I was at SGI during its heyday. Best time of my career. The highest density of insanely smart people I’ve ever worked with, I learned so much from them.
One thing overlooked from that era was that the customers were so cool - they were building virtual wind tunnels, flight simulators, protein visualizers, etc - not running payroll or inventory management.
We used to say our customers used our products to make money, not count money. Joke’s on us because it turned out the market for counting money is much bigger :-)
Is 30 years too late to say thankyou? I was an SGI customer in the UK. Genetics research and bioinformatics. I remember when we bought our Power Challenge XL, (size of a refrigerator), some guy with a PhD showed up to install it and spoke biology. I was impressed.
Like personal computing up through the 90s to the .com boom everyone was trying to have fun and make cool stuff at the same time. Being able to get paid for it was an amazing bonus. Now it feels like getting paid comes first.
> Joke’s on us because it turned out the market for counting money is much bigger :-)
Even that turned out to be not as large a market as expected. PC Magazine and InfoWorld in the 1980s ran many, many reviews of packaged accounting software at various price/size tiers. 70% of them died against QuickBooks, a product that didn't even exist then. 15% got bought by SAP, Sage, Infor (for some reason, Europeans dominate the "legacy accounting rollup" space), or Microsoft. 15% survive by selling the same software for 40 years to small customers local to them, and/or very specialized verticals (pawnshops, watercraft rental).
> But let’s talk about my unfair advantage – my Lyon family mafia. I was living with my brother Bob and his wife. Bob was working at Xerox SDD developing the Xerox Star workstation. And my brother Dick was at Xerox PARC with an Alto on his desk
Sometimes, I feel like the whole downwards trend having a single kid loses the family aspect of my previous generation - I meet enough people who don't have uncles, aunts, nieces or nephews for nepotism (literal) to work sideways on.
Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways.
I got into Linux because my uncle's brother in law worked in computer repair when I was 14, back when India still needed to fill in an export control form to download software. Another uncle sent me extra 32Mb of RAM from Dubai and a modem which wasn't a winmodem (& my dad hated him for the phone bills).
> We were just managing a house mortgage with 3 full time incomes. Interest rates then were well above 10%.
> Sometimes, I feel like the whole downwards trend having a single kid loses the family aspect of my previous generation
There are many reasons folks have no kids or only one kid. I don't think opining for a larger family 'for the chance' of having a family member with similar tastes is really... compelling.
> Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways.
Are you saying friends cannot provide support in minor ways?
In my view, it's more compelling to solution the many downsides of nepotism (esp. in governments not just private entities) rather than endorse or perpetuate it.
> In my view, it's more compelling to solution the many downsides of nepotism
The solution is endless growing bureaucracy to implement and enforce fairness at every level and it is happening everywhere I can see.
> Are you saying friends cannot provide support in minor ways?
From my experience family members have some sort of obligation towards other members( though maybe less true or just untrue in modern day US) whereas friends can say yes or no to any request purely based on convenience.
The author used Nepotism tongue in cheek. It's clear he was pretty talented. He was just saying his family was also talented and knew people in Silicon Valley.
In this case, the Lyons were not providing each other jobs. But they shared insights into which companies had cool tech. And they inspired each other with the nice work stations! Much different. And not really 'nepotism'.
What I find fascinating about Sun is how fast its ride was. They launched their MVP in 1982 which was really just a bare 68000 board with a kluged together software suite. The second generation Sun 2's were like a year and a half later, running virtual memory on 4BSD, the 68020 made the Sun 3's in 1985 faster than a VAX, and suddenly Sun was The Premier Unix that everyone targetted.
The next few years (up through 1991 or so) would see the launch of SPARC[1] and all the Unix goodness we all still work on: shared libraries, NFS, RPC, pervasive IPv4 networking, basically everything about the modern datacenter software environment dates from these few years at Sun.
And then, sort of out of nowhere in the mid 90's, Linux distros running on P6 boards had essentially cloned it all on hardware 1/10th the price and the end had begun. Sun would continue to make a lot of money through the doc com boom, but their status as the thought and innovation center of Unix hit a brick wall.
