When Kindness Backfires - The Tragic Tale Of Sun Microsystems
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Have you ever heard of a company called Sun Microsystems? If you’re familiar with the tech scene, you’ve probably heard the name in passing, but what exactly does Sun Microsystems even do? Well, Sun was a tech pioneer that revolutionized the industry back in the 1980s with massive contributions in the sectors of workstations, programming languages, silicon architecture, and operating systems. But, despite their massive contributions, they’ve disappeared completely disappeared into the background. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that they gave away so many of their tech inventions for free. At first, this worked out fine as their customers preferred to buy the Sun variant of a given product. But, after the dot-com bubble burst, cost factors became a much bigger concern leading to companies choosing cheaper alternatives over Sun. Before you knew it, Sun was needing a bailout which they eventually got when they were acquired by Oracle. While Oracle saved the company, it would also bury the brand and shift its focus to maximizing profits. This video explains the tremendous rise and fall of Sun Microsystems: the company that changed the world and disappeared.
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Timestamps:
0:00 - Sun Microsystems
2:39 - Founding Sun
5:49 - The Bright Sun
8:15 - The Sun Never Sets
11:27 - A Supernova
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I am a software engineer working in big American company. I heard about "Sun Microsystems" when i was in grade 6 or 7 i.e around 2008. And i always thought "What happened to them?". Considering all the contributions that they have made to the tech industry, We can truly say that "Sun was a legendary company". We often use the phrase "this world is not meant for good persons", now we could also say "this world is not meant for good companies" 😭
Welcome to the almost 30 club. I was in 7th or 8th grade in 2008. I also learned about Sun Microsystems as a kid. Starting programming around high school. It feels weird having people call PHP old school and no body remember Adobe Dreamweaver. 😂
I think the fall of Sun was due to several reasons. The rise of cheaper x86 servers (back then) and the wide adaption of Linux as the server OS. Not sure if they fit into "a good company" category (I just see companies are just private profit-driven organizations.) I did glossing over many things, my point is that all tech companies and engineers have contributed different part of computer history and technology. While Sun made great hardwares, normies did not have the chance to play the sparc system.
It was a great company to work for and the customers loved SUN hardware. There was real passion their. As for good and Bad, you are getting into Nietzsche territory here. There is no good or bad in Darwinian struggles, there is only survival.
@@peterfmodel I don't mean there is no good or bad. The closer description of my point is that it's a mixed of many things (good and bad.)
@@wilsonwg Understand. I am just too cynical for my own good sometimes, the result of old age.
I was working for Sun Microsystems in Ireland between 2008 and 2009 until I was affected for the huge lay-off in order to be more profitable before being bought by Oracle. Another reason for the fall of Sun was the 2007-2008 crash. Many Banks went bankrupt, and those banks were mostly Sun clients, so they lost a lot of clients, sometimes with unpaid bills....
Sad
The biggest problem we (as a SUN staffers point of view) had was nothing to do with giving things for free. We had a management layer that didnt like taking responsibility and the upper management from about 2007 onwards were trying to hawk off the company to someone who would buy it. One week we heard it was HP, the next, it was another major company ...and eventually Oracle. Oracle killed Sun and all the potential we had. The company we worked for (SUN) was a fantastic place to work and (within reason) we could explore, research and do what was necessary to innovate. SUN had stagnated and ummed and erred on x86 vs SPARC (remember Sun Linux anyone?! because we werent going to bring out Solaris 10 on x86 initially). Hardware was fantastic....until we stopped producing decent quality systems (check the plastic covers on a V240 for example) ...then let Fujitsu take the lead on the SPARC R&D .... all at the time when Linux was moving from being a homebrew pet project into something that was being taken extremely seriously for production use. I could go on - I genuinely miss SUN and would take a pay cut to go back to what we once had. Oracle killed SUN by trying to make customers pay licences and also no real negotiations around anything unless it was in Oracles favour. Hence why SUN doesnt exist anymore, Solaris is out of use by most companies for most things and JAVA has a licence fee for all but the most test of testing environments....way to go Larry!!
java has a license fee?
I think Sun also has serious errors in judgment in the market. It is only willing to serve enterprise users and cannot see that computers are developing towards end consumers. Judging from the outdated user interface design of Solaris 10, even if enterprise users don't care about user design, it seems By the time x86+Windows systems are cheap and beautiful, and there are a large number of alternative software ecosystems to choose from, Solaris is doomed to fail.
