Back in 1985, in my last year of graduate school, I was lucky enough to get a “real” office, including a door, a lock and key, a telephone, and a shiny, new Sun 3/110 workstation. After timesharing with the general population on VAX 11s for three years, the Sun machine was a godsend: a bitmapped screen, shell windows, and all the processing power of a 16 MHz 68020. (Man, those were the days!)
Back in 1985, in my last year of graduate school, I was lucky enough to get a “real” office, including a door, a lock and key, a telephone, and a shiny, new Sun 3/110 workstation. After timesharing with the general population on VAX 11s for three years, the Sun machine was a godsend: a bitmapped screen, shell windows, and all the processing power of a 16 MHz 68020. (Man, those were the days!)
I continued to use Sun machines up through the early ’90s (in 1992, I switched from scientific computing and supercomputers to shrinkwrap software and personal computers). I had many of the Sun 3 computers and an early SPARCstation, and was always impressed with Sun’s hardware and software. Sun’s UNIX was a reference platform for MIT’s X11 and for much of the open source software of the day (largely found on Usenet newsgroups), and Sun’s machines were widely targeted by independent software vendors. Sun’s sprawl in Silicon Valley was a reflection of its success.
But Sun’s rise (sorry, bad pun) slowed as the PC usurped the desktop. So, some ten years or so after being founded, Sun seemed to be at a standstill.
However, in a strange twist of fate, the lowly machines that nearly killed Sun also resurrected the company: with a PC in (almost) every home and office, and an Internet start-up on (almost) every corner, Sun climbed to the stratosphere, powered by Sun’s servers. Talk about being in the right…
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