Someone did it ! A #sun3 clone https://github.com/54weasels/sun3_60
#sunos #sunmicrosystems #m68k #unix
#SunMicrosystems
From a 1991 SunExpert magazine article about “What’s to come” for network protocols. The article depicts a man traveling into the 2020’s, seemingly unaware of the chaos he’ll find.
He’s going to pass @prahou traveling back in time to 1991 to get some mint condition Sun workstations.
I found this reply that I made in 1984 to Dennis Ritchie in the net.followup newsgroup. I was at the time lobbying Sun to add 8-bit character set support to the firmware, but they wanted to hold out for a 16-bit system, like the as yet unnamed Unicode. There was eventually an interim solution but my memory of that is a bit foggy.
#Usenet #DennisRitchie #C #Pascal #emacs #VT100 #charactersets #ISO8859 #languages #Swedish #programming #unicode #SunMicrosystems #Värmland
![› ... The problem was that, to the Swedes, characters like
› {}|\ were letters, not syntactic symbols.
›
› It's a real problem. I gather that the best-equipped users
› had terminals that would switch graphics depending on
› whether they were writing C or documents.
›
› Dennis Ritchie
That's right, writing C and shell commands is almost impossible on a terminal with a swedish character set. Even Pascal is a bit hard, but some compilers will accept (* *) instead of { } and (. .) instead of [ ].
If you have a terminal with selectable character sets, you can train your editor to switch, depending on what type of text you are editing. I have set up EMACS so that it selects the right character set on my VT100 depending on what mode I'm in (which in turn is controlled by filename suffixes). This works even if I have two windows, one with C code in it and the other holding a document in swedish.
Leif Samuelsson
LM ERICSSON Tel. Co.
S-126 25 STOCKHOLM
SWEDEN
..{decvax, philabs}!mcvax!enea!erix!leif
"E { e }, } i }a { e |"
"It is a river, and in the river there is an island"
(This is a dialect of swedish. My apologies to the people in the
province of V{rmland for the lack of a V{rmland character set).](https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/116/120/123/593/490/639/original/a285f8b00a2b7320.png)
@Gammitin the Purcase of #SunMicrosystems by #Oracle is the worst that hapoened to #FLOSS!
A fascinating look back at 1994: Bud Tribble explaining the pivotal alliance between NeXT and Sun Microsystems.
It’s incredible to read how OpenStep was pitched as the "mature" object-oriented solution back then—laying the groundwork for the architecture we still use today in macOS. Real engineering history.
#RetroComputing #NeXTSTEP #SunMicrosystems #TechHistory #Unix #OpenStep #Apple
https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/nextworld-interviews-bud-tribble
Hey @prahou, look what I found. It’s like finding ancient Roman coins around an archaeological dig site.
Nice theme. This is Sun Java Desktop System 2003 :p
#SunJDS #JavaDesktop2003 #GNOME #SunMicrosystems #VintageLinux #Linux
@marma I stand corrected... The slogan originated with eventual Oracle acquisition #SunMicrosystems employee John Gage way back in the 1980s.
When Sun and #Oracle collaborated on the Network Computer initiative the following decade they trotted out that slogan and both McNealy and Ellison made a big deal of the concept.
It underscores how early and how hard Big Tech has been trying to put the Personal Computing Genie back in the bottle. It is an effort that must be resisted equally hard to preserve personal computing.
@msh That is like saying Sauron coined the phrase "You shall not pass". I don't know if you are intentionally trolling/farming, but I am triggered :)
Other than that: yes
Nice. This used the #CDE desktop, based on #Motif. I did prefer the earlier #OpenWindows / #OpenLook, though. Partially because I was involved in the development of that.
A 1985 Computer Chronicles segment about the brand new company SUN Microsystems.
Featuring Bill Joy, the segment goes on to express doubts that UNIX will ever catch on in the business world.
"UNIX will be important if it can deliver applications that people want to run."
Nothing he says is wrong, but in 1985 I can only imagine what it felt like.
Cleaning and restoring this SUN SPARCstation 330 from 1989. They built these things like vaults. It’s perfectly clean on the inside but hasn’t been powered on in 30 years.
#unix_surrealism #SUNmicrosystems #UNIX #SunOS #Solaris #SPARC
Officially brought a #SPARC server back to life in my living room.
RE: https://todon.eu/@regendans/115741381135313845
I was a #SunMicrosystems employee when this happened. I remember being pleased about it, and its implicit poke in MSFT's eye. I had NO IDEA until today it was literally cheaper than MSFT's licensing. I mean if I thought about it maybe it would've been obvious? Hell maybe it was and I just wasn't paying attention. To be fair, IKE bringup and shoring up other IPsec, and other TCP/IP things (code reviews, etc.) was work/job-encompassing for me at that point.
TIL why Sun Microsystems (Bill Joy and all) bought an office suite company in 1999. 🤨
"In August 1999, Star Division was acquired by Sun Microsystems[81][82] for US$59.5 million (equivalent to US$112 million in 2024), reportedly because the acquisition was less expensive than licensing Microsoft Office for Sun's 42,000 employees.[83][84]"
😄
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History
And that's how eventually LibreOffice became available for many. 😇
This (somewhat early) Christmas I just got from my partner a brand new, still sealed, Sun Ray 2. Basically the best gift I ever got. Period.
Then I decided to reverse-engineer it without looking for what people have already done.
Tickling a Sun Ray 2 - DHCP Discovery
https://vito.io/articles/2025-12-13-tickling-sun-ray-discovery
Tickling a Sun Ray 2 - It Speaks!
https://vito.io/articles/2025-12-15-tickling-sun-ray-it-speaks
OTD 1968: The Mother of All Demos, by Douglas Engelbart and William English.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
I knew Bill English 20 years later when he was working for #SunMicrosystems.
@stefano So, what vendors are left that we can choose from (until they take the same path)?
This reminds me of #SunMicrosystems and #Cisco back in the dot.com days. While Cisco is still around, it isn't as huge as it once was. And we all know what happened to Sun. Micron/Crucial may suffer the same fate when the bubble goes "POP!"
This reminds me of #SunMicrosystems and #Cisco back in the dot.com days. While Cisco is still around, it isn't as huge as it once was. And we all know what happened to Sun. Micron/Crucial may suffer the same fate when the bubble goes "POP!"
Exactly 30 years ago today, Netscape and Sun announced JavaScript.
Originally called LiveScript, the language was renamed to JavaScript, ensuring that everyone in the industry would be thoroughly confused about its relation to Java for the next three decades.
A decision made by the marketing guys, of course, since Java was hot at the time and Sun was on board.
The original announcement: https://web.archive.org/web/20070916144913/http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease67.html
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