The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems

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[Asianometry]

Any old Silicon Valley companies I should consider taking a look at?

[Spookieham]

Once Redhat appeared and Oracle certified itself on Redhat it killed a lot of Sun accounts. We had an significant investment in Sun hardware and within a year it was all replaced with Redhat on Compaq servers. The saving in yearly licence costs was eye-watering.

[WooShell]

As a former Sun reseller and support contractor, I'm very happy for you covering my favorite company for your christmas video. Thanks!
I'm still working in Solaris support today and have a large collections of systems around. So sad that Oracle has ruined what was once a great company.. but that's what happens when a software guy buys a hardware company and has no idea what they actually do or how to run them. When Ellison swooped in, the first he did was double the system prices and triple the support contract fees, and struck down any special deals that Sun had going with their largest customers for decades. This lead to most of those customers taking the jump over to Linux clusters, that were just about becoming mainstream enough at that time.

[therealchriscunningham]

I worked at Sun from 2006 until the Oracle acquisition. A company who were truly, tremendously good to their employees, with incredible internal resources and staff. But every year after the first was one crisis after another.

Amusingly Sun was, like all other enterprises at the time I joined, a total Blackberry shop. How quickly RIM's empire collapsed after the iPhone was released was interesting to view from that perspective considering how things were going internally.

[mikek]

Thanks very much for this. I was a Sun engineering workstation customer, and later worked at Sun until the acquisition by Oracle. The thing that amazed me was, while all you presented here was happening, there was an eerie sense of calm internally. There is a saying by, I think, Euripides that goes, "Whom the gods wish to destroy, they send 40 years of success". Despite the precipitous decline, I saw no sense of concern or panic in my VP peers.

[apkk]

I have some issue about how 'openness' is discussed in the video. Context is really important here. During the mid to late 1980s, most server companies supplied hardware with their own OS and tools. For example, my experience was with Data General MV series computes. You got AOS/VS, INFOS II, DG COBAL, DG Business Basic, etc. They also had their own terminals that were their own standard. You could find third party hardware but it needed to support the Data General hardware in some way. Basically, you were tied to a closed set of standards. Open systems (as was the term used at the time), was about using open standards rather than vendor specific closed standards. No one, at least at the time, was expecting the software to be open source as it was generally expected to be closed. What it was important that you would have common and agreed standards. Granted there was competition in this area which is why we had the UNIX wars but it's important not to confuse open systems with open source. The arrival of Sun was with open systems, not open source. I do appreciate that some people were interesting in open source at that time but it was a small minority and it was not a thing within the market at that time. Open source was much more of a 90s thing.

[markusnl]

I was blessed to work for sun early in my career from 1988 to 1991 as a sales engineer. We called ourselves systems engineers at that time. What a learning experience that was: The people, the technology, the momentum, and the possibilities. As an engineer, I was amazed that a unix system could have an uptime greater than a week without requiring a reboot. Like anything, the growth was too fast and the company changed in spirit in the mid to late 90s. Great summary of Sun!

[waisinglee]

Man, what a walk down memory lane. My first experience with computers was using a terminal to log into a mainframe just to play Star Trek. Sun was always in the background somewhere over the next decades. So many companies have crashed and burned.

[davidshipp]

Thank you for this trip down memory Lane. Working in the workstation marketplace in the late 1980’s you touched on many things that were formative parts of my career, and friendships I still have today. The best man at my wedding I met at HP, he left and we both ended up at a reseller. I few months in and he was poached by Apollo (for a crazy amount of money) and he ended up back at HP 😂. He left again. My oldest friend worked for ARM in its early days. I defected early to the Microsoft bandwagon as my interest was business not technical and I started working with Olivetti hardware (still with the occasional unix install at the start), so it was nice to see their name pop up. Always remember the Olivetti joke that it was going to be called Italian Business Machines but they didn’t think the initials would take off. But I’m rambling now - as us old folk tend to 😂.

[johnopalko]

I miss Sun. I still have a couple SPARCstations sitting in the spare bedroom, a SPARC 20 and an Ultra 5. I haven't powered them up in years, though. I was given the 20 and I bought the Ultra 5 new, way back in the 1990s. They, and the IPC and IPX I used to have, made a nice little home network.

