
Sun Microsystems: A Look Back at a Tech Company Ahead of Its Time - rbanffy
https://thenewstack.io/sun-microsystems-a-look-back-at-a-tech-company-ahead-of-its-time/
======
someonehere
Knee deep learning Solaris 7 back right around the time 8 was approaching
release.

I was convinced by a peer in my helpdesk job that I should drop out of
community college and pursue Solaris training. Back then he said Sun had ~48%
of the internet backbone market. Took a few thousand my parents loaned me and
paid for an all you could eat training package. From those seven courses I
took it helped develop my future career in sys admin work. I was all about
Sun.

I think the true nerd moment of my life was learning the history of Bill Joy
and figuring out his Sun email address. Sent him an email praising and
thanking him for his contributions. I also complimented him on the article he
wrote for Wired called, “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us.” The article stood
out as something I felt would be coming for humanity in the next several
decades. He responded to my email thanking me for reaching out.

------
soulnothing
I was thinking back to when I worked in a data center. We used solaris
zones(container) and crossbow(networking). Writing a custom PXE deployer, that
bootstrapped our nodes. Then added them to a cross data center cluster. It
felt like where we are now with containers. It always seemed a bit ahead, and
now those features are more readily available.

------
eldenbishop
Sun was constantly blowing my mind when I first got into computing. I remember
going to my first Java 1 when Sun was showing off the Java Card. There were
terminals everywhere and you would just slide your card into the terminal and
your X windows sessions would pop up exactly how you left it at the last
terminal. I know, its just skipping the login step but it seemed so cool at
the time.

Years later at a pre-maker-fair style event Sun was showing off their Java
based robotic controllers. They had embedded WIFI and a compiler with a button
that would upload the code directly to the device. This was before raspberry
pie, IoT and "connected devices". Back then we had to physically update our
controllers by attaching them to the PC. It was amazing but sadly WAY too
expensive.

Was very sad when their assets got swallowed up by Oracle. I doubt we will
ever see their like again.

------
NKosmatos
My first workstation was a Sun SPARC, the first UNIX I worked with was SunOS
(later Solaris) and I still have a lot of memorabilia. Great respect for what
Sun has done/offered to the computing field.

------
eaguyhn
In our company at the end of the 1980s we built embedded systems based on Z80
and 8051 chips; our compilers were CP/M. We maintained the builds from a
386i/SunOS environment using make and SCCM. The builds were done using DOS
with a CP/M emulator. Builds were run from a SunOS makefile.

Cool stuff for the time.

------
znpy
I wonder what today's equivalent of Sun would be.

~~~
goatinaboat
Or SGI or Apollo or DEC or any of those old workstation makers. It really was
a golden age, companies making their own CPUs, their own OS, everything from
desktop workstations to massive servers. Today’s world where everything is
just a PC (even in a rackmount case) is dull and grey in comparison.

~~~
rbanffy
At least some of the best parts of Solaris and IRIX now live on in other
places.

