Re "way off topic," the Wednesday <div>meets are billed as forums for Linux and </div><div>other geek talk, so it might be <div>fair to say this venue is as well. Sometimes</div><div>a thread will be billed as not strictly Linux, and</div>
<div>sometimes topics just drift, but a few will find</div><div>almost anything computer related of interest.</div><div>I do. Some will fuss about all this. But as the</div><div>venerable philosopher Bill Cosby once said, </div>
<div>"I'd don't know what a success is, but I do</div><div>know what a failure is. That's someone who</div><div>tries to please everyone." So do your thing </div><div>and take your chances.</div><div>
<div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 4:04 PM, Robar Philip <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:philip.robar@gmail.com">philip.robar@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Getting way off topic, but being at Sun and working in the two major system software groups (Windows and OS/Net) was a big part of my life so I like to talk about it. :-)<br>
<div class="im"><br>
On Jan 8, 2012, at 10:53 AM, Bob Kline wrote:<br>
<br>
> Clearly "working in" trumps working with. i.e., Sun's Graphics Group. A fellow I<br>
> knew years ago became Sun employee number 36. Jerry Evans? Worked in<br>
> the same group, if there were groups yet in a company with 36 employees. The<br>
> same field anyway. He used to got to SIGGRAPH every year. I remember<br>
> visiting the plant in CA, and seeing a hush-hush project: a machine with a<br>
> SPARC processor.<br>
<br>
</div>Jerry was well known throughout Sun (he’s still with Oracle as far as I can tell), but he was in the graphics/imaging part of Sun, not the Windows group itself if I recall correctly.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> The first Sun workstation I had used a Motorola 68020. Seemed spunky at the<br>
> time, but wasn't by today's standards. The display was the big new feature<br>
> for people not so long before using ASCII terminals.... Later I got a SPARC I<br>
> workstation, and that was peppy indeed. A SPARC 5 for home use was less<br>
> people, but still compatible with SunOS, which was really the point. Plus it was<br>
> built like a brick privy.<br>
<br>
</div>My first Sun was a Sun 3/50 (with a smoking 16 MHz 68020 CPU) I used at a startup I worked at for a year before I went to Sun. I still remember the day we upgraded the 3/50’s and 3/60’s from 1 to 4 megabytes. (Yes, MHz not GHz and MB, not GB.) It made an amazing difference in performance, but it cost a small fortune.<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>I had a Sun 3/60 about that time. </div><div>Some president had accused the </div><div>Japanese of dumping memory, so </div><div>the Japanese turned around and </div><div>either raised prices or cut supply.<br>
In my case the company shelled out</div><div>$200 a MB for memory for my workstation,</div><div>in the dollars of 25 years ago. I have </div><div>8GB in my home machine today, and</div><div>for $50 to $100 could double that if there </div>
<div>was any reason to... </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
> Anyway, I recollect that NeWS was short lived, despite that fact that it<br>
<div class="im">> was intended to become Sun's standard windows system. Didn't happen as<br>
> I remember, and there were one or two others to choose from.<br>
<br>
</div>Actually NeWS was around for quite a while. Its development started in the mid-80’s and it lived on in the merged X11/NeWS server until 2002. SGI actually shipped it as their main desktop, and it was ported to the Mac and OS/2. The reasons for NeWS’s failure were many and varied, both from a technical and business standpoint. The Wikipedia article does a pretty good job of summarizing them. That being said, NeWS was very cool and the AJAX style of development clearly traces its history directly back to it.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
> Jumping around a bit, my take is that while Sun dabbled with the idea for a<br>
> while, Solaris never became open source. And with Oracle now owning<br>
> what's left of Sun, probably never will.<br>
<br>
</div>Solaris was open sourced, though Sun did a poor job of managing and working with the external community. It was called Open Solaris. The llumos (core OS) and OpenIndiana projects (illumos and desktop) forked from it when Oracle killed it.<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>I wasn't sure of the detailed reasons,</div><div>but Open Solaris never got much traction.</div><div>Linux came on fast and furious about that</div><div>time. Solaris was a wonderful OS, if less</div>
<div>so than the original BSD, but it never </div><div>developed much of an outside community</div><div>of developers and users, and too it was</div><div>never clear where Sun wanted to go with it,</div><div>or what it would ever put in to it. There </div>
<div>seems to be no game at all now that </div><div>Oracle owns Solaris.</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="im"><br>
