I guess I should address who I am, why I started blogging second
and later this week I will discuss where the name Edstrom_Photons-Electrons
came from.
Who is Dave Edstrom? I am a
Technical Director at Sun and Chief Technologist for Americas
Software Practice. On May 4th, I will celebrate my 20th
anniversary with Sun. I started in the computer industry in the
fall of 1978 programming in assembler on a Honeywell 2080A mainframe using punch cards for the US
Government.
Why did I start blogging at Sun? John Clingan
started calling my mother at home and on her cellphone making
derogatory statements about my family tree because I
was not blogging. When John started working his way up the
family tree attacking my deceased Grandparents, Melvin and Dora
Thompson of Zumbrota,
Minnesota, my mother called pleading with me to start
blogging so John would stop hounding her. Thanks John :-)
A serious thanks to the Sun employees who answered my beginner
questions on blogging.
Seriously, John Clingan was very
encouraging. What was intimidating to me was the high quality
of the Sun blogs. The real catalyst for blogging was
Catalyst. I was in Pittsburgh a week ago and I remembered
the book below.
The book above is my 1985 version of the Catalyst. As it states on the cover:
A catalog of
third-party referrral software
and hardware
from Sun Microsystems
Catalyst
Spring 1985
This Catalyst was
"only" 360 pages in length. In the latter part of the
1980's, our Catalyst catalog became much larger. Why is this so
significant? The number of high quality software
and hardware Partners a computer company has will always be a
fundamental requirement for success. Sun Microsystems has
always been a very Partner centric company. Andy, Vhinod,
Scott and Bill understood from February 1982 that Sun will live or
die with their Partner network. Sun's Partner infrastructure is
what I first noticed about Sun in 1984. Although, as my wife
likes to remind me, I was too stupid to realize how successful
Sun would be back in 1984.
The Catalyst was the "kerthump" factor that all of the Sales Reps (SRs) and Technical Systems Engineers (TSEs) used to drop from four feet above the customers desk to emphasize the strength of Sun's software and hardware partner solutions. You would simply not go on a sales call without bringing a long a few Catalyst Catalogs. On the back of the Catalyst was the price $24.95 We never sold it as far as I know.
It is fun to look through this Catalyst and see a 15
MFLOP board level array-processor that went for $14,900.
I
am a HUGE believer in Sun's Partner ecosystem. Sun is first
and foremost an infrastructure supplier and we depend on our Partners
to complete a customer solution. I will be dedicating a reasonable number of cycles in Edstrom
Photons-Electrons to discuss interesting technical solutions Sun's
Partners are creating. I will talk later this week about where the
name Edstrom Photons-Electrons comes from....
Great to see you get your blog up and running! As I can already tell, my hounding, phone calls, skywriting, etc was well worth it. VERY good first post. I could tell you would be a natural.
BTW, Your mother is very nice. I also got some background scoops on you I could share with the world if I see you entering the ranks of the non-blogging heathen :) FYI, your grandparents are doing fine :)
Posted by John Clingan on March 28, 2007 at 08:05 PM EDT #