Netscape and Sun plan to propose JavaScript to the W3 Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an open Internet scripting language standard. JavaScript will be an open, freely licensed proposed standard available to the entire Internet community. Existing Sun Java licensees will receive a license to JavaScript. In addition, Sun and Netscape intend to make a source code reference implementation of JavaScript available for royalty-free licensing, further encouraging its adoption as a standard in a wide variety of products.
The 90ies had quite a few pretty visionary people. CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free on 30 April 1993, enabling its widespread use.
At that time there were still CompuServe, AOL, Minitel and BTX around - not just walled gardens but walled worlds but a handful of people already saw and shaped the future...
It wasn’t forward facing from a morality standpoint. It was a business strategy. Every tech company open sources (or tries to standardize) things where their competitor is stronger.
Doesn't that article contradict your statement? It gives a bunch of examples of companies supporting open source for sound business reasons, and then claims that Sun is doing stuff with unsound business motivations.
This was written in 2002, I can’t fault Joel for not having perfect foresight.
But if I squint I can see the strategy. First you got to get rid of the industries dependency on Microsoft, if you can get developers comfortable with Java, Microsoft Windows was not going to focus on making Windows Servers the best place to run Java.
Java could have very well been the “nose of the camel in the tent”.
Javascript was definitely an attempt to commoditize “where you run applications” to get more people running apps in the browser.
I think the motivation is backwards. Many employees and even executives are highly motivated by moral arguments. They want to do good in the world, and get paid for it. But to do so they have to justify it with a business case.
IOW, the moral argument comes first, the business case follows.
If I remember this correctly, the move was largely an attempt to make the OS irrelevant by moving applications to the Web. Long term, this more or less worked, but the revolution didn't come quickly enough to save Sun or Netscape.
You're reminding me of when Sun was using the slogan "The Network is the Computer," and even put it on a T-Shirt or two. Most tech-types I knew chuckled a bit. Someone had a T-Shirt printed up saying "The Network is the Network. The Computer is the Computer. Sorry for the confusion."
But I think what they were trying to say was "in the future, the data you use will be spread out all over the network," which, yes, was an advanced concept in 1995. And I hope it was a business strategy to try to sidestep MSFT's desktop dominance (otherwise they were doing it by accident.) I think Sun did a great job of helping create a world where your desktop OS didn't matter that much (I use FreeBSD, Linux, Win10 and occasionally macOS on a daily basis.) But it seems to me Sun really missed the mobile revolution. In the late 2000s, we had a Sun guy come and try to pitch the latest SPARC CPUs for mobile designs. IIRC, they had great per/cycle power numbers, but were just CPUs (not SoCs) and it was hard to throttle them down to the point where you could get decent battery performance. Alas, so much great technology, now wasted.
DonHopkins on April 15, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Solaris 11.4 free for non-production personal use
You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident!
But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if.
The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft.
It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!
And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh!
Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris.
To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke:
I would add things are rarely only one thing. Did Sun cherish Solaris and Oak/Java developers? Absolutely. Did they cherish all of them equally? Absolutely not. Did they also see them as disposable pawns in a war against MSFT? Not as much at the beginning, but pretty much exclusively towards the end.
You still can't pay me enough to use Eclipse. Well, that's not completely true. I got paid to use Eclipse a couple jobs ago. I wasn't happy about it, but I was too lazy to write something better.
And there's probably another discussion in here about how the market changes and if you don't change with the market you turn into IBM or CA. (Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.) IBM came late to the PC party and had to sell it's soul (use an open architecture) in order to not be steam-rollered by Apple (and Commodore and Atari of all people.) MSFT famously came late to the intarwebz and it took Bill Gates to personally beat up some vice presidents to get them to focus on it. I think we just violently agreed that Sun was too focused on defending their web dominance from MSFT that they sort of ignored Leenucks for too long (and as best I can tell just ignored mobile.) Imagine what the landscape would look like if Sun added third-party intel servers as first class supported systems for OpenSolaris (and maybe started OpenSolaris a little earlier.) That was probably too much for Sun management to put their brainstems around at the time.
A big problem was certainly that Linux on commodity boxes became an industry standard. In 2000 it was still seen by many corporations as hobbyist amateur system. But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world and for many use cases a Linux box for 1000 bucks would do the same as a 10000 bucks Sun server.
Teenagers pick free software because a) they're broke, and b) there's way more videos about the free software on Youtube. 10 years later they pick the same software at their job
The Linux (and LAMP, etc.) adoption happened before YouTube, Stackoverflow, ChatGPT and the other recent ways that people decide what tools to use, when they have a choice.
