based I think). The beast was a real friend of anyone selling electricity. Over the years, as the CPUs got a bit faster, you could add/upgrade any of the 6 CPU board slots (each board holding 4 CPUs)...The coolest thing I have EVER done to a production server, was replacing a CPU board in an E6800 while it was up and serving requests (you could tell the OS to move processes off of a given CPU board). One last comment on user expectations of Sun gear, during my E6800/E6900 period (2000 - 2007). Whenever I wanted downtime (patch, reboot, replace a failed part, etc) everyone "Why Carl? Why? I thought these things were bullet proof? Why?" (sigh!)...The Windows guys just had to say "Patch Tuesday". Zero objections...I remember almost hitting a clock bug (some issue after 520 days of uptime in the OOB server cluster (yeah, not a power of 2)) and having to get time slots to reboot the whole E6800/E6900 fleet.
@@xcen1 The 4500 was "cheap" for what it was in it's day. It was an NFS and mid-range data base server without an equal at its price point. The only real problem, as you pointed out, was the airflow design could lead to overheating and indeed fires. I worked at Sun from '96 to '99 personally saw one system catch fire and assisted another customer replacing a unit that had also caught fire. It wasn't intended to be a datacenter unit but rather a small office, stand alone design. The price performance was so good, however, that at one point that's all datacenter customers wanted to buy.
@@justinbukoski1 OMG no wonder sun went away. That's an ass backwards idea to say it was meant to be in office. Any server should be in datacenter environment for so many reasons 1 being a security issue. The E4000 machine weighs as much as a car. Me being a skinny kid in 2000 at 5'8" and 110 lbs I was able to lift up a HP DL380g1 by myself at that time, But this thing was so heavy 2 of us struggle to move it one time. After the first time i learned how to move it by removing everything inside, all the boards, and psu's then it was manageable to move. Jesus to put a server in an office, someone could walk by and spill coffee all over it. What a stupid idea..... And it has to be in a datacenter environment because it needed front and rear access. You're going to put it up against a wall in an office, then you'll move it to change and rear boards or psu. In a rack in a datacenter, you have open access to to rear and front.
A key moment in the development of Linux was when IBM adopted it for use on its computers, sometime around the year 2000. It was a brilliant move by IBM, which then had a much bigger reputation than today. IBM's stamp of approval made a lot of people more willing to consider Linux, and strengthening Linux helped to undermine both Sun and Microsoft.
@@schlbus Yes, but IBM announced support for Linux in 1998. That was a key moment - it meant you could run Linux on IBM metal, and with that stamp of approval, a lot of people started to view Linux as ready for prime time.
@@cv990a4 Until merging with RedHat IBM was not a key element for Linux development no matter how you spin it and no, kernel development does not count. We're not talking about business critical in the 2000s and Linux in the same sentence. I won't entertain this discussion any longer.
I was blessed to work for sun early in my career from 1988 to 1991 as a sales engineer. We called ourselves systems engineers at that time. What a learning experience that was: The people, the technology, the momentum, and the possibilities. As an engineer, I was amazed that a unix system could have an uptime greater than a week without requiring a reboot. Like anything, the growth was too fast and the company changed in spirit in the mid to late 90s. Great summary of Sun!
To this day, I'm always going for 4-digit uptimes. As a manager for a fairly large IT department, I admonished my guys to fix problems, with my line "Restarting is for losers."
Unfortunately, OS uptime seems to be going the way of the dodo. Containers seem to be helping but all of the patch restarts today are really frustrating. I remember when I would only have to patch/reboot an OS once or twice a year if that.
I had a summer job at Sun in 1996, it was an absolute dream, the epitome of cool for a computing student job. Having that on my CV opened so many doors. I miss them.
funny story about a Sun Micro Mainframe. My father started working as a Junior accountant for a Large Queensland meat processing abattoir. they had a sun computer system. when costing the production of sausages by the ton, different wholesalers order them with different ingredients... and these had to be coasted down to the 4 decimal point. and this computer was worked by terminal and punch card. and a salesman would send through ingredient list and volume etc and an hour later they would get a printout handed back to them, and then they would get back to the client with a cost often a 2 hour info round trip. well dad bought a TRS80-4k Level 1 computer when they first came out, supposed to be for me. he wrote a basic program that would work out these costings almost instantly (well a few seconds) so he could talk to the sales person while on the phone. and the next month Byte magazine came out with a basic program that would turn such data into a pie chart. one day day took the computer to work and put it on his desk, and was doing the costings instantly, when the Managing director walked past, and asked what he was doing. dad put on a demo, including a pie chart, and the MD asked the Mainframe guy to make a pie chart for next weeks board meeting. and sure enough next week at the boardmeeting, the Heda of computing showed his pie chart, and dad demonstrated the little TRS-80. and the CEO asked the main frame guy aput him makingthe pie cahrtas, and he said they they had to purchase Sun's special program for pie charst that cost $15K (remember this was the late 1970's) so the MD stood up and said to the main frame guy "your fired" and had the Main frame sent to the tip and had TRs80 put on every salemans desk, and dad was promoted to head to sales... (dad made several changed to production, that had him promoted to 2IC in a few years)...
@@johancoetzer2165 ACTUALLY... Sun did make mainframes towards the end, right before being bought up by Oracle: the M-line. The design was done by Sun and manufactured by Fujitsu. The hardware is completely redundant and can be partitioned, just like IBM's zSeries mainframes, additional processors can be enabled temporarily or permanently with a license... The only difference is, this mainframe hardware is not running z/VM and z/OS, but Solaris 10 or 11. 10 in my case. M3000 was the first, code named "Teraya" (I own one privately), followed by other mainframe models like the M10. These were all made after 2007.
Thank you for this trip down memory Lane. Working in the workstation marketplace in the late 1980’s you touched on many things that were formative parts of my career, and friendships I still have today. The best man at my wedding I met at HP, he left and we both ended up at a reseller. I few months in and he was poached by Apollo (for a crazy amount of money) and he ended up back at HP 😂. He left again. My oldest friend worked for ARM in its early days. I defected early to the Microsoft bandwagon as my interest was business not technical and I started working with Olivetti hardware (still with the occasional unix install at the start), so it was nice to see their name pop up. Always remember the Olivetti joke that it was going to be called Italian Business Machines but they didn’t think the initials would take off. But I’m rambling now - as us old folk tend to 😂.
I served Scott in his final two years as his executive presentation creative manager. In that time, he gave 300 customer presentations around the world with precision and class. I stayed through the Jonathan transition. The company then seemed without a coherent marketing strategy - trumpeting ‘open’ and ‘share’ gibberish, followed by the Oracle acquisition. An iconic company worthy of this retrospective.
I was at Sun from 1986 to 2009, and I agree that Jonathan was not close to what Sun needed. My last five years or so was spent expecting the hammer to fall at any time. But it was a great ride while it lasted.
@@steveh1792 Jonathan was a sad punchline to a long standing joke. Scott M. never understood software, nor the benefits/costs of producing it. He made a fortune taking away IBMs server business and laughing about it, while simultaneously ceding the desktop to Microsoft and setting up Sun for the fall it finally had, which was long overdue.
Memory lane indeed…I worked in the Sun/SGI/DEC aftermarket in the late 80’s through the 90’s. Those were heady times. I met McNeely and Joy at a trade show. Rode about $50,000 of Sun stock down to the ground later LOL. “Stanfurd” lots of UC people called it “Snodfart”.😂
I started driving as a chauffeur in '97 and worked for a small company of about 5 cars. From '97 to the end of '00, our company grew as fast as Sun did. We about quadrupled in size due to Sun. I'm in Boston and their campus in Chelmsford(a few old Apollo computer buildings) grew and they moved into their huge complex in Burlington. I was broke and didn't have the money to invest in stocks. But a couple of my colleagues made a killing on Sun stock(as well as others; internet IPOs were a guarantee of ROI then)and one guy retired early. I don't even know how many times I drove for Mr. McNealy, but almost all their executives and employees were just good people.
Sun gave us Java and around 2000, our company helped produce and serve a lot of JavaOne conference sessions with our learning management system. A very important customer for us.
You’re off by about 5 years. Java first hit around 1995 and started taking off in 1996. By 2000 Sun had already gotten Java 2 out the door, made Servlets standard, introduced JSP, created the EJB spec, and introduced the “Java 2 Enterprise Edition” (J2EE) concept, a confused naming convention referring to a class of application servers.
The problem with is how Oracle change the license policy for Java it is private only or you need to pay money or you use OpenJDK. What is practically heavier is how they kicked out MySQL out of the Linux community with their license model. Which caused massiv pain because tons of stuff where design and build to use MySQL as bases in the Linux space. In general Oracles and SAPs main point is they create a bubble of tools&apps&APIs which only their specialists can handle . You need their licenses , their developers which both make a golden nose at the end with it.
@@thewiirocks off regarding what? I never said that was the beginning of Java. Especially since I began programming with it in 1996. Our LMS was written in Java and we started that in Spring 1998.
I worked in the Milpitas manufacturing building then the Sparc development group from 97 to 04. It was the best job I ever had and the 90s were a true boom time. Huge Christmas parties, quarterly outings, white water rafting, Napa wine train. And tons of Tshirts! But boy did that come to an abrupt halt. Fun while it lasted.
This past fall i worked at their old Menlo Park office that was required by Meta. You could see remnants of what was once a great company through the veneer of renovations
Sun workstations with Solaris were marvelous systems and we used them extensively at my place of work. Their reliability was an asset in those days. I still remember fondly using the unix base system with Motif GUI.
Acorn (the original A in ARM) had their first chip in 1985 and sold their first Archimedes computer in 1987. ARM as a company was spun off on a different timescale.
During the initial development, the ARM instruction set was emulated in software running on a 6502 coprocessor in the "Tube" slot of an 8-bit BBC micro.
I remember when engineering workstations were the most powerful stand alone desktop computers. They, at onetime were many time more powerful than any IBM PC (and its 386 clones) or Apple desktop computer. But, in time Moore's law changed everything, and consumer grade PCs eventually could run the most sophisticated CAD/EDA and simulation software, at a much lower cost. Sun and Apollo workstations had lost their edge. The last thing I remember from Sun was Java.
I worked on Sun workstations (hardware diagnostics programming) starting around 1990, and was amazed to find just a couple of years later that a 486 upgraded to a Pentium and running Linux ran compute-intensive tasks about twice as fast. Our workstations were 2-3 years old by then, but by 1995, the Linux PC was absolutely faster than all but the most expensive Sun workstations, and we stopped buying them. Sun forgot their open roots, beginning a little with SunOS, going full retard with SPARC processors, and by then they had dug too deep a hole to ever get out of. The end of the 1990s was like a sad little joke as they kept on digging that hole. I think hey could have kept going with SunOS and Solaris, wouldn't have been too hard a problem to re-open it like Linux. But Motorola botched the 68030 and 68040 advances, SPARC was a desperate gamble which paid off for a few years, but there was no going back, they had too much face invested to switch to Intel x86, and that was all she wrote. (I can understand Sun shuddering at the x86 architecture. I wrote assembler for a lot of architectures, all were fun and interesting one way or the other, but x86 always gave me the creeps, about the ugliest architecture possible, and that didn't fit their image.)
They fell to the same arrogance has Digital Equipment (DEC): they refused to acknowledge the competition and to a combination of lowering the price and raising the performance.
Yeah, the PPro and successors ate old RISC's lunch, Windows NT/2K and Linux ate old UNIX, and when Nvidia released the og GeForce and Quadros they ate the pro 3D market. Same story in all cases, the low end market just becoming good enough to gradually eat the high end from under it. I still miss SPARC/Solaris though, and those lovely purple boxes. Not so much the E450 that almost fell out of a rack and crushed me once.
*_Former Boeing Everett..._* Boeing used Sun Micro Systems, Silicone Graphics, IBM Catia, Windows NT, IBM OS2, Mac, and Windows 3.xx over a very large campus. I was part of 350 member IT Desktop Support Team in Everett. There were 50,000 devices total, including Workstations, Servers, CAD, Network Printers, and more, used by 30,000 employees in Everett. It was challenging supporting all the various desktop configurations. When Boeing bought McDonald Douglas, we inherited their mess too. I transferred to Lean Manufacturing later. At that time Boeing was consolidating IT and standardizing Computing. IBM Catia was being upgraded to handle PC functions as part of Single Glass Initiative. There were different departments using 2-3 different types of workstations per desk. Single Glass solved part of that problem. Boeing had it's own versions of Windows Operating Systems and Windows Office. Boeing had the largest network running Microsoft Products in the world. Everett was just 1 of many other campuses around the globe. Our Call Center in Bellevue handled a millions calls per year. IT was 24/7 365 a year. Boeing may have slowed down over the Holidays, but it never stopped providing world class support to all it's computer users.
@@NoTraceOfSenseThanks for comment... Yes I was there during the merger. I was part of Lean Manufacturing and was sent to St Louis to iron out production kinks in the F/A-18 Super Hornets. Amazing experience.
Great video and interesting history, I work at NVIDIA now and many of my direct co-workers and leaders are Sun veterans (Jay Puri, EVP of WWFO and Chris Malachowski, Co-founder are probably the two most notable in NVIDIA leadership). It's a pretty incredible place to work.