@@elsiepierce5509He's refering to Oracle's commercial JDK distibution which you have to pay for, but essentialy only want for very long term commercial support. They publish openJDK, which is mostly identical to their commercial offering, and you don't need to pay for licencing in a commercial setting. Other than openJDK, there are many other free distributions which are supported for a long time after release by huge companies like IBM and Amazon, again, without the need to pay for a license
@@elsiepierce5509 java yes, openjdk no
As an ex-Sun employee I agree with this sentiment 1000%! I started off as a PC guy big into hardware in '89-90, then into networking in '93. I was deeply entrenched into the Microsoft world being a contractor doing Windows server & network backend stuff until 1999. I started getting into Linux around 97-98 and eventually Solaris and Sun hardware buying old Sun hardware on the secondary market and tinkering with it. This led to me being hired by Sun in 1999. I thought it was gonna be the last job I ever had. The environment & people were often. Previously I had a disdain for the idea of working for any particular company long-term and preferred my independence. I'd been a contractor for the federal gov't & big telecom and working in those environments leaves a lot to be desired for someone like me. I fkn LOVED working for Sun. I worshipped at the altar of Sun. They used to say it wasn't a job, it was a wardrobe because they gave us so much schwag and cool Sun free stuff all the damn time. It got to the point where nearly everything I owned had a Sun logo on it (foreshadowing) and I was cool with that. I got paid well, I had a flexible schedule, killer benefits, constant training, a cush environment with free stuff everywhere, cool intelligent, motivated people around. I got trained on the E10K which was essentially a rebranded Cray supercomputer. It was the BEST!! But then management shuffled around and the attitude changed from the top down. They hired all these corporate zombie typical middle managers who did not embrace the environment and sought to curb what they saw as excess. That, to me, was the beginning of the end. The 'pissing in the pool' as my astute co-worker called it explaining that when a lil kid pisses in the pool it contaminates the entire pool, it's not contained to one small area. Ultimately, they started cutting all kinds of the cool stuff and everyone's demeanor changed. Then they started talking about incentivized voluntary exits. I remember around this time there was an initiative to gather up all the extraneous equipment and consolidate it by a loading dock, presumably to sell off to generate funds. They had these red stickers that said 'Idle Assets' on them. A few co-workers and myself started wearing the stickers as a kind of badge reflecting our inner anxiety & turmoil about the situation. Ultimately I ended up getting laid off in the early 2000s. I went back to being a contractor with a 'loved & lost' attitude about Sun. I ended up doing contract work for Sun in a variety of roles at different points in time pretty much until they got bought by Oracle and the brand destroyed. Funny because I worked at a data center when that happened... I was the 'Sun guy' and there was an 'IBM guy' I worked with as we were responsible for the deployment and decommissioning of our respective companies equipment in the data center. Up until Oracle bought Sun, it looked like IBM was gonna acquire them so we joked about potentially both being IBM guys soon... In some alternate reality Sun still exists and it was my last job ever.,
PRAISE THE SUN! (microsystems)
\[+]/
Incroyable.
Vough tarnish!! In search of the elden ring !!
Zunism
There are still 20+ year old Sun servers running a lot of critical backend systems, I work on them daily. My old Ultra 10 from the 90s is still one of my favorite computers of all time.
I still work with sun servers
@@JoelTheGamer me too!
I still run my Ultra 2. Dual 300MHz procs.
@@JoelTheGamer Turned my last ones off last week (2 with over 5 years uptime). Vale the good ship solaris, and all those who sail with her.
Man I loved Sun Microsystems back in the day. It's one of the main reasons I share my codes with the comunity. Java is my main language as a coder, I love it
That's cool C# is a bit faster than Java by about 50%, but the real star, if you can get past the OOP paradigm, is Rust, which I'm learning now. About 2x faster than C# and 3x faster than Java, and about as fast as optimized (gcc) C or C++. Peace!
@@raylopez99 Have you looked at the TechEmpower benchmarks? Java, C#, and Rust are all about equal when it comes to web server performance. I have worked professionally in all of these languages.
@@raylopez99 > C# is a bit faster than Java by about 50%
That's plain wrong, they are about the same speed on average. One can be faster than the other depending on what you're doing; generally C# is faster for tasks with shorter run times (because of its AOT compilation before execution), while Java excels in longer running tasks (because of its multi-stage optimization JIT). The CLR has better memory layout, while the JVM has the better garbage collectors (and you can actually choose which ones to use based on what's best suited for the app you're running)
Java was meant to be something like C++ but simpler (leaving out some features) and easier to use (integrated garbage collection). I don’t think it would have become popular without Sun’s massive hype machine behind it.
And in the end, some of the features it left out turned out to be rather important (e.g. generics, typedefs, unsigned integers). And you’d think that garbage collection would ensure no memory leaks, but it doesn’t. And so in language complexity it saves very little compared to C++.
@@raylopez99C# is literally MS Java and it's paid so no reason to go unless you work for MS.
Rust is ok, but main advantage is secure memory.
It is not easy to learn for most (I have electronic/computer engineering background with embedded system programming with C so it's ok for me).
As far as it goes in system programming there are better alternatives for C (Zig for example).
As far as backend goes Golang will take the spot as it is easier to learn and amazing for multi-threading, cloud base solutions.
And considering what rust foundation is doing with its trademarking policy it may be a nail to the coffin.
I don't believe that Sun's downfall had anything to do with its habit of giving away stuff in the 80s and 90s, on the contrary it contributed to the 200Billion valuation. By my understanding it was the conditions after the bubble where they didn't cope up with the changing scenarios that led to its downfall 👍🏻
Exactly. All for-profit companies "share", but it's always an attempt to lock you in onto their core business model, for which I don't blame them. SGI with OpenGL (and their workstations), Sun with Java (and their SPARC servers), Netscape with JavaScript (and their browser). IBM and Microsoft give so much too, for the same profit motivation, then and now. But their so much more diverse, therefore their much more insulated against a specific downturn in one technology trend. Sun failed when customers didn't need their core server products anymore. I respect them, their innovations, and how they gave us Java. But their singular core business model had reached an end. I just wished Oracle had died too, but they learned how to diversify :)
But their giving away their technologies helped create the cheap knock offs of the Dells and HPs that clients turned to during the hard times. While not the single factor , the sharing an giveaways did contribute significantly towards Sun's demise.
