It was 1988 when I joined Sun.
They had fancy computer with very large graphics screen (when PCs were running DOS with the C: prompt)
The operating system was "Unix", where windows existed only to be able to type in some "sh" commands, such as:
$ cat desc* | wc -l > /dev/null
(but this is still very much alive in the "terminal" of MacOSX)
Then there was something called "SERVER". Never heard the word before, and for several years nobody outside Sun knew what the hell a "server" was (or why was it needed).
Anyway a server at the time was something like this...
with disks inside, powered by a motorola 68K CPU, and with the magic "NFS" (Network File System): with it, you never knew where a file really was, but this was an advantage (very many years before any "cloud computing" stuff).
Sun Italy was headquartered in Agrate Brianza, where in those years between october and march you have about 50% of days with thick fog before 11am and after 3pm. Driving there was dangerous!
The boss was a dutch, JB, and our boss's boss was in London.
1989 was RISC: Reduced Instruction Set Computer.
The beauty, the incredible product, out of the brain and pencil of a german called Andy Bechtolsheim.
And what a product it was!
fast, very fast, compact, very compact (it was called the "pizza box"), with a heart beat visible (a green led glowing...),
and incredible graphics. (and NO Intel Inside!!!)
Andy was shy, but in Estoril he explained with pride how small the motherboard was (maybe 1/10 of that of a PC, with maybe 20 times the power).
Here is Andy, in red
the other are Bill Joy (inventor of Java, more or less, and certanly the creator of VI editor, this one too very present in OSX, just fire up the "terminal" and type "vi"), and Scott McNealy, the big boss (CEO).
How young they were! How exiting was to work for such a large company (more than 1B$ at the time) with this young management.
Winning the "SunRise" (a competition among sales and support people) I had the opportunity of visiting Hong Kong, Hawai, New York and Rome (...yes, the last one was Rome!).
After the SparcStation 1 the next big thing was "Java", the language that should have changed the word.
With Java, all doors were open, and we brought around Italy a funny guy, the inventor of SATAN (security administrator tool for analyzing networks)
SATAN was totally unrelated to Java, but due to his way of presenting stuff he was our guest at the "1st Italian Java Conference". This conference itself attracted some 4000 persons in a room with space for 1200.
After Java Sun basically stopped making workstations, concentrating on "servers" with "high parallelism".
At Sun, in 1994, I saw for the first time something called a "Web Navigator", NCSA Mosaic first
and later "Netscape" (well...Mozilla, as can be seen there's an "M")
What a DAY!
When I first see a "web page", when we all first saw a "web page" we knew something big, really big was about to happen.
It's easy to say this now, but it is true: we all were stunned.
Probably the only other time I was so impressed with something was the first time I saw a mobile ("cell") phone. But this was bigger, we could read, we could see, we could surf the world.
There was no Google, Yahoo! was a directory with about 10 sections with 50 sites each, and then there was Lycos. That was it.
Quickly we registered "www.sun.it", and that was Italy's...43rd website (si, c'erano solo 42 siti web in italia!!)
I dont know much about what happened next, I left the company in 1995....but basically it became irrilevant (or about so) in the IT sector, and Scott himself took a behind-the-scene position.
I shall add that in these years Sun brought us OpenOffice (the free version of "microsoft office"), the VirtualBox, as well as some other very complex technology that I cannot comment about.
On January 27, 2010, the acquisition of Sun by Oracle was completed, and the "www.sun.com" website is no more.
I don't think there's sun under Oracle.