Excellent video. Sun could have become what Microsoft became, and the world would be richer for it. It happened around 1988, when Sun introduced the 386i workstation. At this point, the Intel 80386 was far ahead of MS-DOS, and the PC world was desperate for a true multi-tasking, multi-process operating system. Windows 1 was a joke, and IBM's OS/2 was not ready. Power users would have several PCs at one desk, with a bank of monitors and various mazes of wiring to switch keyboards, etc. Now came the 386i, not only with a superb monitor and graphics wuth the SunOS Unix operating system, but able to run many DOS programmes in their own windows! This ability to have it all on one screen instantly made the 386i a hit with stockbrokers. Now, this was all a bit much for the 80386, and people were not used to the delayed latency of a multiprocess computer, but the 486 was already being tested in the next version. The hardware was nice, with higher end workstation features such as SCSI peripherals and the excellent monitor, but it was not PC-compatible (i.e. could not boot MS-DOS, though it ran DOS in subprocesses), even though Compaq had set the standard forever with its open ISA-based Desk Pro 386, thereby burying IBM's proprietary Microchannel bus (technically superior but royalty-laden). The 386i was years ahead of Microsoft, and had Sun gone for the general PC market, they could have taken it all. Only NT/Windows 2000 a dozen years later could compare. The NIS "Yellow Pages" administration system was being improved, and with the 486, a very attractive combination, offered at lower cost, would have captured the whole market. I bought a 386i in 1988, and two of my colleagues followed suit. It was my main computer for seven years, and served several years as a mail server. A student of mine did a massive computional thesis on one. A P2-90 PC running Linux eventually replaced my 386i. Being able to do both Unix and MS-DOS on the same machine was a godsend. Instead, Sun cancelled the 386i in 1989, after just one iteration; they also cancelled the Motorola-based workstations, to concentrate on the higher margin SPARC CPU and the professional engineering workstation market (and later servers). Admittedly, a Sparcstation motherboard was a work of minimal art compared with the always messy PC architecture. Needless to say, the PCs soon took over the workstation market, and Linux did the rest, but there was a gap of about six years between the 386i emerging and Linux becoming competitive. There was no universally available Unix for X86 PC's, only expensive, inferior products such as Xenix which had no traction in the general market. Sun could have filled that vacuum long before Linus took on the job. Sun's failure to take Microsoft and IBM head-on for the whole shebang is one of the greatest missed opportunities in history. General computing would be so much more advanced now had Sun succeeded and not Microsoft.
Sadly the group who came up with the 386i supposedly didn't really have the companies blessing, so it was starved for support and funds. Sun mgmt was both fickle, and devoted to Scott's cult of personality.
Being from Linlithgow Scotland where Sun employed 800 people and had a manufacturing plant, it had a big effect on the town when they closed the manufacturing plant. There is now a smaller presence at the site with Oracle.
The amount of Sun workstations that Nortel bought in the late 1990s and early 2000s you wouldn't believe, as many of the manufacturing rigs used them. When Nortel went into serious decline, their Sun workstation orders dried up very quickly as they had more than enough machines spare.
The original Stanford SUN CPU boards designed by Andy Bechtolsheim was the original CPU board for Cisco routers. Andy's CPU board design was also used in many time sharing UNIX mini-computers back in the mid 80's.
I started working on Suns around 1990 and continued using them through grad school and beyond, up until about 2010. They were a great machine to develop on since Sun controlled both the hardware and the software and created a very integrated feel. At the time, Apple's OS was a mess of spaghetti code. Now I develop on a macbook pro (Apple long ago got smart and switched to unix) and while it's gotten much better, it's still not as smooth as Solaris was in its heyday.
I thought Apple's MacOS was built on Unix, which is true but I recently learnt that it's not the full story. Apparently the older gen Mac OS was replaced with an OS that was based on a Mach kernel (ending with h), and one of the BSD's stack was built on top of this Mach kernel. This OS was named OSX, which some time later became MacOS. You probably know this being an apple user. It's strange how there is more to the story than I thought. Similar to how Android is not GNU/Linux, but Java-like Virtual Machines built on the Linux kernel.
Its a mistake to call Mac os UNIC because Mac os cant do any mission critical task or multiuser doing multitask Calling mac os unix is like calling a teenager a soldier because won a kungfu tournament
@@elumiomerk4013 System 7 to 8 was so broken that you would reboot 10x per day. Networking and dial up was broken, SCSI was bad. The things were slow and there were no graphics cards available. Shitbox by shitheads. G3 were probably the faultiest products shipped ever.
Sun NFS was really bulletproof. I was there for the entire ride, despite starting in 1981 on the IBM PC. The early VME bus systems were good, the 386 based design was a flop, but the Sparc based systems were just incredible. We had a Sparc 2 as our NIS master that had an uptime of 4 years when it came time to upgrade for y2k. We deployed hundreds every year in the 1990s, every software developer had one on his desktop. Too bad they couldn't catch up with the latest process nodes, it was funny to hear about dual channel memory in the PC being such a big innovation when we had been installing quad channel memory for years.
NFS was designed to be “stateless”, which caused no end of problems for Unix software that was expecting a baseline of sane behaviour from the filesystem -- ironic for a Unix-centric company, don’t you think?
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I obviously had a much different experience. Compared to other vendors (and especially Linux) the Sun implementation of NFS "just worked". When they enabled TCP rather than UDP transmission, it just worked. Since our primary use was an NFS based application, I had a lot of experience in that regard.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 NFS had some issues, but having department-wide computer transparent file system in mid 90-s, was plain fantastic. Literally, in first two years in my university department as a postdoc, I did not even know to what computer my home directory is physically attached. Compare that with Windows 95 paradigm. And I still use NFS among the three Linux machines I manage in my office now
Didn't Sun or Stanford license one of their first cards to three companies? Believe one was in Chicago, the other was Sun Micro, can't remember the third. I worked in applications my first two years out of college helping with MC68000 support for multiple customers. Supported Apollo, Apple, Sun, and many others.
1:24 There was some controversy over describing the original 68000 processor as “32-bit”, since this was seen by some as marketing exaggeration. I think the best way to describe it was as a cut-down 32-bit design. When the first true 32-bit member of the family, the 68020, was released, you could see that the 32-bit extensions were mostly just a matter of filling in gaps in the original implementation. Unlike certain other vendors, whose 32-bit chips involving sticking unsightly architectural bags on the side of their older 16-bit designs.
I cut my teeth programming CAD applications on a VAX 11/780 back in the early 80s. I remember the Sun and Apollo workstation wars. I finally jumped on and bought some HP Unix workstations in 1991 to run COTS CAD application (Unigraphics). PCs were simply not capable for high end CAD work back then. It is amazing how far things have come since those old days.
I remember back in college in 2010 We used dated Sun Microsystems Desktop PCs in one of our classes; they were definitely unique. I remember the cases of both the monitor and tower were purple.
@@Nedski42YT It took me some time to find which one it was that they had in our labs but if you google Sun Blade 1000 that was the one; the sides are blue but to me the front always looked purple but i have been called colorblind by many exgirlfriends lol.
@@Nedski42YT $990??!! That is insane! We had a lab of about 50 of them, that is crazy, I thought it was unusual that we used them and I knew they were rare back then, It was some version of Linux that they were running but I can't remember which one.
Thank you, I really enjoyed this video on a couple fronts. Apollo was the first start up I worked for and it was a short (1984-1986), but amazing ride that gave me the desire to hit a couple more start-ups throughout my career. It was also my first experience in wide spread layoffs and seemed so odd at the time after such fast paced growth. I worked at the Billerica campus and to walk through the manufacturing floor and see huge empty spaces and empty worktables after seeing them full of employees was heartbreaking. Those of us that remained were allowed to pick through some of the manufacturing floor tools and I still use a Fluke multi-meter and Weller soldering station to this day. Post Apollo I had the opportunity to work with Sun workstations and after using Apollo and it was an interesting contrast. Those were some great years I will never forget!
Scott McNeely(Sun CEO): James? James Gosling: Yeah? Scott: James? Can you please quit messing around with that editor and get in here? I've got a new assignment! James: Okay boss, what is it now? Scott: "James, I'd like you to do a new version of C++. Make it compile into p-codes like the UCSD p-system. Give it a massive o-o library, why don't you borrow a bunch of stuff from Smalltakl? Oh and I almost forgot, please, drop the unsigned integers. I always hated using those back in the day when I was a C programmer." James: Okay boss, give me 10 years, 1000 programmers, and $40B and I'll be right back ...
@NRGY There is a reason why NSF completely BANNED computer language research in academia in the mid-1980's. It was folly. A bunch of people reinventing the same wheel.
Excellent video. I spent time at Apollo in Chelmsford MA. I was vendor service for their copy machine fleet. I was able to spend some time on one of the public terminals. I knew nothing, but was intrigued. Using the contacts in this position, I entered a position at Masscomp, repairing graphics subsystems at the component level. Everything there was System V. Good times...
I was involved in hardware acquisition for a German university and we used to order SUN workstations per default. As soon as PCs had decent network cards, however, the game was over for SUN. Their prices were hopelessly non-competitive compared to what a PC with a network card cost. Similar story for NeXT; interesting hardware and OS at the time but was just too late, i.e., too expensive.
“Billion Dollar code” a Netflix series I saw mentioned Sun Microsystems and its CEO/Founder (I think) and some German software developers with a lawsuit over creation of google maps. Good movie
No, that was actually SGI (Silicon Graphics), which were close to Sun in some respects but also totally different. Both companies definitely were considered cool from what I was told.
I had such a beast of a CRT monitor. made by Sun. My brother picked it up from a trashcan at UCSC. It was at least 1440p back when most lcd monitors came at 1080, and most tvs where at 720. It was at least 80lbs, and 27" Lasted me so many years, had to get rid of it because of its the weight after I left college in 2013.
I grew up on Sun in the early 90s. They had really great tech, but unfortunately Intel eclipsed the SPARC in performance, and Linux made the high cost of Sun hardware hard to justify.
I worked at Xerox PARC in the 90s. A few Xerox Alto computers were stored in a server room across from my office. We were using the Xerox Star with Globalview in the office and Sun Sparc workstations for engineering. That didn’t last long, and soon all office computers and workstations were replaced with IBM PCs. Xerox PARC even at this stage in time was still an incredible place, so many brilliant people and innovations came out of there.
@@ajax700 PARC had several departments. I worked in a hardware and materials lab, so can’t speak for developments in computer science, though the focus there was on AI. As for hardware, I remember research in MEMS, semiconductor lasers and Oleds. Specifically, the innovations in this period were for example electronic paper, also known as liquid paper, the first digital x-ray imaging system using amorphous silicon and the first blue solid state laser in the US (Japan was first). There were also novel printing and scanning systems, which ultimately led to the Xerox developed liquid metal 3D printing of today. As an aside, because it is not often mentioned, Xerox was also instrumental in spreading VLSI technology and structured CMOS chip layout. Carver Mead and Lynn Conway developed the methodology there in the seventies.
In their hay day they were the best. We used to joke that the NT in Windows NT stood for Nice Try. I had always loved sun servers and I always wanted to get my hands on the bigger ones. In 2005 I was on the team that did the largest install of Sun servers in Europe at commerzbank in Frankfurt Germany. I thought I had died and gone to heaven, lol. such a Great Project
Thank you very much ! The video took me to 1991-92 when I worked on Solaris OS based Sun workstations. Unix was the benchmark OS at that and knowledge of ‘C’ language was a must. I wrote Image processing algorithms on Sun Microsystem…
It really bums me out that Sun, DEC and SGI are all gone. x86 servers are just no fun to work with. Unfortunately it seems ARM is set to repeat the mistakes of it's predecessors by suing it's customer (Qualcomm) instead of working with them to gain market share.
Allah willing, NVidia will eventually figure out a jit x86 transpiler for their SM arch and/or embrace RISC-V, and x86 will start to fall into decline. Intel probably wants to be out of the business, anyway, and just be a fab.
IF by "no fun" you mean "reliable," sure. ARM has far more customers than Qualcomm, and many of them are far more suited to the high performance market. We've got Unix ARM workstations right now - they're called "Apple."
Worth noting that probably about 30 ARM processors ship for every Intel x86 one. I think RISC-V is already catching up, and has already pushed MIPS into second place.
special thanks for a great 2022 season of Asianometry. Your page is one of only two we support via Patreon and your content is always topical, interesting, and educational. merry christmas!!
I had the good fortune as a cardiology fellow, of doing a post-doc at the Center for Bioengineering at the Univ of Washington, 1987-88. The group was connected by Sparc workstations and I learned Unix. We were modeling metabolic substrate flux in isolated heart models. Took the machine back to Yale and set up a bunch of websites for the cardiology section, sailboat racing groups, and ski racing organizations. I had a blast before people really knew what the internet was to become. So many fond memories. Thanks for sharing this history!
Sun engineering vet here during the boom times. 1988 - 1998. One heck of a rocket ride living through the growth and transition from workstations to enterprise cluster servers. Could see the end coming when Scott The Mouth was spending 8 out of 7 days on the golf course. Lack of leadership is what did Sun in. Great piece, thank you!