@@eudofia HP had RISC servers and Workstations before Sun 1 was launched.
They were killed by the state.
@@aneildavis HP already had RISC servers in 82 using their FOCUS microprocessors in the HP9000 line, HP-UX was born in the 1984 and HP used it on the workstation line too.
From memory, Sun was urged by community to open source Java. Sun was not happy but eventually gave up. Only code written in Java was released, not native one.
Original Java API codebase was really nice… I studied a lot of the implementation in college to learn various techniques… clearly took years to write it all and a huge team as most files had the names of their original authors.
And yes, I don’t remember seeing any C or ASM native files which was frustrating cos you could see where the API was calling into native methods.
When I was in college, I started writing code in Java and was fascinated by it (C & C++ being the only other languages I was exposed to). I looked up more into the creators of this brilliant platform and landing a job at Sun Microsystems was a dream for me then. I was quite disappointed when Oracle acquired them.
It's been more than 10 years now and I am still writing code in Java as my primary bread & butter. Fun fact, I worked for Oracle for about 5 years which was not as great as people might think but I still find a soft spot in my heart for Sun Microsystems and the people behind it even though it doesn't exist anymore. This video just goes to show why all programmers with a heart ought to love this company.
That's very inspirational. Learn Rust, it's memory safe and about as fast as C or C++ (gcc, optimized). I'm doing that now. Coming from C#, it's not that hard to learn (takes a bit of time but in a month you'll be a pro almost).
@@raylopez99 Ahh, we think alike sir. It's in my learning queue :) Thanks for the suggestion though. Cheers!
When Java was introduced, I thought it was cleaning up much of the mess in C++, but in doing so also turning into something which could be seen as an Improved Simula. This illustrates that the real innovations actually were in 1967 when Simula, the invention of Nygaard and Dahl, was unveiled.
@@raylopez99 Rust licensing is garbage and people who use Rust are questionable at best.
@@NothingMuchHereToSay What you mean? Is Rust an Open-Source license according to the Rust Foundation? I know CRUSTaceans seem to like Linux, so is that it? I'm a Windows man myself. Not that I love Windows that much (tho I code in C#) but Microsoft has become a 10-bagger for our family and we have a large stake in MSFT.
I love how you find videos of companies that aren’t well known or have their best days way behind them!! Love to see it!!
Try my best haha
Its not known if your are young. I used Solaris and their systems when i was a young developer.
@@LogicallyAnsweredHow do logically try to answer everything 🤔 There are no logically answers to all the questions.
@@tbraghavendranIf he loves to reply many of his fans" comments is this right man 😂 you should said that to yourself bruuhh your comment is 100% what you're doing 😛😄 Everyone have a negative comment nowadays 🤓 you wanted some attention take it & don't even try to beef w/ me 🥶😹 enjoy
I remember back before there was "big tech", companies were a lot more often a positive influence to more than just execs and shareholders. They still made money and wanted to make more but there was a respect for the customer and other engineers.
Sun Microsystems was one of the best companies that I still miss to this day.
I still remember a job posting 2 years after the introduction of Java that required 5+ years experience with Java. Makes me wonder how many applicants lied "oh yeah, I've got 10" or lost the job because they dared correct the ignorance of the hiring manager.
How can you mention Solaris without also mentioning ZFS?! That filesystem was decades ahead of its time, and it’s still considered “next-gen” even today. Linus Torvalds is spooked by Oracles lawsuits over Java, so he isn’t adding support for ZFS into the Linux kernel. That is just how much of a 180 the acquisition was.
The reason zfs is not in the kernel is because of license incompatibles. Is is solved by making it a module to kernel instead.
@@Mysticsam86 yes, but the reason why a port/rewrite was never accepted was because of Oracle's practices
@@Mysticsam86 The licenses are compatible, but not explicitly so. Torvalds might have included ZFS into the kernel if Oracle wasn’t so litigious.
ZFS is to filesystems as Java is to programming languages. It will happily chew all the RAM on your system if you let it. I always thought it was best suited to special-purpose filesystem appliances, rather than multifunction servers.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 wouldn't you consider java a multifunction programming language? you just need to tune the settings right
I worked for Sun in the late nineties. I was the engineering manager responsible for rolling out Javastations throughout the company.
I was lucky enough to work for Sun for 16 years and it was by far the best company I’ve ever worked for.
Today we talk about RISCV and how its open source, Sun was way ahead of its time, they released their flagship chips OpenSparc T1 and T2 and mind you these were not puny smartphone chips they were powerful enterprise level hardware cores that Sun was selling in their servers and workstations. Combine it with OpenSolaris and Java you had perfect trioka that could rid enterprises from lockins, only if AWS and Azure were designing their chips like they do today ARM would have had no chance at penetrating cloud datacenters.
RISCV is an open standard, like USB. That doesnt mean it is open source.
@@AndersHass make sense, Intel, AMD and others can still harass any company if their IP rights are violated.
