The end of the Sun---la fine della Sun

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So we came to the end of the Sun (as an independent company) saga.

Sad day for Silicon Valley, as the article that I will insert at the end of this post testifies.

I joined Sun italy in 1988, we were about 15 employees or so, and left in 1995, when we were about 250-or so I think.

In 1988 Sun only manufactured "workstations", large screen multitasking desktop computers, in an era where PCs were single-tasking, and Mac were still mostly small screen, b/w underpowered toys.

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The computer on the left is a sparctation1, designed by young, incredible engineers such as Bill Joy and Andy Bechtolstein, founders of the company,

When they left, the extreme elegance of their design were lost, and what followed can be seen on the right...

Sun was Open, was young, was anti-IBM, and offered to me the opportunity to see the world -- hong kong, san francisco, hawaii, as well as getting to know incredible people such as  John Gage.

And then there was Java, just after Netscape went public, and we tough we could take the word, and that Microsoft was about to be terminated...

To undestand what Sun was, take a look at some of the names of employees:

 Steve Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell

Alfred Chuang, co-founder of BEA 

Whitfield Diffie, Chief Security Officer, co-inventor of public-key cryptography

James Gosling, co-inventor of Java;

Bill Joy, Sun co-founder and architect of BSD Unix, vi editor

Chris Malachowsky, co-founder of NVIDIA

Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB 

Ivan Sutherland, computer graphics pioneer

Michael Widenius, original author of MySQL

...and many others.

Now Sun is in the hands of Larry Ellison, and Oracle, and about 10.000 people will have to leave.

Difficile dire quanto la Sun sia stata un punto centrale nella mia vita lavorativa: ci sono entrato quando era un'azienda sconosciuta, ma faceva questi bellissimi computer con schermi giganti, usati praticamente solo da chi progettava automobili, aerei o schede elettroniche. E poi c'erano i "server", una parola ancora sconosciuta allora, grossi rack di computer che funzionavano in Unix, il magico Unix...C'era ancora la Digital, il Vax era il nemico da abbattere (e abbattuto fu, in pochi anni). Hewlett Packard-IBM, let me tell-you we dont' care about them, la canzone era cantata direttamente dal presidente, Scott McNealy, che si sarebbe presentato ai vari meeting vestito da antico romano (in biga), o da Elvis Pelvis, tenendo degli speech anti-sistema che mi affascinavano.

Quando arrivo' Java pensavamo che saremmo stati irraggiungibili, ed invece li inizio' il declino.

Forse il valore dell'azione, inizialmente chiamata "SUNW", successivamente (e stupidamente) cambiata in "JAVA" racconta qualcosa di questo periodo, di questa incredibile storia (sulla y il valore dell'azione in dollari):

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Oggi il capolinea: Oracle ha comprato il tutto, e 25 anni di storia dell'IT giungono a compimento. Addio Sun.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Oracle-Will-Permanently-Eclipse-Sun-422107/