That's funny, I thought it was the PC bucket garbage undercutting the Sun Microsystems hardware and everyone's unwillingness to admit it, and design SPARC-based hardware which would undercut the PC-bucket "servers". I told them they'd go out of business in a year if they didn't, but nobody would accept the truth. Eight months later, Sun was sold to Oracle.
I remember fondly my first workstation when I joined my first ISP as a network engineer in 1996. The Ultra1 was a great tool, albeit not the most desktop/user friendly.
I still have mine with Creator 3D graphics. The company I worked for folded - they gave away the workstations. Unfortunately it won't run Solaris 10, and without a somewhat modern browser, it's kneecapped on functionality. I have it set up in my living room, power it up every so often just to see if it works.
I worked in a startup CAD/CAE software company in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, where seeing that can of Coca-Cola @10:21 gave me a big laugh, as prior to the energy drink phenomenon in the 21st Century, Coca-Cola was the energy drink of choice for the CAD/CAE company I worked at. One guy, a software developer, was known to drink 20 cans over a 12 hour day.
In the later half of the 2k's, a friend's company would get full rack Sun systems in lots with other equipment they actually wanted. Apparently that was a tactic used by the wholesalers to get rid of junk. Friend's company had no use for them and nobody would buy them for less than "paying them to take it away as scrap". They offered them to me, but I had no use for anything other than the racks and back then I could buy already empty used server racks for around $50+"you come get it", which is a whole lot cheaper than trying to figure out what to do with multiple dozens of very old SPARC systems.
Wow, this brings back memories. I spent a lot of time with Suns as a postdoc and assistant professor. They were my deep end introduction to Unix, when we got a bunch of them from government surplus, which (per Department of Energy rules) had had their disks completely wiped, so I had to build everything from scratch from tapes.
I remember around 1998 Sun workstations being used in hospital departments like radiography. They had huge monitors and looked like high quality machines. We were rolling out windows desktops for the first time but windows didn't replace those.
Great video as always. Just a note on the pronunciation of Bechtolsheim - the three syllables in German are separated like so: Bech-tols-heim, with “heim” meaning “home”. Therefore, the “sh” is not a single sound as in “shoe” but must be separated into “s” and “h”.
Interesting, I just learned of sun's this year at my new job which has a few machines still running on suns (they're slowly getting replaced as they die), it was Interesting seeing a desktop brand I'd never heard of
@@Sauceyjames eh they're more like a massive horizontal desktop (think old IBM), rather than a server rack. But they've been running 24/7 for decades now, not much life left in those old birds! (Trust me, it's maddening when they start glitching, can literally eat 12hrs of work to get them back).
Great topic! Sun is definitely one of the forgotten tech companies of yesteryear. Sun machines were a bit like Silicon Graphics machines or SNK's NeoGeo if you were into videogames. Cool, high tech machines that you knew existed "somewhere", but that you practically never came into intact with. I still remember how cool it felt seeing a whole room of them when I went to uni for my first semester. Can we get a special on DEC and the Alpha microprocessors next?
When the HP-Apollo 700 series launched they were a game changer and we grepped the root. The UX workstations stood on the top well into the 90's until Intels PII or PIII came in and absolutely destroyed them. We bought our first PC to use in CADCAM for $5,000 while the lower end 720 with base graphics (didn't have the additional graphics unit that came in a separate box), little ram and 480MB SCSI was $40,000. The HP stations paid for themselves in no time and the owners were floored when we did the first tool path demos on them. It was incredible compared to what everyone else was using in our business even though ZPR on a shaded cube was less than smooth. When the switch to PCs was made it was another night and day performance difference.
I remember my first demo on a Sun workstation in 1985, of a new automated publishing system called Interleaf. It offered true WYSIWYG text editing and page composition under an X Windows interface designed (reportedly) by MIT linguists for intuitiveness. It was impressive. Over the next five years Interleaf would be eclipsed by Framemaker, Adobe, and Quark.
I remember buying a copy of Solaris when they made a x86 version for around $100 or so, thinking I would be so cool to learn it. (please let me know if my memory is right!) Also recall buying a workstation with one of those optical mouse at one of those firesales. Not sure where it is now, but yeah, good memories. You can follow up with "Plan 9" OS and how that evolved to Google Cloud and what we have now days ... and where we might be going in the future.
Yes they brought out Solaris for x86 but it was rather crippled in that it lacked the catalogue of application software that the SPARC compiled version had and the performance delta was too much in favour of SPARC at the time.
@@BadatTanking the only thing it really lacked was Netscape Navigator. This was corrected later with Solaris 10. I still run Solaris 10 on i86pc in my private datacenter, and it is absolutely fabulous, I've weathered all the shit from GNU/Linux and FreeBSD thanks to sticking with Solaris. The software isn't a problem either, as I've built and packaged a vast library of the same software which runs on GNU/Linux. I'll be going to Tribblix on SPARC and SmartOS on intel soon, and with SmartOS, 15,000+ software packages will be available, in addition to having all the cool Solaris features like FMA, zones and ZFS, all running on intel hardware.
At Rice University in the late 80's they were setting up Sun workstations everywhere. Big beautiful monitors and an OS that was pretty friendly. Over time some Apple machines moved in next to them, and these were junky by comparison, with very picky and nuanced methods for doing anything, it seemed to me. The Suns were really luxury items in that day.
I was designing advertising for Sun products in the late 90s. The Sun team I worked with were the most intelligent people that a designer could hope for. With their cutting edge hardware and software they looked invincible. I never quite understood how their substandard competitors (Oracle, Cisco) survived the Internet burst but not Sun.
Worked with one of the suits in this saga (and my wife was for a time at Motorola). This is the best concise account I have come across! Nicely done! 😎✌🏼
I touched a Sun workstation once. It was a diskless workstation that booted across the network from another computer. I had never seen or even heard of that way of booting before, though subsequently I've spent a lot of time setting up and using diskless workstations on various platforms. After that first encounter, I never even saw another Sun product again. I started computing with 8 bit systems that ran proprietary OSes. The company I worked for, DHL, even made their own hardware, OS and application software for 8 bit and 16 bit hardware in the early 1980s. Then, they moved to Xenix on the Intel 80286, and NCR Unix on the NCR series of servers based on the Motorola 68020 and 68030 processors. Later they used HP-UX on the HP PA-RISC systems. Finally, when the Intel 80386 appeared, they used SCO UNIX as well. None of these systems were used with graphical workstations, just dumb Wyse50 terminals. So, I learned a LOT of command line computing. Later, I was exposed to Novell Netware, Windows 3.0/3.1/3.11/95, OS/2 2.1, Warp and eventually Linux. I've only recently started using FreeBSD on my home server. Sun certainly was a big player and very instrumental in getting the basic backbone of the internet started, but Linux, in particular Red Hat Linux completely wiped them out with their dirt cheap alternative. I also agree that IBM announcing that they had invested $1 billion in Linux, was a serious affirmation of how good Linux was. That sent shockwaves that affected both Sun and Microsoft. The availability of open source solutions has completely changed the landscape of computing forever. When Richard Stallman lauched his Free Software movement, I'll bet he never thought it would end up being used for surveillance capitalism.
had worked for Sun support service before the bubble pops till 2003 ... One of the key things was high prices for cheap pc parts ... Had to replace lot of 9gb IDE drives in Ultra 5 and 10 ... Server side there were also issues with things such as the FC-AL centerplane , DC-DC converters Also at the software level we had to deal with 64 bits but had to run commercial software in 32. What was great is the ability to boot either from virtually any scsi media and the network was it from pre OBP systems to the OBP 4... My 2 cts
I remember inn 1991 when Eurotherm at their Reston campus got some Sun Workstations for software development. At that time we had Macs and PCs and the PCs were really only used in the lab and the Macs for documenting. This made the Macs the main information originators. The Macs were all networked and could share digital information straight forwardly. They also ran time sharing applications at the same time with real WYWYG What you see is what you get. The PCs were not the useful the Macs were and the Sun Workstation had a lot of characteristics with the Macs. They were not WYSWYG, but they have highly readable bitmapped fonts. The SPARC station was fast! Sunview Sun's window system had tool talk that was suppose allowed various parts of the windowing gadgets to talk to each other. I could cut and paste huge text logs using the windowing cut and paste at a snap while on a Mac the system might not respond for tens of seconds. Sun Workstation then went away from Sunview windowing that had been a system that was more of a advancement over the Macs with bends towards engineering and scientists to the the common desktop environment used my HP and IBM more a kin to MS Windows window system that made the Sun and other work stations seem more like a Windows PC than an engineering Macintosh. I think that was the death of the Sun Microsystems workstation. We could still use an advanced form of that Sunview windowing system today in 2022 for engineers and scientists running CAD and other scientific packages. I do remember the Daisy System workstation. It was used for electronic circuit design in 1992. We had one and I was made system administrator for the electrical engineering department which made me the one to give it attention. It had a screen that was so dim you could hardly see it and very slow to draw. I was told that was due to the high resolution screen it was using for its day. It was extremely slow and the only way to move digital information was on 5" floppy disk. If was the critical production flow of circuit design from EEs to the drafting department. We were having to schedule engineers to use the Daisy for schematic capture use. This was a bottleneck and inconvenient. I remember talking to software support for the Daisy and people at that company they were saying they thought they are going to make it and there was talk of Daisy abandoning its proprietary workstation and porting their software to a Sun Workstation. That was exciting, but Eurotherm was paying a lot for licensing the Daisy per year and only using it for schematic capture. It might have been $30,000 a year. By the time I was involved with the Daisy the discussion had changed keeping it to having me consult the various engineering teams for a replacement for schematic capture. The Daisy ran SPICE a mathematical common source library of mathematical models for electronic devices. Although SPICE was developed in the open Daisy's libraries were proprietary. Our engineering department didn't use the simulation part of the Daisy which may have been its most expensive part. The proprietary nature of a lot of the Daisy made it less appealing to Eurotheum's company uses both in Reston and in the UK. Eurotherm had huge layoff in fall 1992 which included me. Its very hard to retire old CAD systems like the Daisy and without an administrator to transition data, older designers may have never really left that old Daisy workstation. The company adopted a PC based schematic capture system which wasn't the Mac based version I was hoping for and a great deal of people preferred. I was told later the engineering team that was pushing for the PC based schematic capture system was really doing it with the hopes of getting another PC. We did everything on Macs, but they wanted another PC and decided to vote for the PC schematic capture system to get it. A couple weeks after that team got the new PC for schematic capture half of them got laid off.
Just a comment on the Cray acquisition. Sub did not acquire Cray. Cray was acquired by silicon graphics (a competitor). Cray had a division that developed sparc based systems and this division was sold to Sun by silicon graphics.
@@briscoelang2436 Retired now. I was going through all my old papers and throwing them away things. Came across Zander's note scribble on a piece of paper.
Dude...... I grew up in Redmond in the '90s and Early '00s, stepped DEEP in Microsoft and Sub-California tech culture. This video from 10:45 to 13:15 explained SO MANY questions that have been festering in my mind since I was a little tot, seeing all the big-name computer brands rapidly come-and-go in school, home, work, and stores. Fascinating.... man, Sun screwed up. A tale as old a time.
Andy Bechtolsheim would go on to found and fund Arista Networks with a bunch of ex-Cisco employees. Arista would take decent market share from Cisco and their monopoly in the datacenter/enterprise networking space.
The major hole not covered by your documentary was the motivation for SUN Workstations (solely for CS Depts.) was what was called a SAIL terminal (Stanford AI Lab), which had functionality at the time found in no other terminals including watching the evening news (TV, but only B&W in a green phosphor) while working. The SUN-1 in fact could not equal SAIL functionality at the start. Later versions could better the SAIL termonals, and this says nothing of PARC workstations (not merely the Alto but the D-machine successors). I first visited them in Santa Clara in the 2-digit making phase before Bill joined them. Later at Sun Quintin (now Meta/FB), I'd have lunch with buddies at their cafeteria named SPARCy's (SGI's cafeteria was Cafe Iris, now Charlie's at google)). We'd having working meetings on performance characterization, and graphics systems in particular.
I worked for Sun for 7 years in the earlier days in the field - absolutely, the most fun company to work for in my career. I was a manager of pre-sales people out in the field sales force. Was able to give people unexpected raises at times - like, 15%! And the first low cost, color workstation (3/60), had a lead time of six months - we couldn't make them fast enough. Scott McNealy created a great culture, and I got to meet Bill Joy and drive him around to customers. He was hung over from drinking too much tequila the night before, but he was just an amazing, brilliant person, and customers were mightily impressed. And at the same time, he was a nice guy, didn't seem too full of himself. I still think that if they could have worked with HP, DEC, and IBM, to standardize Unix and a window system, we would've had a better and more secure desktop experience than Windows a long time ago.
Excellent video covering all the major points accurately. I worked at Sun 2000-2011 and even in the declining years it was a great place to work. They treated employees well and and had great openness internally. A follow-up video could be a list of all the tech we now use and take for granted that started at Sun but was far too ahead of its time to be commercially viable when released.
I’m not a computer geek (I’m an MD). I started using computer in USA in 1983 and grew up with few systems that you mentioned. Now I’m retired and don’t use computer that much. Latter makes me cry as I feel like a dead person, tears flowing, I returned back to india after 42 yrs in USA working and teaching at Medical Universities, I thank you for taking me through the computer memory lane.
