You’ve heard the Scott McNealy story; this is the rest of my time at Sun Microsystems. I started working at Sun in 1995, directly after I left Netcom. For the first chunk of my Sun employment, I was a contractor through Taos Mountain Software. Taos Mountain was a significant consulting company in Silicon Valley at the time; when I found out how badly Netcom was underpaying me, they were the easy outlet to make a reasonable salary. There was an insane appetite for competent engineers at the time. Those were the days, huh?
I wound up getting jobs for a bunch of my Internet friends through Taos. I was playing a lot of MUSHes at the time (and that could be a post of its own, if there’s interest), and I knew a lot of smart people who were capable of becoming system administrators. Taos hired many of them over the next few years. The Web 1.0 era was a lot of fun.
Anyhow, Taos placed me at Sun Microsystems on the new Menlo Park campus, which is now Facebook’s offices. It was the first time I’d worked in an office campus and I was very impressed by the cafeteria. My job was to run the Web pages for the Solaris 2 migration marketing initiative.
Sun had started out with a BSD UNIX variant, SunOS. Great UNIX and I was very familiar with it from Netcom. In 1992, they launched Solaris, which is still available from Oracle today. It was based on UNIX System V, mostly, and upgrading from SunOS to Solaris was a significant effort. The marketplace was not entirely enthusiastic about this and by 1995 it was apparent that the new product would need lots of marketing.
In 1995, people were happy to assume that some random system administrator with no commercial Web experience could build Web sites for major computer companies. Hey, that would be me! So they gave me an office and told me to pick up the unfinished work and make it cool.
I honestly didn’t do that much. I sat in on a couple of Sun’s core Web team meetings, which I kind of wish I’d paid more attention to. I remember using some really crappy graphics editor to hand-draw the arc of a circle, trying to match the overall Sun Website look and feel? Amateur hour. I don’t regret the lack of archives from that period.
I set up a bunch of links to the Sunfreeware site, a third party effort which we loved because it showed that despite popular belief you could run your favorite programs on Solaris 2 without a huge porting effort. I also recall that the single best marketing tool we had, or at least the one people were most enthusiastic about, was Doom. Yeah, the first person shooter. It had been ported to Solaris but not to SunOS, which means UNIX geeks who wanted to get their demons on had little choice. (The Linux port also happened in 1994 but Linux was not yet a serious commercial choice.)
Over time, I moved my links to the Doom port higher and higher up the page. Didn’t seem entirely in line with our very serious marketing but it also seemed to work.
I spent about six months on that project before I shifted down to do desktop support in PAL01, the Sun HQ in Palo Alto. That building, unlike the Menlo Park campus, is now gone. I think this was where I shifted into being a full time Sun employee, although I may have spent a couple more months as a contractor in the desktop support role.
The thing that really sticks with me from the desktop support role was the lesson I learned about living my job. I’d never worked with people who weren’t obsessed about technology before. In my new team, there was this one guy who didn’t even have a computer at home. He checked in, did his job competently, went home, and stopped thinking about computers until it was time to start working again. I found this totally alien, and it wasn’t ever my style – sometimes to the detriment of my mental health – but I also noticed that it was a valuable trait to have on the team. Teams need balance too.
And I learned a lot. Some of you will remember SCSI, the old peripheral standard used for hard drives and such. Everyone knew that you couldn’t swap SCSI peripherals while a computer was turned on. Someone showed me that you could halt the OS, drop down to the boot PROM (think BIOS), swap peripherals, type probe-scsi to force a rescan of the SCSI peripherals, and type another command to return to the OS right where you left off.
I remember being very proud of the moment when I realized I could debug a lot of desktop issues just by paying close attention to the wall of text scrolling past during startup. “Oh, yeah, there was a 1 second pause between line X and Y. The DNS server is clearly down. Can’t be the desktop networking, because there wasn’t a pause earlier.”
I didn’t say everything I learned was long-term useful.
I got a couple of funny stories out of it too. Doom resurfaces in one of those. The installer for the Solaris port stuffed the rather sizable game files anywhere it could; often enough, it put them in a directory named /tmp. Files in /tmp took up swap space, the overflow area a UNIX computer uses for memory when RAM fills up.
So one guy came to us complaining about his computer being really slow. I took a look at it and realized that yeah, he’d used up all of /tmp with a Doom installation. Without thinking about it I said “I see your problem. You have demons in your swap space.” Possibly more flippant than I should have been but it was funny to me.
I also got to work with my dear friend Gretchen again, who had also fled from Netcom to Taos Mountain. She was on the desktop move team, who were dedicated to moving users from one physical location to another. I never would have guessed a company could be so large as to need such a thing. One interesting thing about her job was that she wound up noticing at least the names of the files of anyone who’d moved. There were fairly clear unwritten guidelines about what sorts of file name you mentioned to your boss and what you delicately ignored. There’s a long-term useful lesson: be careful about what you put on your work computer.
I liked Sun a lot and I liked working at such a prestigious company. I lasted, what, four years, mostly in desktop support. One of my longer tenures. From there I went up to Alexa Internet and the Internet Archive, which story I have also already told.