@@harshwardhangunthey8915 well it is how the law is in regards to who has the rights to make x86 processors. RISC-V is just an open standard for instruction sets which anyone can make processors for (it can be open or close source processors), just like you can make a USB connector/cable that is open or close source. If you wanted to make x86 processor you will need to get permission from Intel (and perhaps also AMD), just like you would need permission from Apple to make a lightning connector/cable.
I don't think it really mattered what Sun did with their Sparc processors. In the end everything got swept into the dustbin of history by x86. At least there's now ARM and RISCV to provide some competition. In my first Java programming job many years ago I was super pleased to have some sort of contemporary Ultrasparc workstation as my development machine. Only to find my Pentium 166 MMX home computer was 3x as fast compiling and running Java and having Java updates delivered sooner... The writing was on the wall. Love all that beautiful Sun hardware though.
@@AndersHass but for a processor to be “risc-v” it has to for the most part implement or be compatible with the ISA. And this still differs greatly with how ARM or x86 works
I worked for Sun for 28 years and they were way ahead of their time. Their inspirational tagline , The Network is the Computer, was the future cloud computing . Yes, Oracle killed the Sun theology! I'm, still, waiting for some company to recognize Scott's vision of buying computer needs as a utility. SO far ahead of all! Unfortunately, he handed the keys over to to a young buck who didn't come from or understand the Sun way.
_"I'm, still, waiting for some company to recognize Scott's vision of buying computer needs as a utility."_
Yep. Had the economic recession of 2008 not occurred, *Sun* could have been what _AWS, Azure,_ and _Google Cloud_ are today. Sun was a hardware _and_ software company with infrastructure and technology already in place to capitalize and drive this new sector. But the economy took a huge downturn, and Scott decided to leave.
The best company and leadership I have ever worked for. Despite the hard times, leadership was strong, and the people were great. I was part of a lot of really cool stuff; working directly with Andy, tacos and beer with James, and supporting Scott's tech demo at an event. The work I did was phenomenally stimulating and stressful but exciting. I am pretty sure my time with Sun was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
I think this is tied up with a similar story with Silicon Graphics...and you should tell their story too I used SUN desktop and server machines for software development in the field of Flight SImulation - but SUN's graphics capabilities were pretty minimal - and even getting a color display out of them was a struggle. So we jumped ship when Silicon Graphics Inc (SGI) appeared.
SGI also made decent UNIX-based workstations (using their own "IRIX" version of UNIX) - not a whole lot different from SUN except they had hardware accelerated 3D graphics capabilities and full color displays. So the transition from SUN to SGI was super-easy. We used SGI graphics hardware to massive effect and aside from our aging main file server, Sun vanished completely from our radar.
SGI was king until 3D graphics hardware got cheap and pretty usable on the PC platform, and then we jumped again to Linux on PC hardware. This gave us pretty much everything we could get from SGI.
SGI had recently made the amazingly impressive 3D hardware for the massively popular Nintendo 64 game console. SGI SHOULD have leveraged that tech to made a PC graphics card and make 3D popular on that platform and gotten out of the workstation market ASAP. Although their engineers (with whom I talked often and were good friends of mine) knew full-well that this was the 100% inevitable future - SGI management chose not to leverage their skills to make PC graphics cards for the growing gamer market.
Almost all of SGI's best 3D graphics engineers saw the inevitability of this - and jumped ship to work for the new startup: Nvidia. Almost overnight, Nvidia became the new Silicon Graphics. Having good graphics was the only thing that had prevented us from dumping expensive workstations and going to Linux PC's - and *THAT* was the end of "workstations" for us.
SGI limped along for a while making servers - and (weirdly) sold massively to the online pornography business because their servers had a bunch of video inputs and so could capture video from multiple cameras and push it out to the Internet in realtime!
Ultimately - the PC ate their lunch and SGI vanished from the scene.
So, Nvidia is the descendent of SGI who are the descendant of SUN...and right now, that's where the story ends.
Pretty spot on, but there was also a big push out of graphics and into servers to compete with Sun, alongside the absolute mess of trying to adopt Itanium. SGI ended up trying to compete in the Intel/Linux server space with overpriced hardware. The poorly received Intel desktop workstations they introduced around that time also had numerous reliability issues, and were competing with much lower priced commodity hardware. Just poor decisions all around, and moving away from their core market. I worked there from 96 to late 99, and it was sad to see the company crumble.
@@audioel What was so bad was that so many of their desktop customers were desperately calling for a PC-based graphics card. SGI could have been - *should* have been Nvidia. They just kinda gave it all away...and to this day, I don't understand why.
SGI was Sun Microsystems' bitter competitor, not a descendent of them; and SGI fell the moment the board ousted its founder, Jim Clark. Most of the former SGI hardware engineers ended up at Nvidia, so much so that Nvidia at one point was named "refugee camp for SGI engineers".
SGI had some really great systems in the 90s and 2000s! Challenge and Indy series were everywhere! Onyx desksides, big Origin series. SGI laptop running IRIX can be seen in Twister (Bill/Helen). SGI in Jurassic Park, SGIs in that Clooney/Kidman movie. Lots of films!
Rackable systems was actually a pretty darn smart buy. AWS was built on those and remained a big SGI customer for a long time.
The freaking HUGE systems SGI and/or Cray built for university and government.
How many of them pretty much ruled spots on the top 100 most powerful super computer systems in the world.