The day the workstation market died, afaict, was the day SNL ASCI Red took the 1 Teraflop crown on TOP 500. Suddenly, it didn't matter how well-designed your chips were, they would never get the price/performance of commodity chips on the latest process node. Economies of scale were here, there was no arguing with it.
The original design goal of the Sun workstation was to build a 3M machine for CAD: 1 MIPS, 1 Mb memory and a 1 megapixel display. The original Sun1 design met this goal and sold for 1 mega-penny ($10,000). But that was without any peripherals like a disk drive or Ethernet networking.
I have fond memories of using a Sun workstation for CAD in Engineering Design class back in 1986. We used DOGS (Drawing Office Graphics System) with the optional BOXER solid modelling software. Wish they could make a comeback.
15:40 the chart labels the year 2001 twice. It should have 2003 after 2002, but it goes back to 2001 when showing the -3,429 (M) net income loss. The chart is also labeled 1999 to 2001 on the top, but also shows 2002 and what I assume should be 2003. Otherwise great video!
An interesting story. In many ways reminiscent of DataPoint corporation. They had the first working network, distributed data processing, enterprise level laser printers, and many other technical innovations.Unfortunately much of the senior management kept reading their own press releases and really had their heads up their collective asses. In the late 80s they refused to consider "entrepreneurship" and instead paid talented technical people generous severance packages to start up their own companies. The USAF has a term for DPTs senior managements thought processes: up and locked.
This is really cool. I'm currently doing a Master's in Computer Science, and we study a lot of Sun's work in distributed computing and multithreaded processing - very influential company
Employed at SUN in Mountain View 2000 to 2002, entire business centers were closed in April 2002. Literally entire office with 500 people, in 4 weeks, give pink slips. It was the beginning of the end.
All the stuff we now take for granted on PCs, e.g. Ethernet, sound cards, optical drives, 3D graphics... they all were on SUN workstations years before they came to the PC.
You helped me fill in an interesting blank and make the connection! I had been selling an SD-WAN product called Talari and then Oracle bought them. Oracle walked away from support of the new hardware Talari had introduced just before the purchase. Trying to force existing users to a new hardware platform. It was likely to move SUN boxes! Makes sense now!
I remember using the Sun Microsystem 3 in the 1986-1987 for my PhD work in CMOS integrated circuit design. The machine uses a Motorola MC68020 running at 20MHz, with 1MB RAM and 10 MB HD. I was using Magic a layout editor, part of John Ousterhout's VLSI Tools, running on Berkeley Unix. With a mouse, I was able to layout several chip designs for a major Japanese company in the late 1980s. The chips were fabricated using the MOSIS service run by Sam (forgot his last name) at the ISI, Marina del Ray, CA. I also remember using the "vi" text editor to write my dissertation on Unix nroff/troff applications. Good times!
Any old Silicon Valley companies I should consider taking a look at?
I think all the well-known ones have been thoroughly covered by this point.
I can think of one or two obscure ones. For example, 3D workstation companies Stellar and Ardent were acquired by the same investors, who forced them to merge into Stardent--did they manage to achieve anything interesting before fading into oblivion? Then there were Alias and Wavefront, who also combined together. You don’t hear much about these any more (though the memory of Alias|Wavefront lives on in the “.obj” format, still popular for 3D data interchange, because of its sheer simplicity).
i would suggest SGI (silicon graphics international)
SCO?
Motorola Semiconductors, the original Hewlett-Packard, and ISC Systems (out of Spokane, Washington).
I'd suggest Silicon Graphics
When I came to study at my uni in 1994, all their services (DNS, mail etc.) ran on lone SPARCclassic workstation. Since they had no one familiar with Unix and I already knew Linux, they hired me to take care of that server and I eventually ended up working full time in their IT and this set up me for my career in networking. And it all started with that small Sun computer. Good memories.
i had a similar "career" 🙂
You were using Linux in '94?
That's like buying bitcoin when it was two bucks.
@@jrshaul back when you had to compile the kernel overnight 😂
I worked at Sun from 2006 until the Oracle acquisition. A company who were truly, tremendously good to their employees, with incredible internal resources and staff. But every year after the first was one crisis after another.
Amusingly Sun was, like all other enterprises at the time I joined, a total Blackberry shop. How quickly RIM's empire collapsed after the iPhone was released was interesting to view from that perspective considering how things were going internally.
I worked for Oracle in Hillsboro after the Sun acquisition. I envied my coworkers who were on the old Sun employment contracts. Oracle tried EVERYTHING to get them to quit but quitting meant losing a lot of the severance benefits, which were absolutely insane, so literally nobody from Sun would quit. The Sun folks were hilarious and would stand up to Oracle's nonsense management because they knew they were untouchable.
Oracle sucks. If anyone can avoid working for them do it. Don't let Oracle take advantage of you. If you can get in and get some experience then move onto another company go for it but never stagnate at Oracle. They don't care about you. They'll make that very known very quickly.
@@CRneu oh, when the deal closed an Oracle exec turned up at our plant in a suit (Sun execs exclusively wore Midwest uniform of jeans and a flannel shirt when doing Doom Tours) and cheerfully announced in a site-wide all-hands that a) Sun were famous both for being great to their customers and great to their staff, b) Oracle cared about neither of those things, only the bottom line, and c) from that day forward the company would proceed on that basis.
Our management fought like tigers for our severance deals and i hope that a dozen years later there are still accountants at Oracle pissed off with what they had to sign away.
I worked with Sun/Oracle packaging engineers on a 3D packaging concept to integrate memory & processors chips to solve memory latency bottlenecks. Regrettably our approach was deep-sixed by Oracle in the Proof-of-Concept stage, and I moved on to work on stacked memory and pioneering SiP work back home in Asia. SoC ultimately proved to be a better if vastly more expensive approach, but current trends for chipsets are driving back to packaging solutions and 3D structures. NO package technology ever dies, it just morphs. STORY OF MY LIFE.
I recall reading Johnathan Swartz’s blog explaining why SUN had to be sold and why the chose Oracle’s bid over IBM’s.
The reason was employee protection. With IBM there were already existing and competitive product lines in hardware, OS and development software. Oracle on the other hand had no such offerings. In fact adding hardware into their portfolio would help them with bigger contracts and projects.
Some former SUN engineers and sales I knew years ago, still work for Oracle now days.
@@CRneu I contracted at Oracle for a little while and all the Oracle employees were like "you need to quit and try to get a job for Intel, this company is dying" Luckily I managed to do just that. There were actually things I really like about Oracle though and at the time I was desperate to become an employee even though they were known to pay badly. I really liked how organized they seemed to be and there was a process for absolutely everything that was very easy to find through their intranet. Intel is ridiculously disorganized in comparison but they are much more generous to the employees.
Sun vet here, ‘99 to 2004. The video doesn’t really get what happened. First, the “sharp elbows” were replaced around the time I got there. We were winning for many reasons, but two of them were the safe and solid OS, Solaris, and partnerships with industry Allies: Sun, Veritas, and Cisco. The performance advantages were still there, and winning deals was pretty easy. Unfortunately, hiring enough people was getting tough, and the culture was changing. Lower to middle management got taken over by a bunch of political parasites many who had learned survival tactics at DEC and Compaq. When things turned, these people completely quit working on keeping the company afloat, and started scheming to be the last thrown overboard as there really wasn’t any place left to go. Scott had seemingly lost control of the culture. Zander, who had been a decent COO totally threw Sun under the bus as he departed for Motorola, where he showed his inability to be a CEO which then surprised no one at Sun. Morale crashed, even though we still had an excellent platform. Perhaps there was no way forward, but it seemed to me the ingredients were there for a better solution than the world ended up with. Open systems are too open, and thieves reach right in.
You sound awfully bitter about the move to open software. By all accounts, the open systems that replaced you were more stable, more compatible, and drastically more user friendly.
@@jrshaul I’m bitter, and it’s not just about open systems. Open systems have lots of advantages, but none of them are stability (quite the opposite. I had customers with systems that had been forgotten about because they had simply run for YEARS without attention), and this has nothing to do with user friendliness which isn’t a factor for operating systems, and has not been for thirty years. Most users never see the OS anymore.
I’m also bitter about all sorts of things mostly thrust on us by an education system that teaches amazing amounts of trash without bothering to teach the importance of prioritizing value over price.
@@nunyabidness3075 Do you have any long form rants? I'm down for some "elder" perspective.
@@Baronvonbadguy3 Sure. Name a subject. 🤣😂🤣😂
You know who else had rants? Scott McNealy. No kidding. He used to do a podcast for the employees, and he would do a rant on each one. One time, he went off on the money the company wasted buying vegetarian pizzas which were mostly thrown away. It was hilarious.
Unfortunately, I’m not blessed with his talent for humor. Sorry.
@@jrshaul > You sound awfully bitter about the move to open software.
Open Software killed off a lot of companies. Nobody ever thought that making a free version of UNIX was a sound business case for the companies that made proprietary HW and OSs. How they got away with copying and mimicking the UNIX code and didn't get sued is beyond me.
Once Redhat appeared and Oracle certified itself on Redhat it killed a lot of Sun accounts. We had an significant investment in Sun hardware and within a year it was all replaced with Redhat on Compaq servers. The saving in yearly licence costs was eye-watering.
As I said above, you had to bathe in cash to use Sun !
As a former Sun reseller and support contractor, I'm very happy for you covering my favorite company for your christmas video. Thanks!
I'm still working in Solaris support today and have a large collections of systems around. So sad that Oracle has ruined what was once a great company.. but that's what happens when a software guy buys a hardware company and has no idea what they actually do or how to run them. When Ellison swooped in, the first he did was double the system prices and triple the support contract fees, and struck down any special deals that Sun had going with their largest customers for decades. This lead to most of those customers taking the jump over to Linux clusters, that were just about becoming mainstream enough at that time.
Not an Oracle fan, but they've done a stellar job modernizing and improving Java. Some of Sun's legacy lives on through Java.
Was it that Ellison is a software guy, or simply that he's a greedy b****rd who makes decisions motivated by short-term profit (or delusions thereof) and that alienate the customer? Seemed to me it was the latter, though being a software guy I could be biased :)
Oracle is the Electronic Arts of the Open Source world, buy up and ruin stuff basically.
I wonder if killing many of Sun technologies was Oracle's plan all along. Afraid that some of the technologies Sun had could pose threat to Oracle dominance in the enterprise markets.
oracle ruins everything
Consider doing a video on _Borland_ the seminal software tools and applications company. It was a huge part of the software industry from the mid-1980's through mid-1990's. Borland revolutionized and democratized software development by bringing its integrated software development environment (IDE) concept/tool to the masses. In 1990, Borland and Microsoft were the biggest software tool makers. Philippe Kahn was a swash buckling figure, ambitious and capable enough to challenge Microsoft on all fronts. It's quite possible Microsoft only defeated Borland because of anti-competitive, monopolistic actions (e.g. Windows ain't done until Lotus won't run), which it was later convicted of. It's worth noting that Anders Hejlsberg, inventor of C# and TypeScript, was Borland's langugage designer.
Thanks for your edutaining videos. Best wishes.
Borland would be excellent, and so would Ashton-Tate, who brought "Framework" to market.
And WordPerfect too!
@@tracyterpstra You and Ryan are right. These are more interesting stories of the short-lived PC software empires of the late 80's and early 90's before Microsoft executed flawlessly/brutally and the other leading players (including Novell) self-destructed, mainly by not realizing that windowing GUIs were the future.
It was originally a Danish company. They hired Kahn to run their US branch.
Sun microsystems killed Borland with Java, because it was free
Man, what a walk down memory lane. My first experience with computers was using a terminal to log into a mainframe just to play Star Trek. Sun was always in the background somewhere over the next decades. So many companies have crashed and burned.
Ahh, TIT Trek was it? Texas Institute of Technology Star Trek? I started on an old ITT Teletype with a 300 baud acoustic coupler dialing into a Honeywell GCOS machine or XEROX CP-V. Even then that crash and burn was going on. Honeywell, mostly controls then (and now), acquired GE's computer division, supported NASA space stuff. My ex father in law co wrote Honeywell's COBOL 74 compiler. I guess they were pushing into business, in competition to IBM. They developed Multics though, which, became part of the predecessor to UNIX as we know it today. Once upon a time, Multics was the most secure computer in the world. One or two of them used to sit in the basement of the White House. Back when PL/I was a popular programming language.
@@richardboulanger3393 I don't know what version was available in 1979 to 1981 but we were all under pressure to not only beat the enemy but get it done before our allotted time was up! Still went through a LOT of paper on the teletype.
I have some issue about how 'openness' is discussed in the video. Context is really important here. During the mid to late 1980s, most server companies supplied hardware with their own OS and tools. For example, my experience was with Data General MV series computes. You got AOS/VS, INFOS II, DG COBAL, DG Business Basic, etc. They also had their own terminals that were their own standard. You could find third party hardware but it needed to support the Data General hardware in some way. Basically, you were tied to a closed set of standards. Open systems (as was the term used at the time), was about using open standards rather than vendor specific closed standards. No one, at least at the time, was expecting the software to be open source as it was generally expected to be closed. What it was important that you would have common and agreed standards. Granted there was competition in this area which is why we had the UNIX wars but it's important not to confuse open systems with open source. The arrival of Sun was with open systems, not open source. I do appreciate that some people were interesting in open source at that time but it was a small minority and it was not a thing within the market at that time. Open source was much more of a 90s thing.
