Explicit reference was also made to NFS, which has nothing to do with WAN-style networking. The local Sun mafia are trying really hard to claim credit for distributed computing at all scales, and there's nothing off-topic about addressing one part.
Many many things over the years, going all the way back to 1990 when I was at Encore dealing with all the dirty tricks they played to hobble competing NFS implementations, but that's not the point.
My real issue with them is hubris. There's a certain cadre of Sun alumni, highly visible on forums such as this, who would have us believe that they were absolutely always doing the best work on the most important problems. I think that denies credit to others who were doing work just as good on problems just as important, at companies which weren't driven into Oracle's arms by all the waste. Having known many of those people over the years - it's not for me to judge whether I'm one of them myself - I find that offensive. Sun just wasn't all that and the sooner we shed that particular piece of idol worship the better the industry will be.
You know why Sun engineers are all that? They made all these technologies they invented wildly popular in professional, elite IT circles. There are still many people who have no clue who Bryan Cantrill or Jeff Bonwick or Matt Ahrens or Nicholas Droux are because they're not in that elite or enthusiast circle of IT professionals dealing with those technologies, but for us who understand what they do and their importance to the overall computer industry, yes, we appreciate them for inventing them. Those people came forward, blogged and documented their work over the span of ten years, did you? I didn't read anything from you until yesterday, and it's not for the lack of trying, let me assure you. They made videos, presented at conferences, a lot. So yes they're popular, as they should be and they get credited, as they should.
It's like watching an Amiga demo: one has to understand how hard it was to code the effect to appreciate it -- a normal person off of the street just sees some graphics and hears some music. Sun engineers not only did great things well, but they popularized them too because they wrote intimate diaries in the open about their work over the span of ten years. They raised an entire generation of IT professionals and taught them what it takes and what it means to be an engineer.
I wish I knew who the engineer(s) behind SGI inst(1M) is(were), but unfortunately I don't because they never put names and faces on their products.
If you're going to persist in this kind of "I'm elite, you're no big deal" posturing (and borderline ad hominem) then we're done. This isn't about who's the biggest blog loudmouth. I don't care that you failed to find something to suit your narrow biased in interests in five minutes of stalking through my old blog two years after it was discontinued. Both Bonwick and Cantrill were able to find it when it mattered. They stopped by and we had a couple of interesting conversations. Those kinds of interactions are what matter.
Please, try learning something new instead of getting stuck on the first thing you found when you first entered the industry and spitting all over everything else. Go look through the conference proceedings, even from Sun's glory years, and you'll find plenty of papers from people elsewhere that have had a far more profound effect on software practice today. This fanboi behavior does nobody any good, least of all you.
It would do you well to stop being so hurt that you didn't get credit or recognition for the work you did. Why didn't you blog about it instead of being pissed off Sun engineers get the credit?
Yes I'm a big fan of their work, not least because their products work damn well, especially when solutions in GNU/Linux are compared to theirs. Did they screw up over the years? Yes they did, the USB subsystem in Solaris is an infamous fuck-up of epic proportions. Ironically it has nothing to do with distributed systems. But the things they really put effort into like Sun clustering, NFS and networking work and work damn well.
As for me and learning something new, I do that all of the time. The problem is that most of the new things coming out aren't new at all and certainly aren't better.
And you know what, for a passionate computer enthusiast, I'm sick and tired of IT and all this bullshit.
> There's a certain cadre of Sun alumni, highly visible on forums such as this, who would have us believe that they were absolutely always doing the best work on the most important problems.
Well, I'd be the first to say that Sun was often doing substandard work. The implication that they were doing no work is just insane though.
