From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: arnold@skeeve.com (arnold@skeeve.com) Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2017 01:30:22 -0600 Subject: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie! [ really sun vs dec/apollo --> X and NeWS ] In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <201709130730.v8D7UNog003861@freefriends.org> And buried in this story is another reason Unix / BSD people went with Sun --- (if you had the licenses) they would give you source! Even for educational institutions, where I mostly worked, getting source out of DEC / IBM / HP was essentially impossible. Arnold "Steve Johnson" wrote: > Funny.  From the outside I had a rather different view of why Sun was > successful. > > In 1986 I came to CA to work for what became Ardent/Stardent.  We > made the decision to go with Sun disc-less workstations.  They got us > more computing power, on paper, for less $$. > > Roughly a quarter of the machines shipped to us were DOA.  When we > got them running, the OS had a memory leak and needed to be rebooted > several times a day.  The NFS server had the delightful property of > sometimes inserting 1024 zeros into a file it was writing or > serving.    (It was so bad that we hacked the OS to check every > executable for 0-blocks in the instruction space and refuse to run > it.  This was especially true for the MIPS cross compiler -- 0 was a > NOP on the MIPS, and encountering a block of zeros caused execution to > slide down a slippery slope of NOPs into the middle of some other > routine with a different stack layout, where it proceeded to do the > most mysterious things...) > > We would go out to lunch every day and trash talk Sun up one side and > down the other.  And then we would go back to work and order more > Suns.  Because THEY UNDERSTOOD WHAT WE NEEDED, and were TRYING TO > GIVE IT TO US.  The other manufacturers were selling application > delivery vehicles rather than attempting to support software > development.  Eventually we ironed out many of the issues (often by > changing or hacking the code).  The only fly in the ointment was the > service department.  Dealing with Sun customer service was like > spitting into the wind.  We would report the same bug every week and > they swore the bug had not been reported before.  The memory leak > problem became so serious that we told them that we would only renew > the service agreement if they would put a date when that would be > fixed.  They refused to do so, and we canceled the service contract, > bought a couple of extra Suns for spares, and heaved a sigh of relief. > > Steve > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Jon Steinhart" > To: > Cc: > Sent:Tue, 12 Sep 2017 08:35:24 -0700 > Subject:Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie! [ really sun vs > dec/apollo --> X and NeWS ] > > arnold at skeeve.com writes: > > > > In particular, the creation of NFS and then the efforts to make it > into > > a de-facto standard (giving away the RPC and XDR code) was a HUGE > thing. > > > > They weren't afraid to swim upstream, either. Even though NeWS > never took > > off (even when combined with an X server), it was an interesting > design, > > ahead of its time even. > > It's interesting that you mention the two of these together. It's my > opinion that the main reason that NeWS failed was because of the > success > of NFS. > > I recall that Apollo was really pissed off by NFS because they felt > that > their token-ring network was better but lost because NFS was given > away. > In hindsight, they were wrong; while the token-ring performed better > in > large networks, the advent of switches made that moot. In any case, > when > NeWS was released nobody except Sun knew how to do the graphics (even > Adobe didn't know how to do it fast for display) and Apollo et. al. > was > worried that Sun would give NeWS away and make it yet another de > facto > standard a la NFS. This led to the formation of the Hamilton Group > which > was a thinly-disguised industry consortium that existed only for the > purpose of making sure that NeWS didn't succeed. > > > DEC, IBM, and HP, all seemed to be playing follow the leader to Sun > for > > many years. > > I mentioned this to a lot of people after Sun died. Few seem to > realize > how much of what became PC manufacturing technology resulted from > innovations > at Sun. > > ron at ronnatalie.com writes: > > > > NeWS had serious issues. However, the same guy who was the NeWS > proponent > > learned from mistakes and the result was the must more successful > Sun > > tehnology: JAVA. > > I'm going to take issue with the above. NeWS had way fewer serious > issues > than X. It's main reason for failure was the coordinated effort to > kill it > from others in the industry. As the guy who single-handedly prevented > X > from becoming an ANSI standard, I'd be happy to start another thread > on > this topic if people are interested. Part of the result of the > Hamilton > Group effort was the misguided attempt to merge X and NeWS which was > a > botched disaster. > > Java is not the result of learning from mistakes in NeWS. I have > joked with > James that I feel that his legacy is being the person who first > realizes that > technology is changing to the point where something can be done using > an > interpreter. If you look at his project history, he's done this many > times. > I think that it's more accurate to say that Java is the result of a > lifetime > of learning from interpreter projects. I fully expect some new > interpreter > to take over AWS sometime soon :-) > > Jon >