Thank you for the clarification. As both a Red Hat user (both) and early Ubuntu user (loyalist). Red Hat had some Enterprise that required contract agreements and payment.📝
This is not completely true. I used DEC computers at that time. When you bought the machine, you got the schematics. When you bought the software, you got the source code. If you found a bug, hardware or software, you documented it, and circulated the fix through the User Group. If you wrote software - including compilers for Pascal, Algol, etc) you circulated them too. Everyone benefited from this - much of the software originated as student projects in universities, but - as today much was written by companies for their own use, and then made open source to avoid paying to support it. From what I understood, it was the same with other manufacturers, including IBM, until Bill Gates stuck his oar in with an article about how "programmers deserve to be paid". Sun was originally a supporter of this too AFAIK. I am still using Sun Sparc kit, but with OpenBSD - which is actually open source, unlike Solaris.
Oracle killed Sparc by being obstructive to the open source community, and failing to support its users - they are extremely unpleasant to their customers. I plan to switch to ARM.
Incidentally, I was chief hardware architect for the GEC model 21 - which was almost identical to the Sun workstation (68020 in a VME bus crate) but with superior thermal management (for which I was not responsible), and also used BSD Unix and very high performance graphics, based on work by Cambridge University. However, GEC decided "there is no future in technology" - Although I believe the GEC model 21 was used at ESRO (European equivalent of NASA). This was the time when Margaret Thatcher decided Britain's future was in "Financial Services" and publicly rubbished the British computer industry (failing to support ICL - which had the Content Addressable File System (a hardware database engine) , a world-beating OS and business software, and died of the poor publicity. Her government also failed to support the Transputer, which sold to France). To this day, Britain's "world beating" financial services are incapable of understanding the concept of venture capital for innovation in the way that America does.
Thanks very much for this. I was a Sun engineering workstation customer, and later worked at Sun until the acquisition by Oracle. The thing that amazed me was, while all you presented here was happening, there was an eerie sense of calm internally. There is a saying by, I think, Euripides that goes, "Whom the gods wish to destroy, they send 40 years of success". Despite the precipitous decline, I saw no sense of concern or panic in my VP peers.
They didn't listen to their engineers, that's why they weren't concerned. I recall one long time lead eng, Chuck someone or other? When he left he sent a company wide email listing known problems with the company . It was ignored.
I miss Sun. I still have a couple SPARCstations sitting in the spare bedroom, a SPARC 20 and an Ultra 5. I haven't powered them up in years, though. I was given the 20 and I bought the Ultra 5 new, way back in the 1990s. They, and the IPC and IPX I used to have, made a nice little home network.
For years while maintaining Sun servers in NJ/CT/NY, I traded/bought used Sun parts from a company in New Jersey...I once spent 2 days upgrading two Sun E6800s by hand (3 quad CPU boards and four 8-card PCI "I/O boats" each). The CPU boards had 32 DIMMs per board (96 per server, 192 DIMMs over both servers)...I had bought 6 newer CPU board and new I/O cards. But I needed to transfer my RAM from the old CPU boards to the newer CPU boards before handing the old boards in as part of the trade up. So 192 DIMMs out, 192 DIMMs back in.
@@carlschumacher5510 Weren't these sun hardware incredibly expensive, and hard to maintain? Didn't they fail all the time? Those sun E series servers were designed wrong. Or that they never notified anyone how to properly mount them. The E4000 and up units had the air intake on the right side and exhaust heat to the left side instead of normal servers that do front to rear. So if you end up putting 2 E4500s next to one another then the one on the left would be constantly hot. Stupid design, and add to the fact that they never told anyone on how to properly mount them. Our company had these and they were always hot. I was a datacenter tech told to look into it. but the company had onsite sun techs to replace parts and they never said anything.
@@xcen1 From 1994 thru 2012 I worked with many models of Sun boxes (from ~$5K up to ~$800K models) but only a handful for E4000/E4500s...Every now and then I'd run into a popular Sun model that had a major flaw I had to work around. The E450 was a perhaps 10U very deep model that I don't think was meant to be racked (it had wheels iirc). The E450 was a model that could have 1 to 4 CPUs, one or two 10-drive bays I think, and various levels of RAM. It had a huge motherboard mounted vertically in iirc the middle of the chassis. Said MB was not supported well (it was easy to crack when installing parts). I wasn't the only one killing said motherboards, the local Sun techs were also...My solution?: I convinced management to let me only order fully-loaded E450s (all CPU & RAM slots filled, both drive cages installed, all the PCI cards I'd ever want). This was during the Doc Com era.
In the early 2000, working with E6500s / E6800s / E6900s was a step up in Sun boxes (but not quite to the E10K). These were "I am a rack" frames that you kept for 5 - 7 years, adding CPU/RAM boards over time (for example as more Oracle databases were added). The E6800/E6900 were true monsters. They had two internal power planes, the OOB management computer was actually a cluster of two small computers (PowerPC based I think). The beast was a real friend of anyone selling electricity. Over the years, as the CPUs got a bit faster, you could add/upgrade any of the 6 CPU board slots (each board holding 4 CPUs)...The coolest thing I have EVER done to a production server, was replacing a CPU board in an E6800 while it was up and serving requests (you could tell the OS to move processes off of a given CPU board).
One last comment on user expectations of Sun gear, during my E6800/E6900 period (2000 - 2007). Whenever I wanted downtime (patch, reboot, replace a failed part, etc) everyone "Why Carl? Why? I thought these things were bullet proof? Why?" (sigh!)...The Windows guys just had to say "Patch Tuesday". Zero objections...I remember almost hitting a clock bug (some issue after 520 days of uptime in the OOB server cluster (yeah, not a power of 2)) and having to get time slots to reboot the whole E6800/E6900 fleet.
@@xcen1 The 4500 was "cheap" for what it was in it's day. It was an NFS and mid-range data base server without an equal at its price point. The only real problem, as you pointed out, was the airflow design could lead to overheating and indeed fires. I worked at Sun from '96 to '99 personally saw one system catch fire and assisted another customer replacing a unit that had also caught fire. It wasn't intended to be a datacenter unit but rather a small office, stand alone design. The price performance was so good, however, that at one point that's all datacenter customers wanted to buy.
@@justinbukoski1 OMG no wonder sun went away. That's an ass backwards idea to say it was meant to be in office. Any server should be in datacenter environment for so many reasons 1 being a security issue. The E4000 machine weighs as much as a car. Me being a skinny kid in 2000 at 5'8" and 110 lbs I was able to lift up a HP DL380g1 by myself at that time, But this thing was so heavy 2 of us struggle to move it one time. After the first time i learned how to move it by removing everything inside, all the boards, and psu's then it was manageable to move. Jesus to put a server in an office, someone could walk by and spill coffee all over it. What a stupid idea..... And it has to be in a datacenter environment because it needed front and rear access. You're going to put it up against a wall in an office, then you'll move it to change and rear boards or psu. In a rack in a datacenter, you have open access to to rear and front.
A key moment in the development of Linux was when IBM adopted it for use on its computers, sometime around the year 2000. It was a brilliant move by IBM, which then had a much bigger reputation than today. IBM's stamp of approval made a lot of people more willing to consider Linux, and strengthening Linux helped to undermine both Sun and Microsoft.
Linux greatest achievement is its manages to wipe out commercial Unix market share.
But strangely enough very-very little Linux users talk about that.
Ummm nope, in 2000 IBM was competing with SPARC and Solaris using System P/RS6000 (aka Power System) and AIX 5.3/6.1
@@schlbus Yes, but IBM announced support for Linux in 1998. That was a key moment - it meant you could run Linux on IBM metal, and with that stamp of approval, a lot of people started to view Linux as ready for prime time.
@@cv990a4 Until merging with RedHat IBM was not a key element for Linux development no matter how you spin it and no, kernel development does not count.
We're not talking about business critical in the 2000s and Linux in the same sentence.
I won't entertain this discussion any longer.
@@schlbus I'm inconsolable...
I was blessed to work for sun early in my career from 1988 to 1991 as a sales engineer. We called ourselves systems engineers at that time. What a learning experience that was: The people, the technology, the momentum, and the possibilities. As an engineer, I was amazed that a unix system could have an uptime greater than a week without requiring a reboot. Like anything, the growth was too fast and the company changed in spirit in the mid to late 90s. Great summary of Sun!
My home Unix (Linux) machine had once uptime of 6 years, from 2001 to 2007
To this day, I'm always going for 4-digit uptimes.
As a manager for a fairly large IT department, I admonished my guys to fix problems, with my line "Restarting is for losers."
Unfortunately, OS uptime seems to be going the way of the dodo. Containers seem to be helping but all of the patch restarts today are really frustrating. I remember when I would only have to patch/reboot an OS once or twice a year if that.
@dražen CRO The Network Is The Computer
Miss Solaris and SPARC. I had the pleasure of using the systems for about 8 years.
@dražen ZAGREB "The Network is the Computer" - "mreža je računalo". Servus!
I had a summer job at Sun in 1996, it was an absolute dream, the epitome of cool for a computing student job. Having that on my CV opened so many doors. I miss them.
funny story about a Sun Micro Mainframe. My father started working as a Junior accountant for a Large Queensland meat processing abattoir. they had a sun computer system. when costing the production of sausages by the ton, different wholesalers order them with different ingredients... and these had to be coasted down to the 4 decimal point. and this computer was worked by terminal and punch card. and a salesman would send through ingredient list and volume etc and an hour later they would get a printout handed back to them, and then they would get back to the client with a cost often a 2 hour info round trip. well dad bought a TRS80-4k Level 1 computer when they first came out, supposed to be for me. he wrote a basic program that would work out these costings almost instantly (well a few seconds) so he could talk to the sales person while on the phone. and the next month Byte magazine came out with a basic program that would turn such data into a pie chart. one day day took the computer to work and put it on his desk, and was doing the costings instantly, when the Managing director walked past, and asked what he was doing. dad put on a demo, including a pie chart, and the MD asked the Mainframe guy to make a pie chart for next weeks board meeting. and sure enough next week at the boardmeeting, the Heda of computing showed his pie chart, and dad demonstrated the little TRS-80. and the CEO asked the main frame guy aput him makingthe pie cahrtas, and he said they they had to purchase Sun's special program for pie charst that cost $15K (remember this was the late 1970's) so the MD stood up and said to the main frame guy "your fired" and had the Main frame sent to the tip and had TRs80 put on every salemans desk, and dad was promoted to head to sales... (dad made several changed to production, that had him promoted to 2IC in a few years)...
Sun was founded in early 1980's. Your story happened in 1970's. It must be another company's computer.
A great general often introduce new weapons to the battle field. 👏
Kudos for your dad! But felt sorry for the mainframe guy!
Sun never made mainframes. They made minicomputers.
@@johancoetzer2165 ACTUALLY... Sun did make mainframes towards the end, right before being bought up by Oracle: the M-line. The design was done by Sun and manufactured by Fujitsu. The hardware is completely redundant and can be partitioned, just like IBM's zSeries mainframes, additional processors can be enabled temporarily or permanently with a license... The only difference is, this mainframe hardware is not running z/VM and z/OS, but Solaris 10 or 11. 10 in my case. M3000 was the first, code named "Teraya" (I own one privately), followed by other mainframe models like the M10. These were all made after 2007.
Thank you for this trip down memory Lane. Working in the workstation marketplace in the late 1980’s you touched on many things that were formative parts of my career, and friendships I still have today. The best man at my wedding I met at HP, he left and we both ended up at a reseller. I few months in and he was poached by Apollo (for a crazy amount of money) and he ended up back at HP 😂. He left again. My oldest friend worked for ARM in its early days. I defected early to the Microsoft bandwagon as my interest was business not technical and I started working with Olivetti hardware (still with the occasional unix install at the start), so it was nice to see their name pop up. Always remember the Olivetti joke that it was going to be called Italian Business Machines but they didn’t think the initials would take off. But I’m rambling now - as us old folk tend to 😂.
I served Scott in his final two years as his executive presentation creative manager. In that time, he gave 300 customer presentations around the world with precision and class. I stayed through the Jonathan transition. The company then seemed without a coherent marketing strategy - trumpeting ‘open’ and ‘share’ gibberish, followed by the Oracle acquisition. An iconic company worthy of this retrospective.
I was at Sun from 1986 to 2009, and I agree that Jonathan was not close to what Sun needed. My last five years or so was spent expecting the hammer to fall at any time. But it was a great ride while it lasted.
@@steveh1792 Jonathan was a sad punchline to a long standing joke. Scott M. never understood software, nor the benefits/costs of producing it. He made a fortune taking away IBMs server business and laughing about it, while simultaneously ceding the desktop to Microsoft and setting up Sun for the fall it finally had, which was long overdue.
"Stanfurd" ...pretty funny!
You mean accent?
Memory lane indeed…I worked in the Sun/SGI/DEC aftermarket in the late 80’s through the 90’s. Those were heady times. I met McNeely and Joy at a trade show. Rode about $50,000 of Sun stock down to the ground later LOL. “Stanfurd” lots of UC people called it “Snodfart”.😂
Yeah, there was a time when everything fits in 200Mbyte disks. Not mentioned, our first Dual System 83/20 had only a 20 Mbytes Fujitsu 8" disk.
