20th Anniversary

No, I'm not one of those four people, but twenty years ago today (give or take a week or two), I first started working with Sun workstations. At that time, I joined the Sun distributor in Melbourne, Australia. This was about two years before Sun Microsystems started up "down under". I joined them in January 1987. The Sun distributorship was one of the businesses owned by Lionel Singer, a well-known entrepreneur at that time. He also had the Australian distributorships for Wicat, Pyramid, Convex (amongst other things).

Before this, I was working for International Computers Ltd (ICL), just across the street. When I handed in my notice from them, I was literally out of the building within 30 minutes. I walked across the road and started at my new job right away. No need to work off the normal last month as I was going to a competitor. So that month, I got two months salaries.

When I started at Sun Australia, there was only one Sun machine in the Melbourne office. It was a Sun 2/120 running SunOS v1.0, and it sat in it's own special "demo" room. If you wanted to work on it, in anything else apart from a remote text-based login capability, you had to book time on it. It was several months before I got my own Sun workstation at my desk.

A couple other memories from this time. In 1986, I decided to buy my first PC. It cost about $6,000 (Australian). It had a 286 chip if I remember correctly. When I left Australia in 1992 to come to the U.S. I sold it for $300. That rate of depreciation kept me away from buying any further PC's until 1998. I also remember using an acoustic coupler for a dial-up from home to my work machine. It was in a lovely wooden case. I kept it for years after I no longer used it. Can't think why apart from it being close to a work or art. Anyway, this was initially going at 300 baud, and eventually I was upgraded to 1200 baud! You really learnt to carefully decide what you wanted to remotely display in those days.

And finally, a tradeshow memory. We were demo'ing some Suns at this show, but we also had a Convex there for the first time, in the next booth along. The Convex was a mini super-computer. All the machines were networked together. Now in those days, University types would go upto each Unix vendor and ask if they could run a small dc benchmark. The time it took to run this, would give them an indication of just how fast the machine was. Sure enough, we got this request one morning. He types in his benchmark and presses return, and gets the answer back almost instantly. He blinks a couple of times, runs it again and gets the same results. He quickly writes it down and goes rushing off. We didn't have the heart to tell him that that graphics window on the Sun was remotely logged into the Convex.

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( Sep 17 2004, 09:11:14 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink