Remembering Sun

A trip down memory lane

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So I think I may have been in mourning last week. A little, at least. I'm going to miss Sun Microsystems.

I wrote a big post full of doom and gloom for the Oracle acquisition. I speculated that this was the end of all that was good with Sun, all the extremely positive open source work it's done, the end of its fantastic R&D efforts. I predicted the death of MySQL. I wrote all that, but I didn't file it. Maybe I thought that if I didn't, it wouldn't come true. I truly hope it doesn't. Time will tell.

[ Check out the slideshow "In memoriam: Sun Microsystems" and InfoWorld's special report "Oracle buys Sun for $7.4B." ]

Instead, I've decided to post some memories of Sun over the years, since working with (and occasionally swearing at) Sun hardware and software was a large part of my formative years in IT.

I started waaaay back with the first iterations of FreeBSD and (later) BSDi, the Internet SuperServer. I became well versed in the BSD way of doing things, and when I chanced to work on some SunOS systems, there was little learning curve. Then came Solaris. Logging into my first Solaris system was like taking a walk in bizarro world. ps auxww had no meaning here. Bash wasn't an option. I quickly found sunfreeware.com and later blastwave.org. To this day, I still modify my Solaris systems to be more BSDish and less SysVish. It's all in the foundation, I suppose.

I recall my first day working as a consultant at a major financial company, sitting down at my new workstation, which was a Sun Ultra 2 with 256MB of RAM (!!) and three 21-inch CRT monitors running Solaris 2.4 and CDE. I was blown away.

Tags: mergers and acquisitions, Sun Microsystems, Solaris, Oracle

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