I started driving as a chauffeur in '97 and worked for a small company of about 5 cars. From '97 to the end of '00, our company grew as fast as Sun did. We about quadrupled in size due to Sun. I'm in Boston and their campus in Chelmsford(a few old Apollo computer buildings) grew and they moved into their huge complex in Burlington. I was broke and didn't have the money to invest in stocks. But a couple of my colleagues made a killing on Sun stock(as well as others; internet IPOs were a guarantee of ROI then)and one guy retired early. I don't even know how many times I drove for Mr. McNealy, but almost all their executives and employees were just good people.
Sun gave us Java and around 2000, our company helped produce and serve a lot of JavaOne conference sessions with our learning management system. A very important customer for us.
You’re off by about 5 years. Java first hit around 1995 and started taking off in 1996. By 2000 Sun had already gotten Java 2 out the door, made Servlets standard, introduced JSP, created the EJB spec, and introduced the “Java 2 Enterprise Edition” (J2EE) concept, a confused naming convention referring to a class of application servers.
The problem with is how Oracle change the license policy for Java it is private only or you need to pay money or you use OpenJDK. What is practically heavier is how they kicked out MySQL out of the Linux community with their license model. Which caused massiv pain because tons of stuff where design and build to use MySQL as bases in the Linux space.
In general Oracles and SAPs main point is they create a bubble of tools&apps&APIs which only their specialists can handle . You need their licenses , their developers which both make a golden nose at the end with it.
@@thewiirocks off regarding what? I never said that was the beginning of Java. Especially since I began programming with it in 1996.
Our LMS was written in Java and we started that in Spring 1998.
@@thewiirocks You misread the comment that you're replying to.
@@xyzzy3000 You are correct. Thanks for pointing that out! I did indeed miss the “and” in the first sentence.
I worked in the Milpitas manufacturing building then the Sparc development group from 97 to 04. It was the best job I ever had and the 90s were a true boom time. Huge Christmas parties, quarterly outings, white water rafting, Napa wine train. And tons of Tshirts! But boy did that come to an abrupt halt. Fun while it lasted.
This past fall i worked at their old Menlo Park office that was required by Meta. You could see remnants of what was once a great company through the veneer of renovations
When I started at Sun in 1997 I worked there. Great campus. Shame it got turned into a slum. 😀
Worked next door at Informix. Yes, a great era. The 90s rocked.
Sun workstations with Solaris were marvelous systems and we used them extensively at my place of work. Their reliability was an asset in those days. I still remember fondly using the unix base system with Motif GUI.
Acorn (the original A in ARM) had their first chip in 1985 and sold their first Archimedes computer in 1987. ARM as a company was spun off on a different timescale.
During the initial development, the ARM instruction set was emulated in software running on a 6502 coprocessor in the "Tube" slot of an 8-bit BBC micro.
Of course, as Acorn was not founded in CA (cough) it doesn't feature.
I remember when engineering workstations were the most powerful stand alone desktop computers. They, at onetime were many time more powerful than any IBM PC (and its 386 clones) or Apple desktop computer. But, in time Moore's law changed everything, and consumer grade PCs eventually could run the most sophisticated CAD/EDA and simulation software, at a much lower cost. Sun and Apollo workstations had lost their edge. The last thing I remember from Sun was Java.
Yes. By the time the PII was released, the workstation was done. Started ProE on a PII.
Started ‘70 on 360, ‘77 U1100, ‘79 Σ7/Networked 360/PC/Lisa&II, ‘83 anything networked (local “PC Guru”), ‘84-present Cysec.
I worked on Sun workstations (hardware diagnostics programming) starting around 1990, and was amazed to find just a couple of years later that a 486 upgraded to a Pentium and running Linux ran compute-intensive tasks about twice as fast. Our workstations were 2-3 years old by then, but by 1995, the Linux PC was absolutely faster than all but the most expensive Sun workstations, and we stopped buying them.
Sun forgot their open roots, beginning a little with SunOS, going full retard with SPARC processors, and by then they had dug too deep a hole to ever get out of. The end of the 1990s was like a sad little joke as they kept on digging that hole.
I think hey could have kept going with SunOS and Solaris, wouldn't have been too hard a problem to re-open it like Linux. But Motorola botched the 68030 and 68040 advances, SPARC was a desperate gamble which paid off for a few years, but there was no going back, they had too much face invested to switch to Intel x86, and that was all she wrote.
(I can understand Sun shuddering at the x86 architecture. I wrote assembler for a lot of architectures, all were fun and interesting one way or the other, but x86 always gave me the creeps, about the ugliest architecture possible, and that didn't fit their image.)
They fell to the same arrogance has Digital Equipment (DEC): they refused to acknowledge the competition and to a combination of lowering the price and raising the performance.
Yeah, the PPro and successors ate old RISC's lunch, Windows NT/2K and Linux ate old UNIX, and when Nvidia released the og GeForce and Quadros they ate the pro 3D market. Same story in all cases, the low end market just becoming good enough to gradually eat the high end from under it.
I still miss SPARC/Solaris though, and those lovely purple boxes. Not so much the E450 that almost fell out of a rack and crushed me once.
*_Former Boeing Everett..._*
Boeing used Sun Micro Systems, Silicone Graphics, IBM Catia, Windows NT, IBM OS2, Mac, and Windows 3.xx over a very large campus. I was part of 350 member IT Desktop Support Team in Everett. There were 50,000 devices total, including Workstations, Servers, CAD, Network Printers, and more, used by 30,000 employees in Everett. It was challenging supporting all the various desktop configurations. When Boeing bought McDonald Douglas, we inherited their mess too.
I transferred to Lean Manufacturing later. At that time Boeing was consolidating IT and standardizing Computing. IBM Catia was being upgraded to handle PC functions as part of Single Glass Initiative. There were different departments using 2-3 different types of workstations per desk. Single Glass solved part of that problem.
Boeing had it's own versions of Windows Operating Systems and Windows Office. Boeing had the largest network running Microsoft Products in the world. Everett was just 1 of many other campuses around the globe. Our Call Center in Bellevue handled a millions calls per year. IT was 24/7 365 a year. Boeing may have slowed down over the Holidays, but it never stopped providing world class support to all it's computer users.
its
your take on the McDonnell-Doug merger?
@@NoTraceOfSenseThanks for comment... Yes I was there during the merger. I was part of Lean Manufacturing and was sent to St Louis to iron out production kinks in the F/A-18 Super Hornets. Amazing experience.
Great video and interesting history, I work at NVIDIA now and many of my direct co-workers and leaders are Sun veterans (Jay Puri, EVP of WWFO and Chris Malachowski, Co-founder are probably the two most notable in NVIDIA leadership). It's a pretty incredible place to work.
Excellent video. Sun could have become what Microsoft became, and the world would be richer for it. It happened around 1988, when Sun introduced the 386i workstation. At this point, the Intel 80386 was far ahead of MS-DOS, and the PC world was desperate for a true multi-tasking, multi-process operating system. Windows 1 was a joke, and IBM's OS/2 was not ready. Power users would have several PCs at one desk, with a bank of monitors and various mazes of wiring to switch keyboards, etc.
Now came the 386i, not only with a superb monitor and graphics wuth the SunOS Unix operating system, but able to run many DOS programmes in their own windows! This ability to have it all on one screen instantly made the 386i a hit with stockbrokers. Now, this was all a bit much for the 80386, and people were not used to the delayed latency of a multiprocess computer, but the 486 was already being tested in the next version. The hardware was nice, with higher end workstation features such as SCSI peripherals and the excellent monitor, but it was not PC-compatible (i.e. could not boot MS-DOS, though it ran DOS in subprocesses), even though Compaq had set the standard forever with its open ISA-based Desk Pro 386, thereby burying IBM's proprietary Microchannel bus (technically superior but royalty-laden).
The 386i was years ahead of Microsoft, and had Sun gone for the general PC market, they could have taken it all. Only NT/Windows 2000 a dozen years later could compare. The NIS "Yellow Pages" administration system was being improved, and with the 486, a very attractive combination, offered at lower cost, would have captured the whole market. I bought a 386i in 1988, and two of my colleagues followed suit. It was my main computer for seven years, and served several years as a mail server. A student of mine did a massive computional thesis on one. A P2-90 PC running Linux eventually replaced my 386i. Being able to do both Unix and MS-DOS on the same machine was a godsend.
Instead, Sun cancelled the 386i in 1989, after just one iteration; they also cancelled the Motorola-based workstations, to concentrate on the higher margin SPARC CPU and the professional engineering workstation market (and later servers). Admittedly, a Sparcstation motherboard was a work of minimal art compared with the always messy PC architecture. Needless to say, the PCs soon took over the workstation market, and Linux did the rest, but there was a gap of about six years between the 386i emerging and Linux becoming competitive. There was no universally available Unix for X86 PC's, only expensive, inferior products such as Xenix which had no traction in the general market. Sun could have filled that vacuum long before Linus took on the job. Sun's failure to take Microsoft and IBM head-on for the whole shebang is one of the greatest missed opportunities in history. General computing would be so much more advanced now had Sun succeeded and not Microsoft.
Sadly the group who came up with the 386i supposedly didn't really have the companies blessing, so it was starved for support and funds.
Sun mgmt was both fickle, and devoted to Scott's cult of personality.
We used Sun workstations in our undergraduate lab at the university back in the 90s. I sometimes feel nostalgic for Solaris.
Steve Jobs once called Xerox management "copierheads", because they had the Holy Grail but weren't interested in anything beyond copiers.
Being from Linlithgow Scotland where Sun employed 800 people and had a manufacturing plant, it had a big effect on the town when they closed the manufacturing plant. There is now a smaller presence at the site with Oracle.
The amount of Sun workstations that Nortel bought in the late 1990s and early 2000s you wouldn't believe, as many of the manufacturing rigs used them. When Nortel went into serious decline, their Sun workstation orders dried up very quickly as they had more than enough machines spare.
I really enjoyed this. I'd love to see a similar piece on Silicon Graphics.
The original Stanford SUN CPU boards designed by Andy Bechtolsheim was the original CPU board for Cisco routers. Andy's CPU board design was also used in many time sharing UNIX mini-computers back in the mid 80's.
I started working on Suns around 1990 and continued using them through grad school and beyond, up until about 2010. They were a great machine to develop on since Sun controlled both the hardware and the software and created a very integrated feel. At the time, Apple's OS was a mess of spaghetti code. Now I develop on a macbook pro (Apple long ago got smart and switched to unix) and while it's gotten much better, it's still not as smooth as Solaris was in its heyday.
I thought Apple's MacOS was built on Unix, which is true but I recently learnt that it's not the full story. Apparently the older gen Mac OS was replaced with an OS that was based on a Mach kernel (ending with h), and one of the BSD's stack was built on top of this Mach kernel. This OS was named OSX, which some time later became MacOS. You probably know this being an apple user. It's strange how there is more to the story than I thought. Similar to how Android is not GNU/Linux, but Java-like Virtual Machines built on the Linux kernel.
Its a mistake to call Mac os UNIC because Mac os cant do any mission critical task or multiuser doing multitask
Calling mac os unix is like calling a teenager a soldier because won a kungfu tournament
@@Teluric2 MacOS is Unix both in lineage and in Open group certification. What more could you want?
@@elumiomerk4013 System 7 to 8 was so broken that you would reboot 10x per day. Networking and dial up was broken, SCSI was bad. The things were slow and there were no graphics cards available. Shitbox by shitheads. G3 were probably the faultiest products shipped ever.
@@808bigisland what are you trying to say?
Man, in the 90s, if you were a Unix wizard, you could write your own ticket. Nevermind Novell, Microsoft and Apple talk, Unix gurus were rock stars.
Sun NFS was really bulletproof. I was there for the entire ride, despite starting in 1981 on the IBM PC. The early VME bus systems were good, the 386 based design was a flop, but the Sparc based systems were just incredible. We had a Sparc 2 as our NIS master that had an uptime of 4 years when it came time to upgrade for y2k. We deployed hundreds every year in the 1990s, every software developer had one on his desktop. Too bad they couldn't catch up with the latest process nodes, it was funny to hear about dual channel memory in the PC being such a big innovation when we had been installing quad channel memory for years.
The sysadmins at the company I worked for, said that NFS stood for No F’ing Security
NFS was designed to be “stateless”, which caused no end of problems for Unix software that was expecting a baseline of sane behaviour from the filesystem -- ironic for a Unix-centric company, don’t you think?
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 I obviously had a much different experience. Compared to other vendors (and especially Linux) the Sun implementation of NFS "just worked". When they enabled TCP rather than UDP transmission, it just worked. Since our primary use was an NFS based application, I had a lot of experience in that regard.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 NFS had some issues, but having department-wide computer transparent file system in mid 90-s, was plain fantastic.
Literally, in first two years in my university department as a postdoc, I did not even know to what computer my home directory is physically attached. Compare that with Windows 95 paradigm. And I still use NFS among the three Linux machines I manage in my office now
Didn't Sun or Stanford license one of their first cards to three companies? Believe one was in Chicago, the other was Sun Micro, can't remember the third. I worked in applications my first two years out of college helping with MC68000 support for multiple customers. Supported Apollo, Apple, Sun, and many others.