Agreed, the tools you learned in school influenced what you use in your job (when you had a chance to influence that), and that was understood by marketers since before Linux. I even know one top CS department that was threatened by a major software company of no internships and other sanctions, if they moved to Linux rather than teach classes with that company's software, and the company seemed to follow through on the threat when the department did Linux anyway. (Nowadays, CS departments are run more like vocational schools, or hoping students do startups, and are generally teaching whatever tools they think industry is using at the moment, rather than leading.)
Related: Apple aggressively getting the Apple II series into schools, influencing what's bought in affluent homes, even before the students are old enough to get jobs.
From what i remember from Bryan Cantrill's talks there were talks about open sourcing Solaris years before sun actually did that.
If Solaris was open sourced say, five years earlier, it would probably have been a major player in the OS space today. (we'll never know, of course, history took a different turn).
> But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world
IIRC i read/heard somewhere that there were also talks for Google to use sun hardware or the solaris OS for their internal infra. I don't remember the source for that though :(
It’s really hard to understand today the level of hype around Java and OOP in the 90s. The fact Netscape changed the name from Livescript to JavaScript may be an indicator. This was also peak Sun, they were really driving the web in this era.
The Java hype was totally unprecedented and probably never repeated. The CEO of a big tech company was on network TV promoting a programming language. I heard stories on NPR in the car. My mother called me to ask me "about this Java thing." Java was everywhere and going to be in everything.
In was accompanied by a huge and successful push into universities to make it the standard didactic programming language. Even MIT switched from Scheme to Java.
I was on the crest of this wave—I actually taught myself Java and Scheme the summer before my freshman year @MIT—so I’m fairly certain that’s not quite right.
The intro CS curriculum stayed on Scheme until it switched to Python something like a decade after the Java hype cycle.
What I believe did change was the intro software engineering lab (6.170) switched from CLU (?) to Java around that time.
I started in 2003, learned C++, then did the majority of my courses in C++ with a class in Java with self-taught Python, C#, and PHP along the way for coursework.
Can someone fill me in, but is there still the derogatory "Java school"? I find that silly because most jobs in programming use some sort of managed memory programming language so teaching everyone in Java makes a lot of sense.
That's also why Apple renamed OpenStep to Cocoa. Java was supposed to be the primary development language for Mac OS X (because Java and Cocoa go great together).
For a while you could write OSX stuff in Java. I did. They also had some pretty okay JNI bindings for stuff like quicktime, so I was able to write a java application that used quicktime to load and display videos. I needed to analyze video streams for my dissertation, so I wrote some custom visualization stuff in java that used the quicktime bindings. Good times.
Well, having a platform agnostic runtime, you could throw arbitrary code at, was potentially a great deal. It was one of the founding concepts for ARPANET, which never took off, since nobody wanted to run foreign code from the network on their machines. For a platform agnostic runtime, OO may have seemed to fit well, by encapsulating data, handlers and logic into interacting objects. (This is close to the original use case for OO as described by Alan Kay.)
Fun fact: Java was also renamed from formerly Oak.
> This was also peak Sun, they were really driving the web in this era.
That's not how I remember it. That's how Sun would have liked to see it but it was Apache on Linux or BSD (or even SGI) that was far more prevalent, at least near me. And I spent a good bit of time in the same building as the local Sun dealership. You could not have paid me to use their warmed over and overpriced hardware. And that really is what I associated both SUN and SGI with: companies wasting money.
But hey, we're in a bubble so party like it's 1999. It's fine if your customers are doing the hype thing, but there is no reason to follow them off the cliff. Someone yesterday asked why Bezos doesn't buy one of the big AI players. That's why.
Well, I was and I know plenty of others that did the same. Slackware was 1993. By 1995 we even had Red Hat.
In 1995 NCSA was running just fine and from December onwards there was Apache. I had the first commercial version of the cam software out (which ran on SGI) and a year later it ran on PCs as well.
You were hobbyists, which was a tiny group compared to ISPs, where Sun’s hardware dominated. IBM and HP were competitors but they were less successful with ISPs. Were you in the US or Europe at the time?
You and your friends were probably hobbyists, hackers or small hosters. Datacenters (remember Exodus?) were full of Sun hardware, racked up & labelled with the ‘hot’ startups of early dot-com.
Sun systems were extremely popular in corporate Silicon Valley in the 1990s. VCs would push the more expensive systems onto their well-funded start-ups. Here's a big check, do what the other well-funded start-ups are doing and buy Sun. More cost effective Apache systems were very widely being used by start-ups on tighter budgets. But even Yahoo for example scaled itself on Apache, as did Geocities.