[sandybarrie]

funny story about a Sun Micro Mainframe. My father started working as a Junior accountant for a Large Queensland meat processing abattoir. they had a sun computer system. when costing the production of sausages by the ton, different wholesalers order them with different ingredients... and these had to be coasted down to the 4 decimal point. and this computer was worked by terminal and punch card. and a salesman would send through ingredient list and volume etc and an hour later they would get a printout handed back to them, and then they would get back to the client with a cost often a 2 hour info round trip. well dad bought a TRS80-4k Level 1 computer when they first came out, supposed to be for me. he wrote a basic program that would work out these costings almost instantly (well a few seconds) so he could talk to the sales person while on the phone. and the next month Byte magazine came out with a basic program that would turn such data into a pie chart. one day day took the computer to work and put it on his desk, and was doing the costings instantly, when the Managing director walked past, and asked what he was doing. dad put on a demo, including a pie chart, and the MD asked the Mainframe guy to make a pie chart for next weeks board meeting. and sure enough next week at the boardmeeting, the Heda of computing showed his pie chart, and dad demonstrated the little TRS-80. and the CEO asked the main frame guy aput him makingthe pie cahrtas, and he said they they had to purchase Sun's special program for pie charst that cost $15K (remember this was the late 1970's) so the MD stood up and said to the main frame guy "your fired" and had the Main frame sent to the tip and had TRs80 put on every salemans desk, and dad was promoted to head to sales... (dad made several changed to production, that had him promoted to 2IC in a few years)...

[cva]

A key moment in the development of Linux was when IBM adopted it for use on its computers, sometime around the year 2000. It was a brilliant move by IBM, which then had a much bigger reputation than today. IBM's stamp of approval made a lot of people more willing to consider Linux, and strengthening Linux helped to undermine both Sun and Microsoft.

[simoncrabb]

I had a summer job at Sun in 1996, it was an absolute dream, the epitome of cool for a computing student job. Having that on my CV opened so many doors. I miss them.

[albeit]

Sun gave us Java and around 2000, our company helped produce and serve a lot of JavaOne conference sessions with our learning management system. A very important customer for us.

[TimNelson]

I served Scott in his final two years as his executive presentation creative manager. In that time, he gave 300 customer presentations around the world with precision and class. I stayed through the Jonathan transition. The company then seemed without a coherent marketing strategy — trumpeting ‘open’ and ‘share’ gibberish, followed by the Oracle acquisition. An iconic company worthy of this retrospective.

[madmotorcyclist]

Sun workstations with Solaris were marvelous systems and we used them extensively at my place of work. Their reliability was an asset in those days. I still remember fondly using the unix base system with Motif GUI.

[johnrekemeyer]

Thank you, I really enjoyed this video on a couple fronts. Apollo was the first start up I worked for and it was a short (1984-1986), but amazing ride that gave me the desire to hit a couple more start-ups throughout my career. It was also my first experience in wide spread layoffs and seemed so odd at the time after such fast paced growth. I worked at the Billerica campus and to walk through the manufacturing floor and see huge empty spaces and empty worktables after seeing them full of employees was heartbreaking. Those of us that remained were allowed to pick through some of the manufacturing floor tools and I still use a Fluke multi-meter and Weller soldering station to this day. Post Apollo I had the opportunity to work with Sun workstations and after using Apollo and it was an interesting contrast. Those were some great years I will never forget!

[MH-ocde]

I started working on Suns around 1990 and continued using them through grad school and beyond, up until about 2010. They were a great machine to develop on since Sun controlled both the hardware and the software and created a very integrated feel. At the time, Apple's OS was a mess of spaghetti code. Now I develop on a macbook pro (Apple long ago got smart and switched to unix) and while it's gotten much better, it's still not as smooth as Solaris was in its heyday.

[MichaelDeLeon]

I worked in the Milpitas manufacturing building then the Sparc development group from 97 to 04. It was the best job I ever had and the 90s were a true boom time. Huge Christmas parties, quarterly outings, white water rafting, Napa wine train. And tons of Tshirts! But boy did that come to an abrupt halt. Fun while it lasted.

[coolcat]

I was involved in hardware acquisition for a German university and we used to order SUN workstations per default. As soon as PCs had decent network cards, however, the game was over for SUN. Their prices were hopelessly non-competitive compared to what a PC with a network card cost. Similar story for NeXT; interesting hardware and OS at the time but was just too late, i.e., too expensive.