OTD 1941: The birth of Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of #UNIX.
I had the great honor and privilege of working directly with Dennis during my summer at Bell Labs.
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Tom Lyon ✅
@aka_pugs@mastodon.social
mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06UNIX Greybeard; sun!pugs; Student of History; Technology Storyteller; Programmer since 1967.
Founder - Ipsilon Networks(→ Nokia), Netillion(→ ⏚), Nuova Systems(→ Cisco), DriveScale(→ Twitter)
#fedi22 #ComputerHistory #SunMicrosystems #UNIX
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OTD 1985: #SunMicrosystems announces the Sun-3/1xx workstations based on the Motorola 68020 - true 32 bit computing. I loved those machines.
Made Sun a billion dollars before SPARC was ever released.
OTD 1999: #SunMicrosystems announces the Sun Ray desktop appliance.
https://www.1000bit.it/js/web/viewer.html?file=%2Fad%2Fbro%2Fsun%2Fray1%2Fsun%5Fray1%2Epdf#zoom=page-fit
OTD 1983: Toronto USENIX conference!
https://www.krsaborio.net/unix/research/1983/0713.htm
It's only a Fresnel lens if it comes from the Fresnel region of France; otherwise it's just sparking optics.
(At Point Arena lighthouse)
OTD 1989: #SunMicrosystems announces the SPARCstation 1, aka Sun 4/60, aka "Campus".
Also first use of SBus.
From my grandfather's photos:
"1920 Cavalryman - Fully Equipped"
Happy Mainframe Day!
OTD 1964: IBM announces the System/360 family. 8-bit bytes ftw!
Shown: Operator at console of Princeton's IBM/360 Model 91.
OTD 1982 (44 years!): I join #SunMicrosystems as employee #8.
Blog post from 2022: https://akapugs.blog/2022/05/03/674/
Today! 25th anniversary of MacOS X!
Fresh scan: "The UNIX System - a Sun Microsystems Technical Report" (1985)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dW6l6cFAiqTKj3bmTulynKQuOHeHMx0u/view?usp=sharing
OTD 1977: The first #UNIX port boots at the University of Wollongong, on their Interdata 7/32.
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/bits/Interdata/32bit/unix/univWollongong_v6/miller.pdf
At Princeton, we were the first to *start* a UNIX port, but it was not completed until I went to Amdahl.
Wollongong also beat out the Bell Labs Interdata 8/32 port by a few months
I met another Turing award winner last night - Martin Hellman. I've known Whit Diffie since Sun days, so now I know both halves of the public key/private key pair pair. 😉
OTD 1996 (30 years!): The Nokia 9000 "Communicator" - clamshell smart phone.
Mrs. Ruby Hill, where are you now?
59 year old coding form found in a Westinghouse FORTRAN/BEEF manual.
OTD 1982: Boston #USENIX conference.
First "trade show" for #SunMicrosystems.
https://www.krsaborio.net/unix/research/1982/0706.htm
Name that programming language!
(Wrong answers appreciated!)
Hint: "Personal" computer, circa 1963.
OTD 2003: AMD announces Opteron, the first x86-64 processor.
Hipster animals.
Replying to
The complete (2 page!) original memo:
https://ethw-images.s3.us-east-va.perf.cloud.ovh.us/ieee/a/af/Ref1_PARC_Ethernet_Memo_1973.pdf
My neighbor Pitch Johnson, one of the first Silicon Valley VCs, just hit his 98th birthday.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Pitcher_Johnson_Jr.%2E
OTD 1972: The founding of Cray Research.
Panel tomorrow:
"UNIX: Before, During, and After Princeton"
CaaS - Cashiering as a Service
That job blows.
OTD 1951: Census Bureau accepts the first UNIVAC system - with 59% uptime.
Excellent takedown of the AI data center hype.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-industry-is-lying-to-you/
Good book from 2021 about how the huge public/private infrastructure deals are usually just short term gain for politicians and long term financial pain for the affected communities.
Think about all the BS AI infrastructure deals recently announced.
OTD 1986: Microsoft goes public. Only 9 days after Sun Microsystems.
OTD 2000: Nokia launches All-IP Core for 3G networks.
My startup, Ipsilon Networks, became the Nokia IP Routing Group. And I personally suggested the tagline "Mobile Information Society" rather than the "Wireless Information Society" they had been planning.
Replying to
@JohnMashey@mstdn.social @markd@hachyderm.io @SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange I love this quote from Boeing about the 360.
See https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zb6s_Ti7ON-6DNGg8VB2VvLSbh72_bgM/view?usp=sharing
OTD 1992: Silicon Graphics announces acquisition of MIPS, Inc.
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/13/business/silicon-graphics-to-buy-mips-for-406.1-million.html
OTD 1992: 2nd Broadband ISDN Technical Workshop - Miyazaki, Japan.
I had the honor of giving the opening talk.
My first trip to Japan!
My latest talk, from Cloud Field Day 25 - "The Rise and Fall of the Cloud - Again!"
https://techfieldday.com/appearance/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-cloud-again/
OTD 1989: Tim Berners-Lee proposal for the World WIde Web: https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
He's got a new book out: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374612467/thisisforeveryone/
OTD 1986 (40 years!) - #SunMicrosystems "Car in Office" April Fool's Day stunt.
Recreated in 2008 at Google - but they didn't have to move and replace walls.
OTD 1996 (30 years!) - #IpsilonNetworks takes the best of show award at the Networld+InterOp show.
My career has been pretty much downhill since then. :-)
https://web.archive.org/web/19970414155838/http://www.ipsilon.com/news/mghill-announce.html
https://web.archive.org/web/19970103020108/http://www.ipsilon.com/productinfo/datasheets/atm1600.pdf
A.I. buildout bullshit - $165B Project Jupiter outside of my hometown El Paso.
@Onmyom@mstdn.social - Hi. I just finished your book Broadbandits - so many parallels to the excesses going on now with AI!
Now Meta has bumped up their $1.5B data center plan on the other side of El Paso to an insane $10B plan.
Replying to
@stuartmarks@mastodon.social @kenshirriff@oldbytes.space Well, in looking at the model 44 functional characteristics, I'm surprised to see the 2315 disk with fixed-block size and addressing. Unlike all the Count-Key-Data drives of the rest of the line. AFAIK, FBA wouldn't should up again until the late 70s with the 3370 line.
Replying to
@markd@hachyderm.io @SteveBellovin@infosec.exchange IBM had a huge lead in commercial data processing because of their punch card business. And that world did not care about floating point. The model 91 was an ego-relief product, not a real business. IMO.
Data processing and HPC markets never converged - until maybe AI.
Replying to
@mike805@noc.social @mappingsupport@m.ai6yr.org Princeton's 360 was purely batch - no terminals other than the operator console (IBM 3215?). But there was a 370 in the same room running time-sharing. IBM's native terminals were the 3277 (weird-ass CRT) and the 2741 (printer/keyboard based on the Selectric typewriter). But as time went on, ASCII CRTs were dominant.
And the model 91 had a whopping 2 (two!) megabytes of core.