> Just how FreeBSD came to be I only know vaguely, but it was the result of<br>
> Bill Jolitz and his wife - nominally a rewrite of BSD Unix, and somehow legally<br>
> open.<br>
<br>
</div>Dr. Dobbs magazine documented the development of 386BSD in an 18 part series. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD</a>) BSD/386, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are all direct descendants.<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Thanks for the URL.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
> … And I'll repeat that the big advances over the years are in silicon, not software….<br>
<br>
I’ll politely disagree here by example: threads and SMP, micro kernels and message passing, shared memory/RPC/Doors, NFS, Yellow Pages/NIS and LDAP, ZFS, virtualization, Sun’s Crossbow, jails/zones/containers, DTrace, ACLs and RBAC, Sun’s Service Management Facility, DBUS, Pulse Audio, HTML and on and on and on. System software developers continue to innovate at a very healthy rate. (As do application developers.)<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Indeed. Another set of discussion for</div><div>another day. Micro kernels go back a</div><div>ways - Mach? Something using micro</div><div>kernels - herd? - was supposed to become </div>
<div>GNU's answer to Linux, but only Thomas</div><div>Busnell ever worked on it much, and </div><div>Richard Stallman got rid of him after some</div><div>tiff. Busnell is now a monk, part time anyway.</div><div><br></div>
<div>Some of the things on the list might or </div><div>might not be strictly computer related - </div><div>e.g., HTML, which arguably made the </div><div>Internet a hit. But TCP/IP dates to the</div><div>late 1970s or so. As you point out, </div>
<div>Wikipedia is a never ending source of </div><div>history on computer history and technology,</div><div>and one can bone up on TCP/IP there, as</div><div>well as Linux, IPv4,6, etc.</div><div><br></div><div>My sense is that file systems are a </div>
<div>dime a dozen today, and every so often</div><div>one has some advantages over what </div><div>exists. The same with languages and</div><div>compilers. Any advanced CS student</div><div>worth their salt once ginned up a language</div>
<div>and created a compiler, few of which were</div><div>ever used for anything other than to get a</div><div>thesis. Rob Pike, now at Google, still</div><div>mostly creates new languages, and a </div><div>few are bound to handy, while most likely</div>
<div>come to nothing. yacc and lex are a </div><div>couple of age old Unix tools that are of</div><div>course used to create new languages</div><div>and compiles. yacc = yet another </div><div>compiler compiler - I doubt many today,</div>
<div>used to using some of the higher level</div><div>languages you mention, have ever used</div><div>these. How about using assembly </div><div>language? </div><div><br></div><div>So yes, lots of changes. NFS, Yellow</div>
<div>Pages, and a bunch of other stuff came</div><div>out of Sun, and reflected its "the network</div><div>is the computer" motto. There again,</div><div>hardware was developed to support that</div><div>philosophy. Ethernet did not, but supports</div>
<div>local networks. Message passing has </div><div>been a Unix kernel feature for a long time.</div><div>I think Minix leans on it heavily.</div><div><br></div><div>Anyway, yes, there's a lot of interesting</div><div>
history. And it is in part a chicken and</div><div>egg game. Bigger drives, more memory,</div><div>faster CPUs and more capable GPUs, </div><div>faster ethernet, and on and on, all with</div><div>greater reliability, have been the enablers.</div>
<div>An amusing question is whether either </div><div>drives the game, or do both simply react</div><div>to new opportunities? I think it's fair to</div><div>say that ever bigger, cheaper, more </div><div>reliable memory, storage, and, well, most</div>
<div>basic hardware are essentially are given</div><div>good things. </div><div><br></div><div>Standards, and the industries acceptance</div><div>of them, is also a major new thing that</div><div>somewhat stands on its own, but has turned</div>
<div>many aspects of computers into practical</div><div>realities. Standards are probably </div><div>under appreciated.</div><div><br></div><div> -- Bob</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br>
<br>
Phil<br>
<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
--<br>
This message has been scanned for viruses and<br>
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is<br>
believed to be clean.<br>
<br>
_______________________________________________<br>
grlug mailing list<br>
<a href="mailto:grlug@grlug.org">grlug@grlug.org</a><br>
<a href="http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug" target="_blank">http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug</a><br>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br></div></div></div>
<br />--
<br />This message has been scanned for viruses and
<br />dangerous content by
<a href="http://www.mailscanner.info/"><b>MailScanner</b></a>, and is
<br />believed to be clean.