The story of the end was all about Java and Oracle and datacenter markets. And IMHO it's not that interesting. What the hell happened to Unix?
[1] In hindsight it was just a flash in the pan, but the RISC arrival in the Unix world was shocking at the time. Even though in hindsight the workstation vendors had at most a 3-4 year lead on Intel at the peak and would rapidly fall behind.
Yeah in retrospect, it feels somewhat inevitable to me that Linux (or something similar if that hadn't happen) would displace it all and demolish the business model of "Unix as commodity", given Unix itself was clearly initially aimed at trying to popularize/democratize a set of technologies/techniques/concepts that had been previously locked up inside larger corporations and projects. The motive force of "getting this out there" was there, and was bound to escape the workstation maker's clutches.
I didn't live through the minicomputer era, but definitely grew up in the "Unix [and then Linux] ascendant" era and was an early adopter (as a user) of Linux on my 486. We just wanted what all the cool kids [err, adults] had. I spent many hours fine tuning my X11 environment to look like the screenshots I saw in UnixWorld of real Unix workstations, etc. ... without doing any actual "real work" with it...
Looking back, it was inevitable that Unix would become less and less a sale-able commodity and more and more a free standard that hackers would just ... assume.
I'm not sure how Sun could have saved itself without just turning itself into a services company, just too hard to win on economies of scale making actual hardware. They made hay while the Sun(tm) shone, I guess.
> Looking back, it was inevitable that Unix would become less and less a sale-able commodity and more and more a free standard that hackers would just ... assume.
I wonder if the operating system[1] has turned out to be the ultimate expression of Steve Jobs's quote about Dropbox: "feature, not a product". A means to an end, with the end being where all the value is.
Everyone talks about Microsoft retaining the rights to market DOS independent of the IBM license being the most important business deal of all time, but Microsoft producing its own applications may be even more important in retrospect.
[1] I wrote "Unix", but of course Windows has been de facto free, even when not purchased with a computer, for some time
I did a podcast with ex-Sun Bryan Cantrill and sjvn a few years back about the inevitability of open source as part of a series. Bryan’s take was basically, if not Linux, BSD. Of course, there’s also the school that Microsoft basically wins which many assumed at the time.
I mean, if you look at commercial UNIX, well to start it all sources from AT&T at some point; they weren't permitted to sell it, so they gave it away more or less.
BSD (and others) took it and improved it.
Everyone (including Microsoft) took at least the BSD socket stack, at least for a while.
Commercial UNIX competing against free community UNIX is a hard battle to win. There's a question of UNIX vs alles, but if UNIX lives, it's going to be community UNIX (or well Linux which is community UNIX alike).
I suppose there's an angle for commercial UNIX on specialized hardware; Apple is doing fine with that model; but it stopped being compelling for Sun --- commodified x86 servers are good enough that you can't build a business to support commercial UNIX on specialized server hardware (x86 or not) alone. Oracle Solaris exists, but as a non-customer, it looks like development has slowed significantly.
I think the root issue here is Joy’s Law [1]: “No matter who you are, the majority of smart people do not work for you.” Sun had a whole lot of very talented engineers working for them, but ultimately they were building a proprietary, vertically integrated system. When compared with the best memory makers in Japan and the best CPU makers at Intel and AMD and the loosely knit coalition of OS engineers working on Linux and all the Linux desktop engineers, they eventually found that the best engineers did not work for them.
[1] Ironically coined and named after Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy.
I recall that in about '92 Intel had launched a project called Eclipse which was an x86-based workstation they were developing to compete against Sun. As with many Intel projects, it didn't get anywhere.
Never heard of that particular product, but in point of fact Sun's original core workstation market had been essentially destroyed by the late 90's by x86 boxes running Windows NT. Intel didn't have the product in the channel in 1992, but by 1996 it was clear SPARC's days were numbered.
Again though, after 1995-ish Sun just stopped "doing Unix", abandoned the community they created (who all trotted off happily to Red Hat et. al.), failed in their core workstation market, and basically spent their time milking server sales to conservative[1] IT departments who wanted to do "internet".
