JDN -
re: post this one URL which would seem to dispute all that you are saying
Whoever wrote this has been looking at SUNW for maybe a couple of years, and apparently does not know much about the history of the industry... where do they find these guys?
As you know, I did a LOT of work with SUN in the late 80's and early 90s and I can tell you from direct experience that from a technical perspective what this guy is saying is almost complete BS.
For example -
Sun Microsystems began its corporate life with the vision "the network is the computer. "
Not hardly - they coined that phrase partly to help move NFS and partly because they had NO server line so they had to say something - and it was not until many years after SUN's founding.
. The underlying tenets supporting this vision have always been scaleability, mission critical, and people.
What complete nonsense!!! At the time I started working with them, SUNW had only single processor workstations and those were not used in any mission critical work. Even as workstations they were hardly the highest quality systems out there - in fact they were near the bottom of the pile from a quality perspective in a market which had many very high quality (and high price) offerings. What SUNW did have was some innovative engineering using standard PC components (SCSI disk drives for example). But the pizza box products were the kind of thing you or I might throw together in a garage, not the sophisticated products offered by the likes of Apollo, and did not even have the construction quality of white box PCs of the same period.
scaleability? Sun's first multi-processor system was brought out in the mid-90s, and even then, the OS did not support SMP - and the machine was not SMP anyway... SunOS never did a good job with SMP. The first decent performance on SMP was not until late 1995. And the team at Sun could have cared less about scaleability or mission critical during any of that time, which was the first 12 years the company was in business - they were after best cost/performance in the workstation and CAD market.
The only company on the planet that comes close to Sun's product breadth and reach is IBM.
Err - Compaq and HP come to mind also... SUNW does not have a broad product line - they have no PCs, printers, handhelds, network components... only a proprietary processor and OS, ONE family of products... what is this guy smoking?
This article is a complete work of fiction and anyone who has been in the industry, especially anyone who worked with Sun in the early days, would laugh themselves silly over it. Sun was a great bunch to work with at that time, irreverent and hard driving, but what they were doing bears no resemblance to this article. Kind of like saying that MSFT built their business around high end mainframe data processing and has always focused on limited volume big systems... say what???? |