Can confirm. The dot-com era startups I was involved with all had Oracle DB on Sun hardware. Apache was common. Java was somewhat common if you could deal with its slowness. C++ was common if you could deal with memory problems or needed more speed / efficiency than Java.
The VCs I talked to said it was a business decision. They had money to invest, so startups could afford to buy soft & hard-ware that had gone through a QA cycle or two. The VCs figured the exit strategy for most of their startups would be via acquisition, possibly by another startup so they wanted to have a standard environment to make integrating companies tech stacks easier. Or at least less distracting.
I have this vague memory of Yahoo! execs complaining about Viaweb / Yahoo! Store being written in Lisp and management freaking out that they couldn't hire enough Lisp people fast enough. Or at least that's the story that was going around the valley. (Isn't Paul Graham around here somewhere? Or someone who could point to a canonical reference where he talks about Viaweb getting acquired by Yahoo!?)
> JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications
Some VB applications were very nice design wise, and ditto with TCL/Tk. They were it a bit loated for its era (Pentium I-III), but I've seen worse JS aberrations.
For sure. And, to quote the Systems Bible: Any complex working system is only the result of the growth of a simple working system. It works. It worked then, and it works now. That doesn’t mean we have to like it. Replacing it is likely impossible.
> He served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer before he was appointed chief executive officer, but resigned shortly after his appointment due to pressure over his opposition to same-sex marriage. He subsequently became the cofounder and CEO of Brave Software.
FWIW... I worked with Brendan @ Mozilla for over a year. Dude expressed zero problems with my queer lifestyle that I didn't hide. I think the problem people had with Brendan was not his opposition for same-sex marriage, but his support for an organization that opposed same-sex marriage. It's a subtle distinction, but one worth making. People are complex.
Sorry, what is the distinction? Being nice to people you know in person but trying to take rights away from the much larger group of people you don't know in person seems, well, worse?
the distinction is between practicing interpersonal bigotry and supporting institutional bigotry. don't be fooled by a warm handshake and a nice smile.
The little quote from DEC led me to do some reading... crazy to think there were DEC manufactured(in the U.S. !) processors that could, in 1995, run JavaScript, Linux, BSD, Windows 2000, and Plan 9.
I know. I was trying to be snarky. I still have an AlphaServer that I boot up from time to time to relive the glory days. Alphas were too good to be allowed to continue. I understand that intel won in the marketplace and DEC did some pretty stupid things, but I would be happier if they won with products that weren't so crappy.
As mfro said, Alpha. DEC never manufactured MIPS processors; it bought them from (amazingly enough) MIPS Inc, and used them from 1989 in DECstation RISC boxes.
DEC launched its own RISC architecture, Alpha, in 1992. I'm pretty sure DECstation was discontinued by 1995. DEC never did deliver OSF/1, its next-generation Unix, to DECstation despite promising to do so.
Right around this time I got to go to the bookstore at UCSD and buy a Sun desktop machine. I also bought a shrink-wrapped compiler, a shrink-wrapped Sybase, and a shrink-wrapped Netscape Enterprise Server.
I built a lot of server side javascript web apps in Netscape enterprise server, and a built a windows shell in javascript with netscape (I had to get a code signing certificate to remove the chrome in Netscape). Over 300 public workstations in the libraries ended up running that funky javascript shell (replacing all the green and amber screen terminals).
Writing the server side apps and hacking together that shell is basically what taught me programming. That plus I had to migrate a bunch of perl 4 code to perl 5.
How much was the student discount back then? I vaguely remember SGI coming to my University and having a complete system for like $2000 back in the day (1996 or 1997). IIRC a Pentium Pro based system would have been similarly priced.
About 2 years before Javascript existed I was very much into the web, first using the Lynx browser, and later Mosaic on an Amiga. I had also been doing a lot of AREXX script programming on the Amiga at the time. I remember telling a friend "This web browser thing really needs a scripting language", like I wished AREXX (or some language) could automate the web browser.
When Javascript first came out in Netscape, my prayers were answered, and there was no looking back. I've been coding Javascript every day since it was released in Netscape.
JavaScript is an easy-to-use object scripting language designed for creating live online applications that link together objects and resources on both clients and servers. While Java is used by programmers to create new objects and applets, JavaScript is designed for use by HTML page authors and enterprise application developers to dynamically script the behavior of objects running on either the client or the server. JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications. JavaScript's design represents the next generation of software designed specifically for the Internet
Hmm. Trying to remember if places I've worked at talked about "The Intranet" or "the intranet." I guess you could use "Intranet" as a proper noun if you're talking about the one in use at your company but then "intranet" if you're talking about the concept of an internet inside your company's firewall that's not connected to the Internet.