Their swan song ended up being Java, an interesting (but again poorly exploited) technology that had next to nothing to do with the environment on which it was incubated. Frankly Sun ran away from it so hard that Java ended up running best (!) on Microsoft Windows.
So basically it was 13 years, as I see it, from kids-with-soldering-irons-and-a-dream to world-changing-behemoth to company-your-grandparents-buy-from. That's fast even in Silicon Valley.
[1] The cool kids, obviously, were all running Linux in their datacenters already. Only the S&P 500 dinosaurs were buying Sparcservers, but there were a lot of dinosaurs.
This is revisionist. ARM didn't break out as an embedded architecture until a full decade later. At the time it was entirely forgettable, with no competitive parts in the workstation market and no software worth running (again, the center of the universe at the time was SunOS).
It's popular now to imagine that ARM had some magic ISA back in the 80's, but it was very much an also-ran through most of its life. The magic is inside Apple Computer, and quite frankly they could have made anything fast. They simply happened to have an ARM OS core running already, so they picked the architecture that wouldn't force people to recompile their iPhone apps.
Working for a great company in its heyday is a gift - one that I wish for everyone. Stories like this are a comfort when the industry is near its nadir, and reminder that the industry moves in cycles, and all glory fades. I got my turn at Facebook in 2010. A bunch of times I'd see a name I'd recognize pop up in internal discussions: an esteemed classmate or colleague had joined, and you knew with all this talent concentrating in one place, good things were to come.
I worked at Disney Animation during the 90s. Yeah, my career may have peaked 30 years ago but not everyone gets a peak like that. "A gift" is the best way to describe it.
I think the author is also very skilled, considering porting part of UNIX to a new architecture almost all by himself as a sophomore.
I admit everything is simpler back then, but again tooling is bad and docs was just Lyon's book.
Putting myself in the shoes. I don't even know where to start. Honestly it would be an interesting project to port xv6 from RISC-V to another architecture WITHOUT the help of Internet and AI.
Or was it the grit and pushing through the pain of banging his own head against the wall many times while dealing with mysterious errors and compiler warnings that made him very skilled?
I fear the current state of our industry eliminated the possibility for not-great, not-skilled juniors to embark in these journeys such as these to become great and skilled seniors. And I'm afraid that sooner or later we will all regret it.
I wonder what stopped me being at that level. Mostly attitude, fear and perhaps aptitude. I liked things that were easy to install and follow tutorials. I got into Visual C++ as it actually installed as opposed to a magazine cover Linux distributionn that barely run. I think having the main system (gotta get those grades) takes most of the energy for most people. Either those who are happy to drop out or genius enough to both study and hack survive to do really cool stuff.
I enjoy historical books about the rise, fall, and everything in between for companies in the industry — things like The Idea Factory about Bell Labs, Dealers of Lightning about Xerox PARC, and Soul of a New Machine about Data General.
Are there any books folks would recommend like that about Sun?
Great, thanks for the pointer! I see it was published in 1999, so I imagine it’ll be a good time-capsule read too, even if it predates the dot com bubble burst and the eventual Oracle acquisition, though maybe that’s where the “Larry Ellison lawnmower” talk fills in well.
Those are great! I picked up a copy of Nokia: The Inside Story at a thrift store and was pleasantly surprised. I will add more if something comes to mind.
A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age
In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon’s full story for the first time. It’s the story of a small-town Michigan boy whose career stretched from the era of room-sized computers powered by gears and string to the age of Apple. It’s the story of the origins of our digital world in the tunnels of MIT and the “idea factory” of Bell Labs, in the “scientists’ war” with Nazi Germany, and in the work of Shannon’s collaborators and rivals, thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Wiener.
I also loved this one:
Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell
Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of “phone phreaks” who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI.
Not sure anyone could save the company, but he didn't help one single bit.
Sun never decided whether they were a hardware company of a software company. They had great hardware and software, but couldn't make much money with the latter. Failing to recognize software as a way to sell THEIR hardware was the biggest issue. When they decided to launch x86 workstations, I knew they were doomed. When they exited the workstation business, I knew it wouldn't be long.
