40 years ago today: I joined a tiny startup called Sun Microsystems. What a ride! Here’s the never-before-told story of how I arrived at Sun as employee #8! 🧵 
I started out in Silicon Valley in June of 1978 working at Amdahl Corp. porting UNIX to the mainframe, a revival of the work started at Princeton in 1975. 
Sometime in late ’80 I moved over to Amdahl’s architecture group to work on data communications – X.25, SNA, etc. But that work wasn’t too satisfying. 
During the UNIX/UTS work I had been up to Berkeley a few times to see talks by Bill Joy and others about BSD UNIX (I think I was the first person to implement the select system call, though it never made it to product). Anyways, I guess Bill remembered me. 
There was *intense* startup fever in the Silicon Valley in 81/82. I was caught up in it and actively looking for a startup – I even bought books and magazines about starting companies. 
🔥🔥🔥 At that time UNIX and Motorola 68000 were HOT technologies 🔥🔥🔥 – there were literally (yes, truly) 100 startup companies doing something with the combination.
Most of the well-funded ones were building time-shared minicomputers to attack DEC – Altos Computer Systems was a prime example. There were a bunch of bottom feeders targeting the home-brew market, and then there were a few with real differentiation. 
I had talked with Valid Logic Systems, who were building a CAD workstation. Good people, but CAD was not my thing so I didn’t have any feeling about the business. 
I also talked with Fortune Systems. John Bass, pretty well known in the UNIX world, was there and trying to get me. Fortune was very well funded and going after the Wang word processing market. I still have never seen a Wang system in person, so that was not my bag either. 
But let’s talk about my unfair advantage – my Lyon family mafia. I was living with my brother Bob and his wife. Bob was working at Xerox SDD developing the Xerox Star workstation. And my brother Dick was at Xerox PARC with an Alto on his desk! So I knew workstations. 
Bob had a friend from SDD, Glenn, who would come over to our house to shoot the breeze; and he started raving one time about the SUN project at Stanford and about how cool the processor board was, and how we should all buy one if we could (for homebrew hacking). 
So I knew about SUN. One day Scott McNealy called me out of the blue, having found me at Amdahl. He said he was with a company called Sun Microsystems. I responded “Oh! Are you doing something with the SUN board?” He was NOT expecting that. 
So I went for a
7 Comments
LastTrain
"There were a bunch of bottom feeders targeting the home-brew market"
Yes we all know how poorly it went for those folks lol
minitoar
Great pictures. lol @ khosla.
ajross
What I find fascinating about Sun is how fast its ride was. They launched their MVP in 1982 which was really just a bare 68000 board with a kluged together software suite. The second generation Sun 2's were like a year and a half later, running virtual memory on 4BSD, the 68020 made the Sun 3's in 1985 faster than a VAX, and suddenly Sun was The Premier Unix that everyone targetted.
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.
gopalv
> But let’s talk about my unfair advantage – my Lyon family mafia. I was living with my brother Bob and his wife. Bob was working at Xerox SDD developing the Xerox Star workstation. And my brother Dick was at Xerox PARC with an Alto on his desk
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%.
DogRunner
If you want to see the included images, jump back to 2022: https://web.archive.org/web/20221218011802/https://akapugs.b…
jmwilson
Working for a great company in its heyday is a gift – one that I wish for everyone. Stories like this are a comfort when the industry is near its nadir, and reminder that the industry moves in cycles, and all glory fades. I got my turn at Facebook in 2010. A bunch of times I'd see a name I'd recognize pop up in internal discussions: an esteemed classmate or colleague had joined, and you knew with all this talent concentrating in one place, good things were to come.
otras
I enjoy historical books about the rise, fall, and everything in between for companies in the industry — things like The Idea Factory about Bell Labs, Dealers of Lightning about Xerox PARC, and Soul of a New Machine about Data General.
Are there any books folks would recommend like that about Sun?