So much history!
However, while fun, this video missed a whole lot of Sun history as well.
StarFire was such a fantastic product. I still have dreams about them!!!
@@xsiunnu Rackable also promptly stopped IRIX development and stopped making any new MIPS hardware; all Rackable was interested in was taking over SGI's customers. They didn't care about the OS or the hardware, and even worse, they didn't understand the highly advanced technology IRIX had in it. They were greedy idiots. Now they're just another PC-bucket company in a sea of PC-bucket companies.
I worked as an engineer at Sun from 1992 to 2002 (in the field, not at HQ, though Sun gave me many opportunities to rotate into various roles at HQ from time to time), and I have to say from an employee's perspective, Sun Micro was absolutely the finest company I ever worked for. Great minds, great technology, great products (both hardware and software)... wouldn't trade that experience for anything.
i like that fireship mention @ 0:41, great channel and happy to see you think so to!
I was a programmer for the open source GIS GRASS back in the '80s. Sun computers, especially their operating system, was the most reliable version of workstations and UNIX at the time. (Porting our software to all the different flavors of UNIX was a pain as operating system functions didn't always work at documented.) Back then, the processing requirements prevented our software from effectively running in Windows or Apple computers.
You could have used GNU Autotools for your build system. That was full of workarounds for quirks in various proprietary Unices that didn’t quite conform to the specs.
Also, the first thing any seasoned Unix admin did with a new box was install the GNU userland tools on it anyway. They usually worked a lot better than the vendor-provided proprietary equivalents.
As someone who was paying attention while this all happened, i believe you've significantly misattributed their failure to their self interested altruism.
The issue was outside market conditions, scale of company and form, and an unwillingness to be Evil (unlike Oracle, which is practically HYDRA its so evil).
why is it so evil?
@@elsiepierce5509 because Oracle is only interested in one thing: squeezing any and all profit from customers, while not caring about customers.
I guess there is a fine line between what you should keep to yourself and what you should share with others.
Sound advice that goes for oversharing personal information. BTW I worked in Silicon Valley for over a decade, putting in long hours, with famous companies, and finally retired in my 40s. My secret: the usual. Hard work, Perspiration, 99%, inspiration 1%. Networking. And I inherited a lot of money from a relative.
@@raylopez99 and here I am crying to get a new monitor 😆😆
You did good sir 💯
@@raylopez99What are you doing now sir ?
Who draws it ?
@@tbraghavendran Retired.
All I knew about Sun is that they made Java
We used Sun back in the late 1990s and early 2000s - their pizza box machines were particularly memorable. One night in 2001 the office was burgaled and all the memory (RAM) was stolen from the Sun systems. Sun RAM was so expensive it became a target for theft. As mentioned in the video, I think that the dot come bubble bursting and Sun systems being so expensive by comparison to others was probably the real cause of their collapse. They were not alone of course - many technology companies went to the wall in 2002.
I have worked for Sun in Germany as Sales Rep. for different costumers, like Educational&Research, later für Media Companies like Bertelsmann. It was a great time for me. Great customer experience, great business rules. It was a company of the perestroika time, open mind oriented. The best time in my professional work time.
I worked for Sun for 10 years in their best times in R&D, desktop and server engineering….The best employer I have ever had. Still have all the swag we were given weekly….RIP SUN Microsystems ❤
Your content is always lovely on these kind of topics. Thank you for being an exception while the rest of TH-cam is on a downgrading path.
The missing point here is that Intel and AMD got better and outpaced Ultra sparc at some point in time. And the big elephant in the room was Linux. That enabled cheap workstations based on x64.
Sun hat an x86 Version of Solaris and gave it away at the end but it was too late. It was poorly supported and didn't support many devices.
Suns hardware was amazing though. I remember a button you could press on the motherboard and a tiny led blinking next to the faulty component would tell you what's wrong.
I don’t know if the word “better” is the right way to describe x86, but they certainly got more powerful, plus there was the 90’s recession which I believe had a long term impact on business decisions on the prices of servers and workstations.
@@chrystals.4376 It was AMD's 64 bit version - x64 - which even Intel had to adopt at the end (because their I64 failed). Being backward compatible to 32 bit software was THE selling point - and cheap compilers (by AMD and GNU) compiling 64 bit capable code actually threw Sparc out of the market.
I used to work with Sun Sparc and their Silicon Graphics machines. Must say they’re the best and the most rock solid hardware at the time. These machines don’t “sweat” trying to pull of large workloads unlike some other in the market.
What were you there ?
SGI was a different company.
Sun Microsystems benefited itself from previous Open Source work. For example SunOS was based on Berkeley's BSD, and Solaris also used some elements from BSD.
That's because Bill Joy worked on all of them.
SunOS 4.x (which was part of what was backnamed Solaris 1.x ) was BSD based.
SunOS 5.x which was released as part of the Solaris 2 suite of software, SunOS, OpenWindows and Open Network Computing (NIS and NFS IIRC) was SVR4 based.
@@buffuniballer You have it wrong. SunOS 5 (Solaris) was a mix of BSD and System V (and a bunch of other things), SVR4 was the result of those efforts between Sun and AT&T.
