[GRLUG] multiple login on Mac

[Robar Philip]

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. :-)

On Jan 8, 2012, at 10:53 AM, Bob Kline wrote:

> Clearly "working in" trumps working with. i.e., Sun's Graphics Group. A fellow I 
> knew years ago became Sun employee number 36. Jerry Evans? Worked in
> the same group, if there were groups yet in a company with 36 employees. The 
> same field anyway. He used to got to SIGGRAPH every year. I remember 
> visiting the plant in CA, and seeing a hush-hush project: a machine with a 
> SPARC processor.

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.

> The first Sun workstation I had used a Motorola 68020. Seemed spunky at the
> time, but wasn't by today's standards. The display was the big new feature
> for people not so long before using ASCII terminals.... Later I got a SPARC I 
> workstation, and that was peppy indeed. A SPARC 5 for home use was less 
> people, but still compatible with SunOS, which was really the point. Plus it was
> built like a brick privy.

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.

> Anyway, I recollect that NeWS was short lived, despite that fact that it 
> was intended to become Sun's standard windows system. Didn't happen as
> I remember, and there were one or two others to choose from.

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.

> Jumping around a bit, my take is that while Sun dabbled with the idea for a
> while, Solaris never became open source. And with Oracle now owning
> what's left of Sun, probably never will.

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.

> Just how FreeBSD came to be I only know vaguely, but it was the result of
> Bill Jolitz and his wife - nominally a rewrite of BSD Unix, and somehow legally
> open.

Dr. Dobbs magazine documented the development of 386BSD in an 18 part series. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD) BSD/386, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are all direct descendants.

> … And I'll repeat that the big advances over the years are in silicon, not software….

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.)


Phil


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