Thursday September 30, 2004

Sun1, Sun2, Sun3, Sun4, Sunray !

In my working life a proportion of it has been involved in using Sun machines, as a customer and now an employee of the company.

I am sure the world wide web can produce a better historical description of the products Sun has sold over the years but my first machine was a two megabyte 68010 processor based Sun2 workstation. I had Sun Unix 2.0 then 3.0 remember when YP ( oops sorry NIS ) came in and NFS. Diskless clients that used NFS instead of 'ND'. The Sun 3/50 was my next workstation. I never had a Sun4 workstation I went straight to a Sparcstation 10 when I joined Sun. I have always wanted a machine on my desktop called 'betelgeuse'. The reason is simple. The first place I used Sun machines, a CAD/CAM software company in Cambridge called CIS gave me my break into computing as an operator. My manager Ian Barratt had a thing about stars. So everything was called after star . His machine was called aldebaran. Server names of kooshe, asterix and deneb among others.

So what am I rambling about ? Well it is all about desktop 'envy'. Everyone looks at your desktop and makes an assumption about how powerful and wonderful it is. It is a status symbol like swimming pool in the garden or a porsche on the drive. My desktop is still 'betelgeuse'. But it is a piece of metal the size of a cdrom drive set on its side. It has eight USIV processors. I share them with other folks but I wager any amount that the performance I get is as good as it gets. One of these days I am going to paint a smiley on that sunray box. I think we should sell them with the smiley on them !

So my story is I started with a workstation the size of a pedestal you have under your desk and now it is the size of a cdrom drive. The web site Thin Clients will tell you all about Sunray appliances and why they are good, save money and make people more productive. With Solaris10 betelgeuse comes back to life as a Solaris container that I have root access on and can customise as I wish.