I heard from a friend and neighbor who just started his sabbatical at Stanford University in Palo Alto.
One of the more intersting jobs I had was a Sun Microsystems in the 1990s. Sun Microsystems was named for the "Stanford University Network." Sun was a Unix Workstation company and, along with Apple, drew a lot of good people together. I joined Sun after leaving Apple at a time when the internet was just starting to rise. I wanted to learn more about networking and figured Sun would be a good place to work and learn.
UNIX was starting to move out of the university and research labs and one of the founders of Sun was Bill Joy, who is credited with the development of BSD UNIX at the Univeristy of California at Berkeley. Bill Joy, Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Andy Bechtolsheim were the founders of Sun and their workstations were popular with the scientific and academic audiences. When I was at Apple, Steve Jobs started a company named NeXT, focused on developing a workstation for higher education. The NeXT operating system was very similar to BSD UNIX and became the core of Apple's OSX when Jobs returned to Apple. Many World Wide Web ideas and early prototypes were developed on NeXT and SUn workstations. Sun and NeXT had an alliance and I remember Sun classrooms filled with NeXTStep training materials.
I left Sun employment in the late-1990s but kept work for them as a contractor. One of the more intersting jobs I had was developing employee training on the World Wide Web and html. This was a four hour course designed to expose non-engineering audiences to this new thing called the Web and teach them how to develop content using html. Combining short lectures with structured hands-on labs, students left the course understanding the basic interaction of web servers and client applications and could use a simple text editor to build web pages. - My projects
Sun provided grants to schools to train teachers in the WWW and I had a chance to teach my course to teachers and employees all over the world. Those were exciting days. Imagine the world today without easy access to the Internet or the Web. That was only the mid-1990's about 20 years ago. We now have a full generation who never knew life before the internet.
Sun imploded after the dot-com bubble but it's management and employees have gone on to start many of today's great companies. Sun's assets were bought by Oracle in 2010 and linking to sun.com redirects to Oracle.
I'm not sure if this was triggered by my birthday, retirement or just a coincidence but I've been getting junk mail (the paper kind) with offers for cremation, burial plots and death related services. I guess they figure this is my next concern.
Golden Gate Bridge - December 18, 2017
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