Sun Microsystems

» see sun.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

sun showed up in my space around 2003. i was a second-year computer engineering student at a university in ankara and the lab machines ran solaris. the textbooks for the object-oriented design course were in java. one of the senior students kept a netbeans shortcut on his desktop and treated the ide like a religion.

by then sun was already past its peak. the dot-com bust had taken a real bite out of the enterprise-server market and the company was making free java available to anyone who downloaded it while the actual hardware revenue kept declining. nobody on the engineering campus thought about it that way. we just used the tools. java was the language the assignments came in. solaris was the os the assignments compiled on.

oracle announced the acquisition in april 2009 and closed it in january 2010 for around $7.4 billion. larry ellison kept the bits he could monetize and laid off the parts he could not. the brand itself stopped being a brand. the sun logo came off the boxes and people who had worked there for fifteen years started showing up at google and netflix.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

"the network is the computer" was the line scott mcnealy ran for two decades. it sounded like marketing in 1985 and like a prediction by 2005. sun built the workstations that drove pixar's first renders and the servers that ran the dot-com boom's back ends. it built java, which is still under the hood of about half of the enterprise software written since 1996, and it built solaris, which is still running in places that pay oracle to keep running.

~ what it influenced ~

look at what sun open-sourced before the end and what those projects became. mysql still backs a generation of web stacks under oracle's ownership. virtualbox is still the easiest way to run a different os on a laptop, and zfs lives on in freebsd and a few storage appliances that pretend to be magic. java is more dominant in enterprise than it has ever been, even if nobody on a frontend team picks it. sun's intellectual property is everywhere. sun the company is nowhere.

~ what came after ~

i still write code in languages descended from java. the jvm is still running production code i wrote eight years ago for a system i no longer touch. when oracle dissolved the sun brand they did not actually kill the software. they just took the company's name off it. that is a quieter death than the bankruptcies and the late-night shutdown notices most of the rest of this site documents. it is also harder to grieve, because the things sun made are still doing their jobs.

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