Anyway

The EU has approved, the Sun/Oracle deal all but done, wait­ing for China and Rus­sia. James Gosling’s post shows the poignant side. How long, I won­der, will the blogs.sun.com web­site still be avail­able? How long to give space to memor­ies and reminders?

Some of my own memor­ies of Sun, in roughly timeline order:

Work­ing on the Sun booth at CeBiT in Ger­many (I was work­ing for a Sun reseller at the time). Watch­ing the US mar­ket­ing video at the after-closing party, since the Ger­man mar­ket­ing team decided the video wasn’t appro­pri­ate. I still have the “Power of Sun” music CD, and a scarf with images of Sun workstations.

Won­der­ing why Sun didn’t sup­port Motif prop­erly, when all the other Unix vendors did.

Find­ing a pos­i­tion at Sun that made use of the skills I have.

Meet­ings at Menlo Park; long, involved dis­cus­sions on all sorts of secur­ity and iden­tity subjects.

Sit­ting out­side the cafet­eria at the Menlo Park office, talk­ing to people.

The Sun-internal innov­a­tion con­fer­ence, mix­ing intel­li­gent, innov­at­ive, hard­ware, soft­ware, and oper­at­ing sys­tem people together, with din­ner on the beach.

The most fun I’d had at work in a long time on a good pro­ject with great people, that unfor­tu­nately fell vic­tim to the Great Fin­an­cial Crisis.

Really good people, know­ledge­able. Sun seemed to have a lot of people with integ­rity and ded­ic­a­tion. Also its share of less-knowledgeable posers, of course, but the trenches were filled with good people.

There are lots of memor­ies out there; Sun was one of those com­pan­ies with an influ­ence lar­ger than its nom­inal size. Those of us who were part of it, even if for a short time, won’t for­get it quickly.