What Sun Microsystems Should Do

It has been awhile since I was familiar with Sun Microsystem products on a daily and developmental basis. These comments reflect what I believe Sun should do now and this same opinion has stayed with me since 2003 and earlier when I was a Sun employee.

Sun has had excellent hardware as well as as solid operating systems (SunOS & Solaris) through the years. They played a large role to pioneer the networking of desktops in a corporate environment. In the large telecommunications company I worked for prior to Sun this allowed a large improvement over the mainframe model of software development for telephone communication systems environment.
Corporations gained a huge benefit in their use of Sun products and services.

Great for corporations - what about home, school, very small businesses?

What I thought then as well as now is that Sun should attempt to gain access to the desktop world - the home, the school, the small to very small business...a smaller environment desktop world. No doubt it would be a slow evolving process and probably more difficult now than in the past with the growth of various linux desktops that have been gaining in favor. Many hardware vendors are placing more emphasis on drivers for linux operating systems thus making using linux much easier to accept and use for smaller environment computing needs.

Certainly the competition there is Microsoft - but as I see the world Microsoft has taken a huge hit with the impact of Vista with users and businesses being both unhappy or reluctant to place trust in Vista. Frankly, some business legacy products and applications come with an implied plea to stay with XP.
The obligatory 'not to mention the improved security of a unix/linux based Operating System' inserted here.

One reason given to me when I voiced this opinion while working at Sun was that it would cost too much money to support individual users. (now the only person that gave me that opinion was someone of low influence).
Again though, it would be an evolving process and could be ramped up if successful.

When one imagines the number of accessories and peripherals that attach to the home PC and small business environment it would be a huge number of users. This will change even more should Wall Street diminish in terms of employees and the number of data centers (consolidation of banks for example) while Main Street grows. Another topic...

It sure would be hard now though with the various linux varieties rapidly expanding in use and popularity. Although Sun hardware is the best in my opinion - the Intel and AMD platforms can be just as good if one spends the money for the better quality motherboards and other hardware.

So JAVA, OpenOffice, SQL, Solaris - lots of software is there and hardware, excellent hardware, is available for purchase. Maybe it is simply a question of marketing to a potentially large new customer base.

Vista ... Calling Microsoft!

Here is an interesting article on the Computerworld site talking about the point of view that Windows is collapsing.

I see that (Apple) OS X is mentioned in the context of iPhone and where Vista may be too large of a source base for mobile devices.

I don't see any mention of any of the Linux distributions, maybe because it is not a commercial product?

Homebrew Apple II+ Diagnostic Tool

Rummaging around in a stuffed drawer one day I came across a computing project from the past for an Apple II+...

My first personal computer was a built from a kit, the Heathkit H-8. That one was based on an 8080A CPU, 4KB of static RAM and a front panel monitor based in octal. Well, after the solder smoke cleared there was a fully functional computer in front of me with a cassette player to load and save data. Programs were created with either a BASIC interpreter or a far less used FOCAL language and even less via the front panel I/O capability.
Later I obtained a breadboard and with some BASIC peeks and pokes was able to actually have the terminal inform me that lights were either on of off in the room. The future was finally here!

A couple of years later I purchased an Apple II+ with 16KB of dynamic RAM, later upgraded to 64KB. This was of course a much more useful PC application and program learning wise than the H-8 mainly due to the variety of applications available as well as UCSD Pascal.
I subscribed to magazines both Apple specific and computing in general. In one of these magazines an article described a home brew project along a schematic to build a diagnostic device to examine the address and data states on an Apple II+ bus.

This diagnostic board had 16 red leds representing the address bus and 8 red leds representing the data bus. The led being lit indicating a binary 1 and a binary 0 for an unlit led. In the upper left there were 3 green leds which represented the Ready, Write, and Sync CPU indicators for the 6502 CPU.

There were 3 control switches in the upper right. The first being a toggle switch which would place the CPU in either Halt or Run mode.
The second 2 switches were momentary switches with one being to execute a Single CPU Cycle and the other to execute a single CPU Instruction.

The card was made with IC sockets and wire-wrapped on the backside. The logic consisted of the 7400 variety of integrated circuits which ranged from de-bouncing the mechanical switches to driving the leds through current limiting resistors. The usual +5VDC noise eliminating capacitors were wired across various points in the power supply runs.

Below is a close up of the LS373 tristate latches which were the direct interface to the address and data bus signals. The '1's and '0's on the bus were latched onto and displayed on the led indicators depending on the directives of the switches.


Although it was actually never used to diagnose a problem it was a good learning tool, especially when used with ORCA/M (Object Relocatable Code Assembler for Microcomputers), which was a very nice code assembler for the 6502 CPU and Apple.

Note that time takes a toll, a 9 volt battery was used to illuminate the leds for the purpose of these images.