Today has largely been brought to you by nostalgia brought about by this article, reporting on a get-together of former Sun Microsystems employees.
I have never been a former Sun Microsystems employee, and of course now I never will be one. Of all the tech companies I’ve interacted with, Sun is the one I most regret not getting to work with. By the time I dealt with them, they had already put the “crash” in “dot-com crash” but there was still a feeling that they made great things. And besides, they showed that even a pony-tailed Objective-C programmer can be a tech CEO.
I recently talked about the importance of GNU projects, but plenty of other software projects were also important, and Sun had a hand in quite a few of them:
- Bill Joy worked for them, and most of their early workstation operating systems were based on BSD Unix.
- In fact while Apollo may have invented the idea that a single person might use a Unix computer, Sun popularised it.
- I learned how to boot Macs by learning how to program Forth and boot Suns.
- NFS was the beginning of the separation between your device and your documents.
- NIS was a bit of an important step on the way to logging in anywhere (its level of baroqueness compared to OAuth has never been accurately gauged).
- In fact, they pretty much invented cloud computing.
- Java was quite a big thing for a while.
- Dtrace is pretty amazing.
- They even got into standard Unix workstation vendor capitalisation for a while.
It’s likely that much of the interesting stuff at Sun was already over by the time I could’ve worked there, and I certainly experienced a very last-minute replay of some of their history. When I was a student I ‘borrowed’ an Ultra 5 (one of their least good workstations, pretty much a PC with a sun4u SPARC innards) and a SparcStation 5 (one of their most good) to learn about Solaris, SunOS and NeXTSTEP. But it certainly feels like a lot of the future was invented there, even if they were largely following Xerox’s playbook like the rest of the industry.
So tonight, I’ll remember that my control key is in the correct place:
I’ll press L1 and A, then raise a glass to Sun and the job I never had.