@@21nickik SVR4 released in the late 1980s IIRC (I was in college and kept up with those things a bit more than today)
Solaris 2/SunOS 5 was a mid to late 1990s release. I was working for a Sun partner then before joining Sun in 2000. I think I pretty much have a handle on the timeline here.
I do know I was one of the last few instructors for Sun Education still teaching SunOS classes after most customers were taking Solaris 2 training.
Sun and AT&T did work together, that is true. Unless I just typed up something wrong, I think I got it right here. I was early some morning when I couldn't sleep, so this video popped up as a suggestion.
I used to work federal IT and I remember everywhere I'd go, if you searched deep enough you'd find old Sun Microsystems mice and keyboards in bins somewhere. The things litter government offices 20 years later.
Thanks for the amazing video 🤗 Loved the Java language ever since gotta know it!!
I own a Sub LX Station until today. End of the 90th I worked for a company that sells Sun and Sun clones in Germany. It was a great time!
Sun hardware and software was pivotal in the development and success of TCP/IP and the Internet. My experience as an IT admin in London in the late 80's and 90's was of Sun's excellent hardware, system support and training services, unmatched by any other vendor, during my IT career. To this day, I shed the odd tear when I'm reminded of its sad demise. 😪
Sun microsystems Java was my introduction to Enterprise computing 1987, Traffic light networks & Desalination plants ... Fun times
But ... Java was ready at around 1995! How can you use it in 1987?
My first proper job was as a Solaris admin. Played with some fairly high end servers (E6000, E6500, tho never quite got my company to pay for the E10k! ;) )
The quality of hardware was second to none, and the innovation in tech was fantastic. Dynamic partitioning of CPU/Memory boards, early days of virtualisation with containers. ZFS too was a game changer.
I left my company and became a more generic Linux admin shortly after the oracle buyout and quite glad I did. It was obvious from day one that oracle wanted to kill the sun name. Haven't worked on such high class hardware since.
There are lots of inaccuracies concerning technical details in this video. Take any analysis the presenter makes himself with a grain of salt.
I once had a job where almost everybody used a Sun workstation. Sun had a catchphrase "the network is the computer.". What that meant, in practice, was that anyone in the company could run things in my workstation and make it do strange things, and some people did. I don't miss it.
I started University in 1994 in the Computer Science field, and I did have access and played with Sun Workstations, although the PC was the core of my knowledge at the time. We started with Modula-2, but moved to Java a few years later. As I was part time it took a decade to get my degree
I was introduced to Sun by way of my university having a ton of Sun workstations, and even got one for myself when they were getting rid of old stock. Solid stuff that was easy to use, but by that time Linux was already starting to take over and the writing was definitely on the wall.
Mad respect to the company for what they did for the tech industry though, thank you Sun.
Great video!! Thanks again!!
Thanks Daniel!
Solaris 10 was a breakthrough of its own; years ahead of competition, yet way too late to change anything in Sun's fortune. Let's remember
- DTrace - first of a kind kernel - and userspace, with nice coverage - scriptable probes gave a unique ability to introspect your system
- Containers to isolate your services, including "legacy" solaris 8 containers; not the first of its kind (FreeBSD jail was a thing at the time) but the level of integration into a system was amazing
- SMF to replace init.d and unify the service lifetime management (though others did see the writing on that wall - launchd, upstart etc were cropping up at about the same time)
- ZFS, like already mentioned elsewhere, was mindblowing for me at the time - snapshots, subvolumes with their own limits, all that NAS-level niceness right there ready for ya
Love your videos!
Thank you so much man!
I went from running AT&T System V Unix to Sun Solaris. It was a far better version of Unix. Never used a SPARC Workstation but I heard they were amazing and were faster than any X86 system on the market.
They were up to a point. By about 2000, PCs were whipping their butts.
If you're a digital IC designer, there's a lot that came from Ivan Sutherland (logical effort being the most famous, but so much on latch based sequential logic; we had to study his papers). Sutherland was from Sun Microsystems of course.
Wow. That is amazing, i knew they were behind Java but I didn't know how much good they did.
I used the sun workstation in college because the labs that had windows 2k were always jammed packed with people. I used it enough to get me through school and download files over modem to my machine since I couldn't afford school printing prices. I miss those days
I used a Sparc 2 running Solaris. Third party SW ran great and I could leave it powered on for six months with out a reboot.
Google bought a video codec firm & gave the codec away as vp8, vp9 and later av1. This broke the MPEG monopoly making Av1 the new standard. Even MPEG admitted defeat due to this. Av1 is used in 90% streaming content today.
Was there for the ride, it was great the best place I've ever worked at until Oracle killed us.
Sun microsystems was definitely to internet and scalability, what Silicon Graphics was to animation and media production… Both legendary and foundational to what we take for granted today
My dad is a social science professor and I remember back in the 90's they used high end Sun workstations for large dataset statistical analysis. It was the most badass machine I'd ever sat down at up to that point in time.
Makes sense, the first Sun/Solaris machine I ever saw was when my mate walked me from
the Comp. Sci. building to Aeronautical Engineering… he showed me their wind tunnels then as we walked by some
students on terminals, I was like what is that machine, bro? 😋 Sun machines he said, used to do modelling, simulations, analysis and so on.
“You have a login, right?” 😊
“Sure..” 🤔
“I need it… I want to check this machine out” 😊
He logged in and left me there for an hour.