1:24 There was some controversy over describing the original 68000 processor as “32-bit”, since this was seen by some as marketing exaggeration.
I think the best way to describe it was as a cut-down 32-bit design. When the first true 32-bit member of the family, the 68020, was released, you could see that the 32-bit extensions were mostly just a matter of filling in gaps in the original implementation.
Unlike certain other vendors, whose 32-bit chips involving sticking unsightly architectural bags on the side of their older 16-bit designs.
I cut my teeth programming CAD applications on a VAX 11/780 back in the early 80s. I remember the Sun and Apollo workstation wars. I finally jumped on and bought some HP Unix workstations in 1991 to run COTS CAD application (Unigraphics). PCs were simply not capable for high end CAD work back then. It is amazing how far things have come since those old days.
I remember back in college in 2010 We used dated Sun Microsystems Desktop PCs in one of our classes; they were definitely unique. I remember the cases of both the monitor and tower were purple.
Purple? Didn't Sun computers have blue colored accents?
SGI computers definitely lots of purple!
@@Nedski42YT It took me some time to find which one it was that they had in our labs but if you google Sun Blade 1000 that was the one; the sides are blue but to me the front always looked purple but i have been called colorblind by many exgirlfriends lol.
@@belltolls1984 Yeah, I found an image and it looks purplish to me too. There is one for sale for $990 on eBay.
@@Nedski42YT Indigo!
@@Nedski42YT $990??!! That is insane! We had a lab of about 50 of them, that is crazy, I thought it was unusual that we used them and I knew they were rare back then, It was some version of Linux that they were running but I can't remember which one.
One of Sun's most iconic lines to me was when they coined the phrase, "The Network Is The Computer." That still resonates today & tomorrow!
Sadly they lost sight of the importance of that in the late 90's.
Thank you, I really enjoyed this video on a couple fronts. Apollo was the first start up I worked for and it was a short (1984-1986), but amazing ride that gave me the desire to hit a couple more start-ups throughout my career. It was also my first experience in wide spread layoffs and seemed so odd at the time after such fast paced growth. I worked at the Billerica campus and to walk through the manufacturing floor and see huge empty spaces and empty worktables after seeing them full of employees was heartbreaking. Those of us that remained were allowed to pick through some of the manufacturing floor tools and I still use a Fluke multi-meter and Weller soldering station to this day. Post Apollo I had the opportunity to work with Sun workstations and after using Apollo and it was an interesting contrast. Those were some great years I will never forget!
How about a video on Java? This is such an important part of Sun's legacy!
We had to program in J++ for our undergrad thesis in engineering.
@NRGY Good one! And not very well, either.
Scott McNeely(Sun CEO): James?
James Gosling: Yeah?
Scott: James? Can you please quit messing around with that editor and get in here? I've got a new assignment!
James: Okay boss, what is it now?
Scott: "James, I'd like you to do a new version of C++. Make it compile into p-codes like the UCSD p-system. Give it a massive o-o library, why don't you borrow a bunch of stuff from Smalltakl? Oh and I almost forgot, please, drop the unsigned integers. I always hated using those back in the day when I was a C programmer."
James: Okay boss, give me 10 years, 1000 programmers, and $40B and I'll be right back ...
@NRGY There is a reason why NSF completely BANNED computer language research in academia in the mid-1980's. It was folly. A bunch of people reinventing the same wheel.
Excellent video. I spent time at Apollo in Chelmsford MA. I was vendor service for their copy machine fleet. I was able to spend some time on one of the public terminals. I knew nothing, but was intrigued.
Using the contacts in this position, I entered a position at Masscomp, repairing graphics subsystems at the component level. Everything there was System V.
Good times...
As a software engineer, this episode hits really hard. Thanks for taking a look at it.
I was involved in hardware acquisition for a German university and we used to order SUN workstations per default. As soon as PCs had decent network cards, however, the game was over for SUN. Their prices were hopelessly non-competitive compared to what a PC with a network card cost. Similar story for NeXT; interesting hardware and OS at the time but was just too late, i.e., too expensive.
“Billion Dollar code” a Netflix series I saw mentioned Sun Microsystems and its CEO/Founder (I think) and some German software developers with a lawsuit over creation of google maps. Good movie
No, that was actually SGI (Silicon Graphics), which were close to Sun in some respects but also totally different. Both companies definitely were considered cool from what I was told.
Andy is a decent human being. Treats regular people well.
I had such a beast of a CRT monitor. made by Sun. My brother picked it up from a trashcan at UCSC. It was at least 1440p back when most lcd monitors came at 1080, and most tvs where at 720. It was at least 80lbs, and 27"
Lasted me so many years, had to get rid of it because of its the weight after I left college in 2013.
Sun was the largest buyer of Sony Trinitron tunes for a number of years, and got only the highest QC spec units
BORING DUDE
you should give it to me
"Stanfurd." Oof, shots fired.
I grew up on Sun in the early 90s. They had really great tech, but unfortunately Intel eclipsed the SPARC in performance, and Linux made the high cost of Sun hardware hard to justify.
I worked at Xerox PARC in the 90s. A few Xerox Alto computers were stored in a server room across from my office. We were using the Xerox Star with Globalview in the office and Sun Sparc workstations for engineering. That didn’t last long, and soon all office computers and workstations were replaced with IBM PCs. Xerox PARC even at this stage in time was still an incredible place, so many brilliant people and innovations came out of there.
What innovations came out of PARC in the 1990s?
@@ajax700 PARC had several departments. I worked in a hardware and materials lab, so can’t speak for developments in computer science, though the focus there was on AI. As for hardware, I remember research in MEMS, semiconductor lasers and Oleds. Specifically, the innovations in this period were for example electronic paper, also known as liquid paper, the first digital x-ray imaging system using amorphous silicon and the first blue solid state laser in the US (Japan was first). There were also novel printing and scanning systems, which ultimately led to the Xerox developed liquid metal 3D printing of today.
As an aside, because it is not often mentioned, Xerox was also instrumental in spreading VLSI technology and structured CMOS chip layout. Carver Mead and Lynn Conway developed the methodology there in the seventies.
@@ajax700 Several good documentaries on PARC and Xerox moving to a services company. To say Xerox was big on this planet cannot be overstated.
@@2040wagon care to mention a few documentaries?
That company had everything to make it big but didnt. Wonder what the management were thinking regarding commercializing their ideas.
In their hay day they were the best. We used to joke that the NT in Windows NT stood for Nice Try. I had always loved sun servers and I always wanted to get my hands on the bigger ones. In 2005 I was on the team that did the largest install of Sun servers in Europe at commerzbank in Frankfurt Germany. I thought I had died and gone to heaven, lol. such a Great Project
Thank you very much ! The video took me to 1991-92 when I worked on Solaris OS based Sun workstations. Unix was the benchmark OS at that and knowledge of ‘C’ language was a must. I wrote Image processing algorithms on Sun Microsystem…
It really bums me out that Sun, DEC and SGI are all gone. x86 servers are just no fun to work with. Unfortunately it seems ARM is set to repeat the mistakes of it's predecessors by suing it's customer (Qualcomm) instead of working with them to gain market share.
You should see all the firms that never had a chance but burned investor money anyway.
Allah willing, NVidia will eventually figure out a jit x86 transpiler for their SM arch and/or embrace RISC-V, and x86 will start to fall into decline.
Intel probably wants to be out of the business, anyway, and just be a fab.
IF by "no fun" you mean "reliable," sure.
ARM has far more customers than Qualcomm, and many of them are far more suited to the high performance market. We've got Unix ARM workstations right now - they're called "Apple."
Worth noting that probably about 30 ARM processors ship for every Intel x86 one. I think RISC-V is already catching up, and has already pushed MIPS into second place.
What is wrong with x86 servers?
special thanks for a great 2022 season of Asianometry. Your page is one of only two we support via Patreon and your content is always topical, interesting, and educational. merry christmas!!
I had the good fortune as a cardiology fellow, of doing a post-doc at the Center for Bioengineering at the Univ of Washington, 1987-88. The group was connected by Sparc workstations and I learned Unix. We were modeling metabolic substrate flux in isolated heart models. Took the machine back to Yale and set up a bunch of websites for the cardiology section, sailboat racing groups, and ski racing organizations. I had a blast before people really knew what the internet was to become. So many fond memories. Thanks for sharing this history!
Sun engineering vet here during the boom times. 1988 - 1998. One heck of a rocket ride living through the growth and transition from workstations to enterprise cluster servers. Could see the end coming when Scott The Mouth was spending 8 out of 7 days on the golf course. Lack of leadership is what did Sun in. Great piece, thank you!
That's funny, I thought it was the PC bucket garbage undercutting the Sun Microsystems hardware and everyone's unwillingness to admit it, and design SPARC-based hardware which would undercut the PC-bucket "servers". I told them they'd go out of business in a year if they didn't, but nobody would accept the truth. Eight months later, Sun was sold to Oracle.
I remember fondly my first workstation when I joined my first ISP as a network engineer in 1996. The Ultra1 was a great tool, albeit not the most desktop/user friendly.
I still have mine with Creator 3D graphics. The company I worked for folded - they gave away the workstations. Unfortunately it won't run Solaris 10, and without a somewhat modern browser, it's kneecapped on functionality. I have it set up in my living room, power it up every so often just to see if it works.
I worked in a startup CAD/CAE software company in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, where seeing that can of Coca-Cola @10:21 gave me a big laugh, as prior to the energy drink phenomenon in the 21st Century, Coca-Cola was the energy drink of choice for the CAD/CAE company I worked at. One guy, a software developer, was known to drink 20 cans over a 12 hour day.
In the later half of the 2k's, a friend's company would get full rack Sun systems in lots with other equipment they actually wanted. Apparently that was a tactic used by the wholesalers to get rid of junk. Friend's company had no use for them and nobody would buy them for less than "paying them to take it away as scrap". They offered them to me, but I had no use for anything other than the racks and back then I could buy already empty used server racks for around $50+"you come get it", which is a whole lot cheaper than trying to figure out what to do with multiple dozens of very old SPARC systems.
Wow, this brings back memories. I spent a lot of time with Suns as a postdoc and assistant professor. They were my deep end introduction to Unix, when we got a bunch of them from government surplus, which (per Department of Energy rules) had had their disks completely wiped, so I had to build everything from scratch from tapes.
I remember around 1998 Sun workstations being used in hospital departments like radiography. They had huge monitors and looked like high quality machines. We were rolling out windows desktops for the first time but windows didn't replace those.
Thanks for the memories. I worked for sun from 1988 to 1998, but got out before the big fall. I really loved working there at the time.
Great video as always. Just a note on the pronunciation of Bechtolsheim - the three syllables in German are separated like so: Bech-tols-heim, with “heim” meaning “home”. Therefore, the “sh” is not a single sound as in “shoe” but must be separated into “s” and “h”.
That might be the case in Germany, but everyone at Sun said Bechtol-sheim.
@@wjcroft72 Fair enough, just thought I’d point it out.
Interesting, I just learned of sun's this year at my new job which has a few machines still running on suns (they're slowly getting replaced as they die), it was Interesting seeing a desktop brand I'd never heard of
KEEP THOSE MACHINES. Well I'm not so sure about the gigantic servers...
@@Sauceyjames eh they're more like a massive horizontal desktop (think old IBM), rather than a server rack. But they've been running 24/7 for decades now, not much life left in those old birds! (Trust me, it's maddening when they start glitching, can literally eat 12hrs of work to get them back).
Great topic! Sun is definitely one of the forgotten tech companies of yesteryear. Sun machines were a bit like Silicon Graphics machines or SNK's NeoGeo if you were into videogames. Cool, high tech machines that you knew existed "somewhere", but that you practically never came into intact with. I still remember how cool it felt seeing a whole room of them when I went to uni for my first semester.
Can we get a special on DEC and the Alpha microprocessors next?
I will take a look at it
Depending where you worked. At universities, SPARCstations, DEC Alpha's, and SGI machines were the backbone of computer-heavy research.
Nice video! Reminded me of my first CAD job, using ME10 on an old HP Apollo! Good times.
When the HP-Apollo 700 series launched they were a game changer and we grepped the root. The UX workstations stood on the top well into the 90's until Intels PII or PIII came in and absolutely destroyed them. We bought our first PC to use in CADCAM for $5,000 while the lower end 720 with base graphics (didn't have the additional graphics unit that came in a separate box), little ram and 480MB SCSI was $40,000. The HP stations paid for themselves in no time and the owners were floored when we did the first tool path demos on them. It was incredible compared to what everyone else was using in our business even though ZPR on a shaded cube was less than smooth. When the switch to PCs was made it was another night and day performance difference.
I remember my first demo on a Sun workstation in 1985, of a new automated publishing system called Interleaf. It offered true WYSIWYG text editing and page composition under an X Windows interface designed (reportedly) by MIT linguists for intuitiveness. It was impressive. Over the next five years Interleaf would be eclipsed by Framemaker, Adobe, and Quark.