When you destroy all the on-ramps to your highway, it's a matter of time until the toll booths are empty.
Readit News
One thing overlooked from that era was that the customers were so cool - they were building virtual wind tunnels, flight simulators, protein visualizers, etc - not running payroll or inventory management.
We used to say our customers used our products to make money, not count money. Joke’s on us because it turned out the market for counting money is much bigger :-)
SGI absolutely rocked it in those days.
Even that turned out to be not as large a market as expected. PC Magazine and InfoWorld in the 1980s ran many, many reviews of packaged accounting software at various price/size tiers. 70% of them died against QuickBooks, a product that didn't even exist then. 15% got bought by SAP, Sage, Infor (for some reason, Europeans dominate the "legacy accounting rollup" space), or Microsoft. 15% survive by selling the same software for 40 years to small customers local to them, and/or very specialized verticals (pawnshops, watercraft rental).
Understandable given the cost of living in SV.
Sometimes, I feel like the whole downwards trend having a single kid loses the family aspect of my previous generation - I meet enough people who don't have uncles, aunts, nieces or nephews for nepotism (literal) to work sideways on.
Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways.
I got into Linux because my uncle's brother in law worked in computer repair when I was 14, back when India still needed to fill in an export control form to download software. Another uncle sent me extra 32Mb of RAM from Dubai and a modem which wasn't a winmodem (& my dad hated him for the phone bills).
> We were just managing a house mortgage with 3 full time incomes. Interest rates then were well above 10%.
There are many reasons folks have no kids or only one kid. I don't think opining for a larger family 'for the chance' of having a family member with similar tastes is really... compelling.
> Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways.
Are you saying friends cannot provide support in minor ways?
In my view, it's more compelling to solution the many downsides of nepotism (esp. in governments not just private entities) rather than endorse or perpetuate it.
The solution is endless growing bureaucracy to implement and enforce fairness at every level and it is happening everywhere I can see.
> Are you saying friends cannot provide support in minor ways?
From my experience family members have some sort of obligation towards other members( though maybe less true or just untrue in modern day US) whereas friends can say yes or no to any request purely based on convenience.
In terms of optimizing for happiness and life fulfillment, I think less nepotism is probably good, even in the literal sense.
Dead Comment
The next few years (up through 1991 or so) would see the launch of SPARC[1] and all the Unix goodness we all still work on: shared libraries, NFS, RPC, pervasive IPv4 networking, basically everything about the modern datacenter software environment dates from these few years at Sun.
And then, sort of out of nowhere in the mid 90's, Linux distros running on P6 boards had essentially cloned it all on hardware 1/10th the price and the end had begun. Sun would continue to make a lot of money through the doc com boom, but their status as the thought and innovation center of Unix hit a brick wall.
The story of the end was all about Java and Oracle and datacenter markets. And IMHO it's not that interesting. What the hell happened to Unix?
[1] In hindsight it was just a flash in the pan, but the RISC arrival in the Unix world was shocking at the time. Even though in hindsight the workstation vendors had at most a 3-4 year lead on Intel at the peak and would rapidly fall behind.
I didn't live through the minicomputer era, but definitely grew up in the "Unix [and then Linux] ascendant" era and was an early adopter (as a user) of Linux on my 486. We just wanted what all the cool kids [err, adults] had. I spent many hours fine tuning my X11 environment to look like the screenshots I saw in UnixWorld of real Unix workstations, etc. ... without doing any actual "real work" with it...
Looking back, it was inevitable that Unix would become less and less a sale-able commodity and more and more a free standard that hackers would just ... assume.
I'm not sure how Sun could have saved itself without just turning itself into a services company, just too hard to win on economies of scale making actual hardware. They made hay while the Sun(tm) shone, I guess.
I wonder if the operating system[1] has turned out to be the ultimate expression of Steve Jobs's quote about Dropbox: "feature, not a product". A means to an end, with the end being where all the value is.
Everyone talks about Microsoft retaining the rights to market DOS independent of the IBM license being the most important business deal of all time, but Microsoft producing its own applications may be even more important in retrospect.
