Making workstations even in the dominant market position that Sun had, was a cottage industry compared to technology today, and it was managed that way. I wouldn't blame management for Sun being irrelevant now.
What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough. Not even Xerox. I've used aa Xerox Alto, a Sun workstation, an LMI CADR, and a Symbolics 3600, and none of them were as carefully crafted as a Macintosh with a tiny memory and a floppy disk. Next inherited this ethic.
Jobs valued the person using the machine more than anything else about the machine.
> What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough.
But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times.
Sun, just like SGI, got attacked by cheap beige PCs running either Windows or Linux.
I don't think their UI had much to do with their downfall and, arguably, SGI's UIs were better than the competition and they still disappeared too.
Also weren't most machines sold by Sun servers anyway? Their famous "We the dot in .com" tagline.
> But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times.
My first exposure to Solaris was in 2003 when Linux had Gnome 2.6 and Solaris had CDE. The UI on my Debian box seemed decades ahead of the Solaris machines I managed, which looked like Windows 3.1 and performed about as well.
Combined with Linux package managers being infinitely better, the GNU core utilities having so many more conveniences and options than the Solaris equivalents, I felt like Sun was this dinosaur that couldn’t die fast enough. I’ll still never understand why so many people praise Sun for its engineering culture when free software seemed so superior to me at the time.
My favorite anecdote exemplifying my opinion about Solaris at the time: you log into the console of your Sun workstation, running SunOS, with your Sun keyboard plugged in, and press backspace. It echoes ^H back to you. They couldn’t even figure out how to configure their own keyboards correctly out of the box.
Maybe in the 90s the standards were different. Maybe their tech was better. But by the time I ever used their software is was the butt of jokes.
> My first exposure to Solaris was in 2003 when Linux had Gnome 2.6 and Solaris had CDE. The UI on my Debian box seemed decades ahead of the Solaris machines I managed, which looked like Windows 3.1 and performed about as well.
Linux having better UI than proprietary Unices (except SGI) was true from the beginning. In 01993, even before package managers, the Linux standard was color rxvt, color ls, Seyon, fvwm with multiple virtual desktops (really important at 800×600), Emacs preinstalled, and you could termify your web browser and whatnot so you could run them at home on a dialup shell account. Proprietary Unices (except SGI) had monochrome xterm, vi (with no arrow key support), and typically either twm or mwm, which both looked like shit and still do. Suns sometimes had olwm but Sun had sort of abandoned Open Look by that point. If you had a Sun at home connected through a dialup shell account, you could forget about running any TCP/IP apps on your Sun. By 01996 the Linux world had slirp, so you didn't even have to termify your TCP/IP apps, while Solaris didn't even include a C compiler anymore.
CDE seems like somebody thought that the problem with Motif was that, although it was butt-ugly, it wasn't quite ugly enough.
And, yeah, backspace worked. Also automatic window resizing. And for years Solaris had a totally fatal TCP round-trip estimation bug which made TCP connections to Solaris machines over dialup incredibly slow. Linux was just dramatically more technically competent.
Sun did have a pretty amazing engineering culture. They shipped SPARC, Open Look, NeWS, Java, HotJava, HotSpot, NFS, Sun RPC, yp/NIS, Spring, ZFS, OpenBoot/Open Firmware, and I think even Sprite, and for a while they employed the Tcl team, bringing Tcl out of the stone age. But they sucked at fixing the fatal flaws in their actual products, and half the engineering achievements in my list above were murdered by Sun's incompetent management.
Zigurd · · focus · HN ↗
What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough. Not even Xerox. I've used aa Xerox Alto, a Sun workstation, an LMI CADR, and a Symbolics 3600, and none of them were as carefully crafted as a Macintosh with a tiny memory and a floppy disk. Next inherited this ethic.
Jobs valued the person using the machine more than anything else about the machine.
TacticalCoder · · focus · HN ↗
But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times.
Sun, just like SGI, got attacked by cheap beige PCs running either Windows or Linux.
I don't think their UI had much to do with their downfall and, arguably, SGI's UIs were better than the competition and they still disappeared too.
Also weren't most machines sold by Sun servers anyway? Their famous "We the dot in .com" tagline.
ninkendo · · focus · HN ↗
My first exposure to Solaris was in 2003 when Linux had Gnome 2.6 and Solaris had CDE. The UI on my Debian box seemed decades ahead of the Solaris machines I managed, which looked like Windows 3.1 and performed about as well.
Combined with Linux package managers being infinitely better, the GNU core utilities having so many more conveniences and options than the Solaris equivalents, I felt like Sun was this dinosaur that couldn’t die fast enough. I’ll still never understand why so many people praise Sun for its engineering culture when free software seemed so superior to me at the time.
My favorite anecdote exemplifying my opinion about Solaris at the time: you log into the console of your Sun workstation, running SunOS, with your Sun keyboard plugged in, and press backspace. It echoes ^H back to you. They couldn’t even figure out how to configure their own keyboards correctly out of the box.
Maybe in the 90s the standards were different. Maybe their tech was better. But by the time I ever used their software is was the butt of jokes.
kragen · · focus · HN ↗
Linux having better UI than proprietary Unices (except SGI) was true from the beginning. In 01993, even before package managers, the Linux standard was color rxvt, color ls, Seyon, fvwm with multiple virtual desktops (really important at 800×600), Emacs preinstalled, and you could termify your web browser and whatnot so you could run them at home on a dialup shell account. Proprietary Unices (except SGI) had monochrome xterm, vi (with no arrow key support), and typically either twm or mwm, which both looked like shit and still do. Suns sometimes had olwm but Sun had sort of abandoned Open Look by that point. If you had a Sun at home connected through a dialup shell account, you could forget about running any TCP/IP apps on your Sun. By 01996 the Linux world had slirp, so you didn't even have to termify your TCP/IP apps, while Solaris didn't even include a C compiler anymore.
CDE seems like somebody thought that the problem with Motif was that, although it was butt-ugly, it wasn't quite ugly enough.
And, yeah, backspace worked. Also automatic window resizing. And for years Solaris had a totally fatal TCP round-trip estimation bug which made TCP connections to Solaris machines over dialup incredibly slow. Linux was just dramatically more technically competent.
Sun did have a pretty amazing engineering culture. They shipped SPARC, Open Look, NeWS, Java, HotJava, HotSpot, NFS, Sun RPC, yp/NIS, Spring, ZFS, OpenBoot/Open Firmware, and I think even Sprite, and for a while they employed the Tcl team, bringing Tcl out of the stone age. But they sucked at fixing the fatal flaws in their actual products, and half the engineering achievements in my list above were murdered by Sun's incompetent management.