The Sun Goes Down
Crikey! Today’s news is a bit of a shocker!
Admittedly Sun have been on shaky ground now for some time, but Oracle! Where did that one come from!
I was never an employee of Sun, but did have the good fortune to work on an excellent project for them during my time at Oracle. They were implementing the Oracle HRMS suite, and the project was being run out of their offices in Palo Alto, and was called GEMS (Global Employee Management System if my memory serves me well). This would have been circa 98/99 and early 2000 – just prior to the Dot-Com bubble bursting I guess.
As the main Apps Technician from Oracle (their budget stretched to one Apps Technical Expert, one functional expert, a support rep and an occasional DBA flown in for good measure), I got to work with all of the Sun technical teams involved with the project, be they reports, forms, interfaces or data migration teams. When not on-site in Palo Alto I worked from a hot desk based out of their UK offices in Camberley (and latterly out of Fleet), and occasionally from my dining room at home (when I needed to do US time in the UK!).
This meant a fair deal of shuttling between UK/US and thus I managed to accrue a good collection of frequent flyer miles 
I remember my first day on the project… having just stepped off a 14 hour flight from Heathrow to San Francisco and a quiz sprint down the 101 to their offices, and after all-to-brief introductions i was whisked into what can only be described as an interrogation. Me on one side of the desk, a mass of Sun people on the other, in an office next to the server room (and so no windows, no clocks). The purpose was to “quiz” me to see if I was any good and the right person for the project.
I can’t recall everything that happened, but I do recall that I had technical questions fired at me in a seemingly random fashion from all and sundry, with questions not necessarily being in order…So I’d field an Oracle forms question, then a detailed one about Employee API’s, followed by a reports question and then back to a forms question….This seemed to go on for hours and hours, but in reality it was probably only 60 minutes – 90 at a push.
I must have given a good account of my self for the following morning I was presented with a filled agenda for my 2 week stay, effectively being shuttled between the various teams in a bid to get them all rolling.
In all I think I had 18 months of involvement in the project, and looking back I still regard my time on the project as being one of the most enjoyable periods in my (almost) 12 year tenure at Oracle.
Anyway, the reason for this trip down memory lane is partly because of the hardware. Sun Sparc workstations filled every available crevice – some of the engineers I worked with had several, some of which seemed simply to be dumped on the floor as newer kit had arrived to replace….
It was my first real exposure to a desktop OS other than Windows since my early days of employment (when I used Data General kit featuring their flavour of Unix). The kit was good, robust, effective in use and (get this) did not need constantly rebooting I think I was hooked. It certainly got me started on the Linux bandwagon that’s for sure.
I also recall something called a “Sun Ray”. It was a thin client machine, with a smartcard reader built into it. You plugged in your card and up popped your desktop, complete with apps and anything you happened to have been working on. You could take out the smartcard, wander over to another machine, plug in and be working where you left off immediately. The rumour from the Sun guys I worked with was that you could plug your card into any Sun Ray, even if it were located in a different office in another country, and be up and running instantaneously. Whether this was just rumour of truth I’ll never know, but what does amaze me is why this technology never took off?
Anyway. Sun are being swallowed up by the corporate behemoth that is Oracle, and thus another piece of history will vanish. I wont even start on the speculation as to what is going to happen to MySQL? I’d like to think that Oracle see past the balance sheet and realise that we still need a truly free Open Source database, and leave it well alone (maybe someone out there would like to buy it off them?).
Until then I shall keep half an eye on the news coming out of Redwood Shores to see what their plans are.