One thing overlooked from that era was that the customers were so cool - they were building virtual wind tunnels, flight simulators, protein visualizers, etc - not running payroll or inventory management.
We used to say our customers used our products to make money, not count money. Joke’s on us because it turned out the market for counting money is much bigger :-)
Sometimes, I feel like the whole downwards trend having a single kid loses the family aspect of my previous generation - I meet enough people who don't have uncles, aunts, nieces or nephews for nepotism (literal) to work sideways on.
Nobody to pull them up and nobody to pull up in term. Not dynasties of tiger children, but simply support in minor ways.
I got into Linux because my uncle's brother in law worked in computer repair when I was 14, back when India still needed to fill in an export control form to download software. Another uncle sent me extra 32Mb of RAM from Dubai and a modem which wasn't a winmodem (& my dad hated him for the phone bills).
> We were just managing a house mortgage with 3 full time incomes. Interest rates then were well above 10%.
Are there any books folks would recommend like that about Sun?
Truly learned a lot from them, especially when pair programming. Must have been a special place to work at.
Yes we all know how poorly it went for those folks lol
The next few years (up through 1991 or so) would see the launch of SPARC[1] and all the Unix goodness we all still work on: shared libraries, NFS, RPC, pervasive IPv4 networking, basically everything about the modern datacenter software environment dates from these few years at Sun.
And then, sort of out of nowhere in the mid 90's, Linux distros running on P6 boards had essentially cloned it all on hardware 1/10th the price and the end had begun. Sun would continue to make a lot of money through the doc com boom, but their status as the thought and innovation center of Unix hit a brick wall.
The story of the end was all about Java and Oracle and datacenter markets. And IMHO it's not that interesting. What the hell happened to Unix?
[1] In hindsight it was just a flash in the pan, but the RISC arrival in the Unix world was shocking at the time. Even though in hindsight the workstation vendors had at most a 3-4 year lead on Intel at the peak and would rapidly fall behind.