These two men were joined by William Joy and Scott McNealy, and on the 24th of February in 1982, they founded Sun Microsystems. All of these men are Stanford graduates (except for Joy who went to Berkley), and the name “Sun” is derived from Stanford University Network. This is well named as from the start, Sun systems included network capability. Employee 5, John Gage, went so far as to say “the network is the computer,” which became the Sun slogan. Funding for this adventure was provided by Eastman Kodak, AT&T, Olivetti, and Xerox.
I have a soft spot for Sun. I don’t care much for Java, but their hardware – especially their workstations and thin clients – were unique and cool, and it’s incredibly sad the company couldn’t keep their workstation business operational. SPARC actually managed to hold on for quite a while – more so than other non-x86 architectures – but Oracle was not at all interested in the workstation market, which was probably the right financial call.
I’m still looking for a Sun Ultra 45 that doesn’t cost my me firstborn.
When I read the name William Joy, I wondered “Who’s that guy, never head about him”.
C’mon, no one ever talks about “William Joy”.
Also, “my me”? “Me my”?
Ohhhhh haha yeah, I didn’t catch that! I definitely know the name Bill Joy.
How could he do that at 16 when the 8008 was not released until he was 17?
Typo, miss remembering, source being wrong. And come on we are talking about 1972 here 50+ years ago 1 year error is about 1.25% at most, if inflation had bin that liw the past year we would all be hsppy.
“I don’t care much for Java”.
Well I DO!
I wish all games were made in JAVA and were cross platform instead of tying us into one OS. JAVA and WINE (independently) have shown us that it is more than possible to run games and programs on OSs that they weren’t designed for. I wish this was done with forethought by game companies but it isn’t.
I’m just glad that there are more than enough games for the non-Microsoft OS that I use. While I can’t play all the games I want, I have more than enough for what my time allows. But aren’t there games that are on consoles or a desktop OS or mobile device that you would love to play on a different system? I would have a hard time imagining that the answer is “no” unless you can afford all of them. And if you can, wouldn’t you rather have one box to run them all? I would. And it definitely would not be anything from Microsoft.
Sabon,
You’re right, portable binaries would address most of the problems with commercial software being non-portable and consumers would be better off for it. This possibility would have been in the cards had Sun succeeded but microsoft was the stronger company and wouldn’t have that. So they built their own competing platform to kill off java on windows. .net eventually became more portable thanks to mono, but it didn’t start out that way. Since being acquired by Oracle, much of the java software I used has stopped working (since java 8?). For better or worse, Oracle didn’t give much respect to Sun’s philosophy and I wouldn’t want to target java today.
The java language is used in android, but obviously it compiled to android specific byte codes, limiting portability. Nevertheless, at least within the android ecosystem, users & manufacturers benefit from being able to switch architectures without having to break software compatibility.
Yea, I think most users will agree with that. The thing that frustrates me is that these days most game engines are portable, just a recompile away. However publishers sometimes end up in exclusivity deals or simply don’t have the interest in targeting alternative platforms even with minimal effort. It’s a real shame. I’m thankful for proton/wine, but it’s not a good substitute for multi-platform/portable software. I still find wine’s compatibility with arbitrary software lacking.
I remember the days of Loki Software, making officially supported Linux ports of games – now so often the odd Linux ports of games are poorly documented with even less support.
I still remember playing UT2004 on FreeBSD under Linux emulation, which was an officially supported configuration.
FreeBSD offered more than double the framerate as Linux.
Drumhellar,
That was a fun game! I wouldn’t be opposed to trying FreeBSD, but I have yet to convince myself that it would be worthwhile. I think in some ways it may be better engineered, but linux is the devil I know and I hesitate to invest in a new OS with potentially less support. I could be wrong though, FreeBSD might support the ethernet and wifi adapters on my computer that debian 11 chokes on. I had to install a PCI adapter to get connected, bah.
FreeBSD’s wifi support isn’t very great, sadly, It still has problems with my Intel chipset on a 12 year old laptop, and doesn’t support my 2015 Macbook wifi at all.
And, it is a victim of Linux’s popularity – too much software (Especially anything Wayland specific) expect Linux and doesn’t bother to support any other Unix-like OS.
I love FreeBSD, but it just isn’t keeping up.
That said, the Linux emulation is still pretty good. There is are even meta package in their pkg repo designed to make running commercial Linux software easier – as an example, linux-steam-utils will install the necessary packages to make Steam run, and nVidia still has current drivers that run well, if you want/need them instead of the opensource NV driver.