I remember buying a copy of Solaris when they made a x86 version for around $100 or so, thinking I would be so cool to learn it. (please let me know if my memory is right!) Also recall buying a workstation with one of those optical mouse at one of those firesales. Not sure where it is now, but yeah, good memories. You can follow up with "Plan 9" OS and how that evolved to Google Cloud and what we have now days ... and where we might be going in the future.
Yes they brought out Solaris for x86 but it was rather crippled in that it lacked the catalogue of application software that the SPARC compiled version had and the performance delta was too much in favour of SPARC at the time.
@@BadatTanking the only thing it really lacked was Netscape Navigator. This was corrected later with Solaris 10. I still run Solaris 10 on i86pc in my private datacenter, and it is absolutely fabulous, I've weathered all the shit from GNU/Linux and FreeBSD thanks to sticking with Solaris. The software isn't a problem either, as I've built and packaged a vast library of the same software which runs on GNU/Linux. I'll be going to Tribblix on SPARC and SmartOS on intel soon, and with SmartOS, 15,000+ software packages will be available, in addition to having all the cool Solaris features like FMA, zones and ZFS, all running on intel hardware.
Solaris 7 for intel cost $50 USD.
At Rice University in the late 80's they were setting up Sun workstations everywhere. Big beautiful monitors and an OS that was pretty friendly. Over time some Apple machines moved in next to them, and these were junky by comparison, with very picky and nuanced methods for doing anything, it seemed to me. The Suns were really luxury items in that day.
I was designing advertising for Sun products in the late 90s. The Sun team I worked with were the most intelligent people that a designer could hope for. With their cutting edge hardware and software they looked invincible. I never quite understood how their substandard competitors (Oracle, Cisco) survived the Internet burst but not Sun.
Worked with one of the suits in this saga (and my wife was for a time at Motorola). This is the best concise account I have come across! Nicely done! 😎✌🏼
As someone who has worked at SUN since the CRAY acquisition till the end, this is a good overview of the company.
This is an excellent documentary. Sun couldn't have been described better so perfectly and informatively in ten minutes. Congratulations.
I touched a Sun workstation once.
It was a diskless workstation that booted across the network from another computer.
I had never seen or even heard of that way of booting before, though subsequently I've spent a lot of time setting up and using diskless workstations on various platforms.
After that first encounter, I never even saw another Sun product again.
I started computing with 8 bit systems that ran proprietary OSes. The company I worked for, DHL, even made their own hardware, OS and application software for 8 bit and 16 bit hardware in the early 1980s.
Then, they moved to Xenix on the Intel 80286, and NCR Unix on the NCR series of servers based on the Motorola 68020 and 68030 processors. Later they used HP-UX on the HP PA-RISC systems. Finally, when the Intel 80386 appeared, they used SCO UNIX as well.
None of these systems were used with graphical workstations, just dumb Wyse50 terminals.
So, I learned a LOT of command line computing.
Later, I was exposed to Novell Netware, Windows 3.0/3.1/3.11/95, OS/2 2.1, Warp and eventually Linux.
I've only recently started using FreeBSD on my home server.
Sun certainly was a big player and very instrumental in getting the basic backbone of the internet started, but Linux, in particular Red Hat Linux completely wiped them out with their dirt cheap alternative.
I also agree that IBM announcing that they had invested $1 billion in Linux, was a serious affirmation of how good Linux was. That sent shockwaves that affected both Sun and Microsoft.
The availability of open source solutions has completely changed the landscape of computing forever.
When Richard Stallman lauched his Free Software movement, I'll bet he never thought it would end up being used for surveillance capitalism.
had worked for Sun support service before the bubble pops till 2003 ...
One of the key things was high prices for cheap pc parts ...
Had to replace lot of 9gb IDE drives in Ultra 5 and 10 ...
Server side there were also issues with things such as the FC-AL centerplane , DC-DC converters
Also at the software level we had to deal with 64 bits but had to run commercial software in 32.
What was great is the ability to boot either from virtually any scsi media and the network
was it from pre OBP systems to the OBP 4...
My 2 cts
I remember inn 1991 when Eurotherm at their Reston campus got some Sun Workstations for software development. At that time we had Macs and PCs and the PCs were really only used in the lab and the Macs for documenting. This made the Macs the main information originators. The Macs were all networked and could share digital information straight forwardly. They also ran time sharing applications at the same time with real WYWYG What you see is what you get. The PCs were not the useful the Macs were and the Sun Workstation had a lot of characteristics with the Macs. They were not WYSWYG, but they have highly readable bitmapped fonts. The SPARC station was fast! Sunview Sun's window system had tool talk that was suppose allowed various parts of the windowing gadgets to talk to each other. I could cut and paste huge text logs using the windowing cut and paste at a snap while on a Mac the system might not respond for tens of seconds.
Sun Workstation then went away from Sunview windowing that had been a system that was more of a advancement over the Macs with bends towards engineering and scientists to the the common desktop environment used my HP and IBM more a kin to MS Windows window system that made the Sun and other work stations seem more like a Windows PC than an engineering Macintosh. I think that was the death of the Sun Microsystems workstation. We could still use an advanced form of that Sunview windowing system today in 2022 for engineers and scientists running CAD and other scientific packages.
I do remember the Daisy System workstation. It was used for electronic circuit design in 1992. We had one and I was made system administrator for the electrical engineering department which made me the one to give it attention. It had a screen that was so dim you could hardly see it and very slow to draw. I was told that was due to the high resolution screen it was using for its day. It was extremely slow and the only way to move digital information was on 5" floppy disk. If was the critical production flow of circuit design from EEs to the drafting department. We were having to schedule engineers to use the Daisy for schematic capture use. This was a bottleneck and inconvenient.
I remember talking to software support for the Daisy and people at that company they were saying they thought they are going to make it and there was talk of Daisy abandoning its proprietary workstation and porting their software to a Sun Workstation. That was exciting, but Eurotherm was paying a lot for licensing the Daisy per year and only using it for schematic capture. It might have been $30,000 a year. By the time I was involved with the Daisy the discussion had changed keeping it to having me consult the various engineering teams for a replacement for schematic capture. The Daisy ran SPICE a mathematical common source library of mathematical models for electronic devices.
Although SPICE was developed in the open Daisy's libraries were proprietary. Our engineering department didn't use the simulation part of the Daisy which may have been its most expensive part. The proprietary nature of a lot of the Daisy made it less appealing to Eurotheum's company uses both in Reston and in the UK. Eurotherm had huge layoff in fall 1992 which included me. Its very hard to retire old CAD systems like the Daisy and without an administrator to transition data, older designers may have never really left that old Daisy workstation. The company adopted a PC based schematic capture system which wasn't the Mac based version I was hoping for and a great deal of people preferred. I was told later the engineering team that was pushing for the PC based schematic capture system was really doing it with the hopes of getting another PC. We did everything on Macs, but they wanted another PC and decided to vote for the PC schematic capture system to get it. A couple weeks after that team got the new PC for schematic capture half of them got laid off.
Just a comment on the Cray acquisition. Sub did not acquire Cray. Cray was acquired by silicon graphics (a competitor). Cray had a division that developed sparc based systems and this division was sold to Sun by silicon graphics.
I was the guy who did the report to Sun's Office of the President to buy Cray Research. Ed Zander sent me a personal Thank You note.
I thought you were the guy in the commercials for the hamburger restaurant
@@briscoelang2436 Retired now. I was going through all my old papers and throwing them away things. Came across Zander's note scribble on a piece of paper.
Dude...... I grew up in Redmond in the '90s and Early '00s, stepped DEEP in Microsoft and Sub-California tech culture.
This video from 10:45 to 13:15 explained SO MANY questions that have been festering in my mind since I was a little tot, seeing all the big-name computer brands rapidly come-and-go in school, home, work, and stores.
Fascinating.... man, Sun screwed up. A tale as old a time.
You probably mean “steeped”. No idea what “Sub-California” is; Baja doesn’t have much tech.
Andy Bechtolsheim would go on to found and fund Arista Networks with a bunch of ex-Cisco employees. Arista would take decent market share from Cisco and their monopoly in the datacenter/enterprise networking space.
The major hole not covered by your documentary was the motivation for SUN Workstations (solely for CS Depts.) was what was called a SAIL terminal (Stanford AI Lab), which had functionality at the time found in no other terminals including watching the evening news (TV, but only B&W in a green phosphor) while working. The SUN-1 in fact could not equal SAIL functionality at the start. Later versions could better the SAIL termonals, and this says nothing of PARC workstations (not merely the Alto but the D-machine successors).
I first visited them in Santa Clara in the 2-digit making phase before Bill joined them. Later at Sun Quintin (now Meta/FB), I'd have lunch with buddies at their cafeteria named SPARCy's (SGI's cafeteria was Cafe Iris, now Charlie's at google)). We'd having working meetings on performance characterization, and graphics systems in particular.
I worked for Sun for 7 years in the earlier days in the field - absolutely, the most fun company to work for in my career. I was a manager of pre-sales people out in the field sales force. Was able to give people unexpected raises at times - like, 15%! And the first low cost, color workstation (3/60), had a lead time of six months - we couldn't make them fast enough. Scott McNealy created a great culture, and I got to meet Bill Joy and drive him around to customers. He was hung over from drinking too much tequila the night before, but he was just an amazing, brilliant person, and customers were mightily impressed. And at the same time, he was a nice guy, didn't seem too full of himself. I still think that if they could have worked with HP, DEC, and IBM, to standardize Unix and a window system, we would've had a better and more secure desktop experience than Windows a long time ago.
All of them did standardize on a windowing system - it was called "CDE", the Common Desktop Environment. Sooo... OY! Mate! What are you on about?
I loved working on Sun gear in the late 90s. Such good quality products.
Excellent video covering all the major points accurately. I worked at Sun 2000-2011 and even in the declining years it was a great place to work. They treated employees well and and had great openness internally. A follow-up video could be a list of all the tech we now use and take for granted that started at Sun but was far too ahead of its time to be commercially viable when released.
This is more informative than the other videos covering Sun's history, great job.
I’m not a computer geek (I’m an MD). I started using computer in USA in 1983 and grew up with few systems that you mentioned. Now I’m retired and don’t use computer that much. Latter makes me cry as I feel like a dead person, tears flowing, I returned back to india after 42 yrs in USA working and teaching at Medical Universities, I thank you for taking me through the computer memory lane.
The day the workstation market died, afaict, was the day SNL ASCI Red took the 1 Teraflop crown on TOP 500. Suddenly, it didn't matter how well-designed your chips were, they would never get the price/performance of commodity chips on the latest process node. Economies of scale were here, there was no arguing with it.
No matter price performance when you have a chip that can run an OS(AIX) that run circles around competition OSes.
The original design goal of the Sun workstation was to build a 3M machine for CAD: 1 MIPS, 1 Mb memory and a 1 megapixel display. The original Sun1 design met this goal and sold for 1 mega-penny ($10,000). But that was without any peripherals like a disk drive or Ethernet networking.
A whole 1MB? That's just crazy! Who'd ever need such a thing?
I have fond memories of using a Sun workstation for CAD in Engineering Design class back in 1986. We used DOGS (Drawing Office Graphics System) with the optional BOXER solid modelling software. Wish they could make a comeback.
15:40 the chart labels the year 2001 twice. It should have 2003 after 2002, but it goes back to 2001 when showing the -3,429 (M) net income loss. The chart is also labeled 1999 to 2001 on the top, but also shows 2002 and what I assume should be 2003. Otherwise great video!
Was the Stanford label a joke?
An interesting story. In many ways reminiscent of DataPoint corporation. They had the first working network, distributed data processing, enterprise level laser printers, and many other technical innovations.Unfortunately much of the senior management kept reading their own press releases and really had their heads up their collective asses. In the late 80s they refused to consider "entrepreneurship" and instead paid talented technical people generous severance packages to start up their own companies. The USAF has a term for DPTs senior managements thought processes: up and locked.
This is really cool. I'm currently doing a Master's in Computer Science, and we study a lot of Sun's work in distributed computing and multithreaded processing - very influential company
Employed at SUN in Mountain View 2000 to 2002, entire business centers were closed in April 2002. Literally entire office with 500 people, in 4 weeks, give pink slips. It was the beginning of the end.
All the stuff we now take for granted on PCs, e.g. Ethernet, sound cards, optical drives, 3D graphics... they all were on SUN workstations years before they came to the PC.
You helped me fill in an interesting blank and make the connection! I had been selling an SD-WAN product called Talari and then Oracle bought them. Oracle walked away from support of the new hardware Talari had introduced just before the purchase. Trying to force existing users to a new hardware platform. It was likely to move SUN boxes! Makes sense now!
I remember using the Sun Microsystem 3 in the 1986-1987 for my PhD work in CMOS integrated circuit design. The machine uses a Motorola MC68020 running at 20MHz, with 1MB RAM and 10 MB HD. I was using Magic a layout editor, part of John Ousterhout's VLSI Tools, running on Berkeley Unix. With a mouse, I was able to layout several chip designs for a major Japanese company in the late 1980s. The chips were fabricated using the MOSIS service run by Sam (forgot his last name) at the ISI, Marina del Ray, CA. I also remember using the "vi" text editor to write my dissertation on Unix nroff/troff applications. Good times!
Ah the BIOS and CMOS screens at start up ...
1:17 I like the alternate spelling of "Stanford"