Amazing machine - much more powerful than the Linux x86 machines we were using in Comp. Sci. 👍
I still have my SUN SPARC Ultra 5 from when I was in college. It is now running Solaris 9. I even named my pet Ocicat SPARC.
I recall learning Solaris in my college days! Unfortunate how such giant company had to face this.
Tesla and SpaceX opened up their patents. I don't know if it's all of them or just some.
I saw the future being born. Best 14 years of my professional life. Joined in 1994, Sun Microsystems Laboratories.
Great video as always
Thank you Andrew!
@@LogicallyAnswered thank you for taking the time to reply really appreciate it
Nice new video, I was waiting for another one!
Thanks for watching Aaron!
Employee #422....
knew all the founders personally....
opened up the Asian markets...pretty much all of them from Japan to India...
Was a great run.
Retired in Thailand....
Was a nice trip down memory lane.....
your synopsis on Vinod is misleading.....
OMG, I wish Java had never been. As a enterprise security network specialist it is the the bane of my existent. It is everywhere in all our core applications and services and is un-secure as hell.
Don't forget slow and memory hogging! It's basically C++ For Dummies.
Audio upgrade? I like it!
#1:00 Well ... That's not quite what happened. Google used the same name for their functions so it could do the same thing and have the same API surface area as Java. Oracle sued as they felt that the API was apart of the copy right of the Java product. Thankfully this was shot down after a long battle in court that you can't trademark an API surface area.
I was a software engineering student at the end of the 90s cutting my teeth on Sun Microsystems machines and Java (and some DEC systems too). I miss Sun and its ethos massively, but times move on and sharks will always circle.
Can we talk about how geniusly the Logo in the thumbnail spells sun in every direction yet just looks like some weird stripes
15 years ago I suggested that a local LUG, or Linux User Group, should change the name to GUG, or GNU User Group. That was the faith I had in OpenSolaris.
I remember Sun. Brings back memories of the 90s
My first exposure to Sun was in the Army when they used Solaris for some applications.
I taught the Sun Microsystems computers in the Army at Ft. Huachuca in the mid to late 90's.
Another great historical - Something is different in the narration though. The mic? A different reading style?
I think docker / kubernetes is a different but similar situation to what you describe in the video.
Docker made Open Container Initiative, making basically all the underlying technology open source and Google gave the container manager system kubernetes to Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
What would you recommend ?
Its a bit different. Docker (then Cloud Inc or something like that) was a Paas compnay that was failing. So in desperation they threw a hail marry pass and OpenSource the Docker system. And that actually worked because Docker became popular and they were able to raise money from that (that they then promptly wasted).
That said, most of the technology that made Docker possible was added to Linux many years before with lots of work from other people. Docker is a clever use of namespaces, cgroups and other kernel features. So Docker wouldn't have been possible without all that other open work.
Kubernetes was a much more straight forward attempted by some people at google to open that technology up.
@@21nickikThanks for the history lesson, I didn't known that the whole OpenSource effort by Docker was a hail marry to stay afloat. That puts things into perspective
I used their workstation in college in the mid 90s. Still remember the day the computer lab was changed to Windows NT Dells overnight
Whether most people even know it or not, they are using technology in their own hands that was in some way influenced by Sun. Sun has the respect of almost everyone, even if they don’t know it. The world would be such a different place if Sun was never a thing, and for that, I think people so take a moment to appreciate all the good they did for us. Thank you, Sun.
Nice new video about Java, Thanks again.
Thanks Philip!
SUN is the best company to ever exist. The public stuff released by sun isn't even the half of it, these guys had absolutely no idea how to make money and it seriously sucks. Stuff like "Sun Spot" and "SunRay" were absolutely mind blowing. It begs the question, if they never went down under, what else would they have brought into the world? If in a handful of years they created all of this, imagine how they would have changed the world if they existed up until today. Its heartbreaking to think about. Especially in the modern tech world today, it's hard to imagine a company like Sun Microsystems ever existing again. They didn't just treat their customers well, they treated their own engineers and the rest of the tech world with tons of respect until the end.
Great narration. Which voice is it?
I’ve worked for two ISP in the UK, both still using Solaris when I left in 2021. I’ve worked at other places too using Solaris, now I’m seeing RHEL as a standard.
Cisco used to run the network game (as in everywhere) but Juniper started to creep in more and more, I think perhaps features and their openness to new ways of dong things. I see Arista making headway in the last three years.
How about you guys?
so underrated. It’s painful. a tragedy.
In 2009, I helped assemble the last Sun Microsystems server in Hillsboro Oregon.
Sun microsystem went down with 9/11 attack in NYC i always had a grain of doubt that such attack was motivated with financial reasons.
A bit surprised you didn't mention the acquisition of MySQL in 2008 for an eye watering 1 Billion dollars. That was just an insane move. At that point, that kind of money wasn't chump change for Sun. And to monetize an open source database was also not a straightforward trajectory.
If you think that was crazy. They bought StorageTek for 4.1 billion $ in 2005. They also bought so many other companies in the post-bust area. They literally went company buying crazy, buying new companies every couple months.
Just LOVE Java since 1997 onwards....No looking back since then. WRITE ONCE RUN ANYWHERE is always great.