Well yea exclusively deals stink, but it’s a way fir devs to get money in the door before release so I can understand why they sign them. And then we ar in to the whole thing about directx being windows ( and probably xbox) only so if the devs pick an engine based on that, well…..
Eh portability is more difficult than just having a universal binary, but that is a major hurdle. You still need the devices to be of similar capabilities and have a graphics framework that abstracts away the hardware. Like vulcan. But the os players don’t play nice so there isn’t a modern graphics stack thats supported by them all. So any cross platform game also needs to support multiple common graphics frameworks which ups the cost considerably.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I agree with the point here, but I feel the industry is failing at portability even in instances when it doesn’t have to and capabilities are extremely similar. Unfortunately for us sometimes incompatibilities are deliberate. Market leaders may not want to be compatible with the rest of the market since that makes competition far more viable.
This is why apple is against supporting vulcan even though it would bring huge benefits for interoperability. This was never about what’s best for users, but what corporations feel gives them the most power over consumers. This this regressive behavior can be prevalent especially with dominant companies.
I agree. Some companies like Sun were doing more than anyone else to unify platforms, but look at what it got them. The trouble with pushing generic solutions is that you’re using your own resources to help support your competitor’s platform, meanwhile you’ll have a hard time developing a competitive advantage for yourself. Companies in the long tail are probably more likely to be ideologically aligned to teaming up against common foes, but today’s markets are so skewed that dominant companies at the top are eating everybody’s lunch while small companies are starving.
So although I think there are some great opportunities to improve compatibility if we wanted to, I simply don’t think the for profit companies running our industries have the incentives to do so.
Picking nits:
– StarOffice was a product of Star Division. SUN just bought the company.
– SUN hardware was good but it lost its way on the OS side with the corporate choices to abandon SunOS(BSD), switch to Solaris(SVR4), and make the C compiler an optional package.
– Java might have held early promise but it’s now regarded as a bloated mess, to be avoided as much as possible, not only because of Oracle’s onerous license costs.
I don’t really care for the Java language any more, but the JVM is still highly performing. If you can accept the relatively high memory usage and startup time, it’s great. By the way: OpenJDK isn’t affected by any Oracle license.
Ummm … those are pretty big “if”s
And most of the time you can’t run BigVendor[tm] packages on OpenJDK.
So are C#, Visual Basic, and all of MS’s products.
Anyway, other fun Sun-isms is the whole Microsoft vs. Sun. Windows for Workgroups was Microsoft’s (copied) version of NIS, with pretty much all of its flaws. Windows AD was Microsoft’s (copied) version of the Distributed Computing Environment. While Sun refused to directly participate, they did partner with Transarc there.
Back in the very early 90’s, when things like the Sparcstation 10 was coming out, I demo’d (to Sun) our software showing 100’s of simultaneous users on their little pizza box. And while that might not seem like a huge deal. our little CICS clone pulled it off as well as our emulated VSAM db offering gigabytes of file storage. You had to live back in the day to understand how miraculous that was. All pre-www. Also back then, hardware companies like Sun would just throw you equipment to aid in porting. Gone are those days. We had lots of free Sun hardware.
Sun’s allergy to HW RAID (though they did do some) led to ZFS. Remembering “zones” vs. hw partitioning. Just too little way too late given the fast rise of virtualization.
SPARC, much like IBM Power at the time, was a heat monster, unless you used the poor performing stripped down “i” variants… which of course became their mainstay (before cool threads, because nobody wants a 4U “thing” that should have been a “2U” thing were it not for the massive cooling requirements.
And of course “cool threads” brought us the worst performing “SPARC” systems ever. Reminds of people buying earlier gen SB/Ivy Xeons with large number of cores and atrocious speeds. Sure, I guess it “scales”, now you have 100 really really slow running things.
Andy B’s return gave them “style” and even led to weird things like a SPARC with a PCIe bus of all things. But of course, Sun didn’t have anything that worked with it…. sigh…
Back then, Sun leveraged Nvidia for their chipsets on their x86-64 AMD hosts. Now, there’s a pairing you’ll never hear again!!
The Sun Java Workstation (dual Opteron), was named that because “they thought” they needed to leverage their trademark. Of course the host was nothing of the sort and mostly a bomb. Was “tiny”-ish for a workstation with two CPUs, using a mezzanine board design. However, Sun didn’t make this. And while there was an IBM unit using the exact same board, and even an option to replace the “south” portion of the bottom board with PCIe, Sun made sure their BIOS’s were locked so that you couldn’t do that (thanks Sun!!).
Back in the day, I was a fan of Tcl/Tk, and was greatly distressed as John O’s project went to Sun, who at the time, believed that it’s only hope… get this…. was to port it to Windows. Now, of course that makes absolutely ZERO sense (from a Sun perspective). I told Dr. O that Sun bought them in order that Java wouldn’t have competition early on. And, I’m pretty sure I’m right. Anyway, it worked, and Tcl/Tk waned as Java was released. Tcl/Tk was allowed to run in a browser, but only after you did some manual editing of a file for your browser. Meanwhile, Java was given (at the time), full blessing to run without any “mother may I”. (Browser based Java being a big thing at the time). Java in a browser ran unimpeded for many many years before somebody thought, “hey, this probably isn’t secure?” You think? And of course, they did since they forced Tcl/Tk to not work out of the box)
Oh, and even post the “give away the hardware” days, Sun servers and workstation were at one time pretty cheap (about 3x less comparatively speaking). After cool threads (the slow Suns), they greatly raise their prices. $60K would have gotten you a beast in the III days, now it buys a pea shooter (think dual Xeon vs Celeron).
Even though I use it less and less, I still find java to be the most useful of the available languages supported on JVM. As I get further into supporting new IIoT solutions and using them to extend the lifetime of legacy equipment, I had thought that Java’s days were numbered, everything would be C or Python, we had to optimise what we had.
But as devices gain more performance and capabilities the use of Java seems to be valid again, and it comes with a huge library of ready made solutions, ironically in an industry architecture where the network is the computer. Exactly as the closing statement in the article suggests.
Things, Thread and MATTER, the network is the computer.
So, people should keep a Sun Ultra 45 stored in conditions that keep it in decent shape for several years so Mr Thom Holwerda can come and pick it up at the same price it was going for years ago? What entitles Mr Thom Holwerda to receive such a service?
Here is some advice: Buy soon-to-be-collectible electronics when they are old used stuff, not when they are collectible. For example, you can pick up PS3s and Intel-based Macs now for “old used stuff” prices on eBay and CeX. But some years later, anyone who will have kept them stored and in decent condition for you to come and buy them will want to be compensated for the service.
I have done something similar in the past btw, bought some Alienware 3D laptops back when they were old used stuff, because I knew once UHD TV (non-3D most of them) took over people would want to experience 3D in some way and a laptop is the best way to do it (due to the compact dimensions). I didn’t wait until those laptops became collectible (which they did) and whine about the fact people want to be compensated for spending time and real-estate space to store those items.
So, long story short, that’s how much a Sun Ultra 45 costs today once everything is considered. It’s not “firstborn son” prices.
kurkosdr,
You’re reading an awful into the gripe that something is expensive, haha. I complain about unaffordable prices all the time,
I suppose when it comes to privileged/luxury goods that people don’t need, apathy may be an appropriate sentiment. However I do feel that the middle class is increasingly headed in the direction of subsistence living conditions such that even basic needs can cause financial distress. It’s kind of sad to see the world headed this way instead of getting better.
I don’t like it when someone thinks that they are entitled to a certain price when it comes to rare off-production items. No, there is no such thing as a maximum price for those, and let’s keep in mind that safekeeping them for years costs time and real-estate space. I also wish I could get a Sun Ultra 3 laptop for the price of a sandwich, but I understand it’s not reasonable to demand so.
I will now skip the off-topic part of your comment (that is, the second paragraph) if you don’t mind. Stop trying to hijack threads.
Some people are always going to act shocked when they discover the laws of supply and demand.
The number of Sun Ultra 45s are significantly lower than the number of people, who for whatever masochistic reason, want one. And the more time passes, the higher the price is going to get, as the number of available/functional units keeps decreasing due to the laws of component failure.
I mean at this point is easier, and more performant, to just boot solaris on an emulated ultrasparc on qemu. Boot it, do a couple of silly things, and realize how useless it is a this point. Which is going to be just about the same experience you’d get with the real HW, and you don’t even have to spend anymoney!
I don’t think people realize how slow an Ultra 45 is by todays standards. And it was already a grossly overpriced piece of kit when it was new, as it had just awful price/performance ratio.
well, after the article I understood better about tunnel rush and Sun Microsystems.