[1] I wrote "Unix", but of course Windows has been de facto free, even when not purchased with a computer, for some time
BSD (and others) took it and improved it.
Everyone (including Microsoft) took at least the BSD socket stack, at least for a while.
Commercial UNIX competing against free community UNIX is a hard battle to win. There's a question of UNIX vs alles, but if UNIX lives, it's going to be community UNIX (or well Linux which is community UNIX alike).
I suppose there's an angle for commercial UNIX on specialized hardware; Apple is doing fine with that model; but it stopped being compelling for Sun --- commodified x86 servers are good enough that you can't build a business to support commercial UNIX on specialized server hardware (x86 or not) alone. Oracle Solaris exists, but as a non-customer, it looks like development has slowed significantly.
[1] Ironically coined and named after Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy.
Deleted Comment
Their swan song ended up being Java, an interesting (but again poorly exploited) technology that had next to nothing to do with the environment on which it was incubated. Frankly Sun ran away from it so hard that Java ended up running best (!) on Microsoft Windows.
So basically it was 13 years, as I see it, from kids-with-soldering-irons-and-a-dream to world-changing-behemoth to company-your-grandparents-buy-from. That's fast even in Silicon Valley.
[1] The cool kids, obviously, were all running Linux in their datacenters already. Only the S&P 500 dinosaurs were buying Sparcservers, but there were a lot of dinosaurs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX
In retrospect, if Sun had acquired Acorn, they might still be around.
It's popular now to imagine that ARM had some magic ISA back in the 80's, but it was very much an also-ran through most of its life. The magic is inside Apple Computer, and quite frankly they could have made anything fast. They simply happened to have an ARM OS core running already, so they picked the architecture that wouldn't force people to recompile their iPhone apps.
I admit everything is simpler back then, but again tooling is bad and docs was just Lyon's book.
Putting myself in the shoes. I don't even know where to start. Honestly it would be an interesting project to port xv6 from RISC-V to another architecture WITHOUT the help of Internet and AI.
Or was it the grit and pushing through the pain of banging his own head against the wall many times while dealing with mysterious errors and compiler warnings that made him very skilled?
I fear the current state of our industry eliminated the possibility for not-great, not-skilled juniors to embark in these journeys such as these to become great and skilled seniors. And I'm afraid that sooner or later we will all regret it.
And which formed the basis of a full-fledged commercial product sold by Amdahl, a big-name company selling big iron to big-name customers.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Are there any books folks would recommend like that about Sun?
1. https://archive.org/details/highnoon00kare
There was a blog by a lady who was an early HR employee, but I can't find it anymore.
The Dream Machine: J.c.r. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop
Not really about a company, though.
In this elegantly written, exhaustively researched biography, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman reveal Claude Shannon’s full story for the first time. It’s the story of a small-town Michigan boy whose career stretched from the era of room-sized computers powered by gears and string to the age of Apple. It’s the story of the origins of our digital world in the tunnels of MIT and the “idea factory” of Bell Labs, in the “scientists’ war” with Nazi Germany, and in the work of Shannon’s collaborators and rivals, thinkers like Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and Norbert Wiener.
I also loved this one:
Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell
Exploding the Phone tells this story in full for the first time. It traces the birth of long-distance communication and the telephone, the rise of AT&T’s monopoly, the creation of the sophisticated machines that made it all work, and the discovery of Ma Bell’s Achilles’ heel. Phil Lapsley expertly weaves together the clandestine underground of “phone phreaks” who turned the network into their electronic playground, the mobsters who exploited its flaws to avoid the feds, the explosion of telephone hacking in the counterculture, and the war between the phreaks, the phone company, and the FBI.
Sun never decided whether they were a hardware company of a software company. They had great hardware and software, but couldn't make much money with the latter. Failing to recognize software as a way to sell THEIR hardware was the biggest issue. When they decided to launch x86 workstations, I knew they were doomed. When they exited the workstation business, I knew it wouldn't be long.
When you destroy all the on-ramps to your highway, it's a matter of time until the toll booths are empty.