I miss those early mobile java games powered by sun microsystems. Being able to play super Mario and FIFA on my Motorola phone with friends connecting via Bluetooth for a multiplayer mode was some of the best highschool memory I had of owning my first gadget.
This is a very business oriented view, just as your very positive video about Oracle.
As such it's missing a large part of the picture. Again.
Network technology serves ONE purpose. It's meant to connect computers. As such it is RELIANT on open standards. In fact EVERY GODDAMN COMPANY thats big in the internet today makes their network protocols open. Yes, SUN was a bright leading star in that behavior, which IS WHY they got so big in the first place. If you want proof, look at token ring network technology.
But all the success of SUN was RELIANT on them being open with these standards.
The computer space isn't a zero sum game, and especially at that time, a single company would not have been able to serve everyone, they would not have been able to scale fast enough.
Being open ended up being a business decision, whether it was originally made because of that or not.
Meanwhile, SUN started failing at a time when they had STOPPED being open. SUN had become just another vendor for Unix workstations. SUN OS was one of many Unix OSs, just after it became open source it ended up being one of the last ones still used today. Yes, many of the competitors used SPARC, but there were also many competitors with other RISC chips. SUN did not own RISC, as they were not the ones that invented it.
Opening all these technologies was done after the crash, in an attempt to establish these technologies as standards and end up profiting from the boom, as they had done in the past.
I don't say that to devalue what SUN did, but saying they just opened up their technologies out of the good of their hearts doesn't capture their whole intent. Yes, there were people there that were likely heavily motivated by that too, but the execs would not have done this for that reason alone.
That hail mary didn't work out, sadly for them. But saying that it was JUST BECAUSE they were open doesn't really capture reality. The market was crashing hard. Being open is a growth strategy, so yeah, it probably didn't help, but as I showed, being open is how they got into the situation of having something to loose in the first place. These technologies they open sourced also were not network technologies, so the boost to adoption would, if at all present, also have been less direct, so perhaps that was a bad choice. However also, they opened the technologies too late for them to easily become the standard, as there were already competitors.
Sun Microsystems also helped the beginning of OpenOffice if I recall correctly. I think they modified it from StarOffice, which was produced by a German company.
There was a commercial rationale behind 'giving back to the community' as it helped create a strong grassroots support for them among those consulting on what systems to use.
In the late 90s I obtained a number of SUN, SGI and HP workstations, and initially wanted to run legal versions of Solaris, IRIX and HPUX.
SUN was surprisingly nice to deal with for a random private 'customer'/enthousiast user having ended up with some SUN hardware. They'd talk to you, try to provide 'best effort' technical support, would send you a boxed copy of Solaris for 'non production use' for a small fee (essentially covering the cost of the materials and shipping), etc.
I was involved at the time in the discussions resulting in open-sourcing Solaris, initially that wasn't an easy sell, and increasing competition from a rapidly developing Linux played a significant role in that.
SGI would at least talk to you, but wouldn't really help you, just told you they totally didn't care if the copy of IRIX I wanted to run was legal or not, so just find one (and then one of their employees contacted me privately to point me at some places for 'finding' the version I wanted)... People there tended to be quite nice, but company was pretty unhelpfull.
I'm still waiting for HP to reply (well, not really, but they never did)
Fun to think back at that time, was also involved in the discussions resulting in the open-sourcing of openmotif. Sadly that happened way too late to matter for anything.
Sun was great technical company. In 2009 maybe I had access to cluster built using UltraSparc T1 and I think T2. 2x CPUs per node, 8 cores x 8 threads (SMP) on EACH CORE.
Sounds like my story. Several people with a financial vision took advantage of my “free” non-patented inventions. This is why I am still working at age70 and none of those who profited if my ideas & projects now don’t give me the time of day nor do they return my phone calls. I can only hope there is a better life when my time comes to pass on to the other side! I worked with a Sun Spark station at The U of KY in the early 90’s.
The technology was all actually developed by the U.S. taxpayer, then handed off to private corporations - as is the norm in a state capitalist economy. Technically, we should ALL be seeing dividends from i-Phone sales, internet companies, etc.
0:42 gotta love that advanced finger-waving typing technique the guy on the right is doing.
Oracle, the same company that sued google and thankfully lost over a copyright API case. It would be a massive disaster for software development of any kind relating to API if it would be found in favor of oracle.
We had several sun servers for development and many we decommissioned as we could not repair them any more in I think 2014. Yes we kept a few servers like two rack mounts however running virtual machines made more sense a few years later. As interesting my career was and I enjoyed A.I. now could replace me.
Sparc didn't triple the instructions, it cut it down to a third. Hence Reduced Instruction Set instead of Complex Instruction Set
Can't wait to watch the whole video through 🙌
Do Silicon Graphics next. SGI had amazing hardware back in the day.
I’d like to add another piece to this story. Just like Steve Jobs with Apple and Next, Sun Microsystems clearly had a design ethos as well. For example, the logotype was designed by Paul Rand, who also designed the Next logo.
Well thank you Sun... Sun always gives all to everyone thats why its shining.
Transmeta is a good one.
Shockley Transistors is another good one.
Radiola getting beat by a few months by Shockley/Fairchild is funny because some people make it seem like a race but they weren't talking to each other like that.
Anywho, great job. Thanks.
Great video. You should make one about VMware.
Thanks for the suggestion Ivan!