Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago (2022)

Summary

40 years ago today: I joined a tiny startup called Sun Microsystems. What a ride! Here’s the never-before-told story of how I arrived at Sun as employee #8! 🧵 I started out in Silicon Valley in June of 1978 working at Amdahl Corp. porting UNIX to the mainframe, a revival of the work started at Princeton in 1975. Sometime in late ’80 I moved over to Amdahl’s architecture group to work on data communications – X.25, SNA, etc. But that work wasn’t too satisfying. During the UNIX/UTS work I had been up to Berkeley a few times to see talks by Bill Joy and others about BSD UNIX (I think I was the first person to implement the select system call, though it never made it to product). Anyways, I guess Bill remembered me. There was *intense* startup fever in the Silicon Valley in 81/82. I was caught up in it and actively looking for a startup – I even bought books and magazines about starting companies. 🔥🔥🔥 At that time UNIX and Motorola 68000 were HOT technologies 🔥🔥🔥 – there were literally (yes, truly) 100 startup companies doing something with the combination. Most of the well-funded ones were building time-shared minicomputers to attack DEC – Altos Computer Systems was a prime example. There were a bunch of bottom feeders targeting the home-brew market, and then there were a few with real differentiation. I had talked with Valid Logic Systems, who were building a CAD workstation. Good people, but CAD was not my thing so I didn’t have any feeling about the business. I also talked with Fortune Systems. John Bass, pretty well known in the UNIX world, was there and trying to get me. Fortune was very well funded and going after the Wang word processing market. I still have never seen a Wang system in person, so that was not my bag either. But let’s talk about my unfair advantage – my Lyon family mafia. I was living with my brother Bob and his wife. Bob was working at Xerox SDD developing the Xerox Star workstation. And my brother Dick was at Xerox PARC with an Alto on his desk...