But yes, capitalized "Internet" refers to the "Connected Internet," of which there is only one. The first rule of SIPRnet is no one talks about SIPRnet. But if we did talk about it, the comment would likely be that it is like "the Internet" but not "the Internet."
If you spend time in academia or academia-adjacent industrial research, you sometimes hear "an internet" (always with lower case to signal it's a common noun) to describe a network of networks. But you are right... that use is not growing and if anything shrinking.
Maybe some aliens out there have their own internet. But then is the internet just the sum of all intranets and thus in a way just the top-level intranet?
That was an insane time. The pace was unreal. I remember Netscape 2.0 had at least 6-7 beta releases prior to the full release. And each one just dropped something massive and fundamental to the Internet - JavaScript (then called LiveScript IIRC) being one of those things. Just casually dropping what would dominate the entire industry in a browser beta.
The only other period I have experienced that comes close is what is happening now. What an incredible time to build.
It's kind of funny to see how the endorsements were talking about rich multimedia integration, when your output options with JavaScript 1.0 were: writing into a textarea, writing into a form input field, or setting the state of other form elements (like checkboxes or select elements) – that's your rich multimedia experience!
Of course, there was the infamous `document.write()`, when the document was loading and the document stream was still open, but this was more of a hack than an interaction model.
Some seems to be server-side (LiveWire), as well, which was a Netscape product long before Node.js, but I'm not sure if this was already available, then. (When was the Netscape Enterprise server launched?)
I'm also not too sure, if LiveConnect (the connection between JS and Java applets and vice versa) was already a thing, when JavaScript was announced. (I think, this came a little later.)
Edit: I've a Netscape JavaScript book from when this was still in beta. (My first reading on the subject.) It does mention applets on a single page and that you may address them per ID via LiveConnect in a single sentence. So this was already implemented, but it wasn't advertised prominently. The book is all about form based examples.
(The applications in this book were the same that were demoed as showcase applications by Netscape on their website – and probably represent a significant part of what these voices reacted to.)
My memory is that around '98 people were falling over themselves to figure out how to wire up "components" made of applets. I think that stopped being a thing when people figured out SpyGlass/IE didn't use the same techniques to wire applets as Netscape. So props to you Microsoft, you made my life irritating for multiple decades (don't get me started about 1990 when I was a beta tester for Microsoft C 5.0.)
I remember using Netscape Enterprise Server suite, but didn't realize it had a JS engine in it. I do remember Rhino from a little later (though the wikipedia says it emerged in the late 90s.) And I have relatively horrible memories of the Netscape guys integrating the Visigenic ORB in both the enterprise server and Navigator. I wonder if Rhino was what they stuffed into NES/iPlanet/Sun ONE.
> JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications.
Lies at the time. More accessible popular examples of extension languages already existed at the time (e.g., VB, Python, Tcl, various 4GLs, even COBOL), and none of them looked like this.
They gave it the syntax to look much like a systems programming language, and a semantics that wasn't all that great for this purpose. (Syntax inherited from Java, which was actually a very nice applications language at the time, but had to replace the C++ that embedded developers would have otherwise used for set-top-like boxes that Sun was targeting at one point for Oak (Java). And, hey, random non-programmers can totally pick up a semantics that's a mix of functional and block-structured imperative, with a prototype-delegation object model that almost no one has seen before, and lot of error-prone pitfalls.)
This is what happens when marketing, product management, and engineering aren't working together, or are thrown together much later in the timeline than you'd prefer.
> Netscape and Sun plan to propose JavaScript to the W3 Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an open Internet scripting language standard.
But first, press release! Because we've assembled an industry gang of endorsements, to plow right over the W3C on a central Web standard, with this hasty kludge that one programmer whipped out from bad requirements and rush constraints, in literally a few weeks, knowing at the time it was a poor approach and he would've done better with even a little more time or better requirements.
"We'll deal with the tech debt later." We know how that played out for the industry. Now we have an entire field that is incapable of building a reasonably secure system for anything involving the Web. (Security isn't the only effect; it's just a harder-to-ignore example of what happens when everyone has to poke at big shoddy messes to do anything, and no one sufficiently understands what they're doing.)
And it didn't even selfishly benefit Netscape or Sun for very long. Maybe some people got their bonuses and promotions that year, but both companies were soon ruined, after some great earlier engineering and product work.
This is such a weirdly antagonistic take. Javascript was out there first, and it was good enough, and a vast improvement over both flash and java in the browser. There's no guarantee that some committee designed language would have ever made it out to the public, let alone that it ever would have gotten any kind of uptake, or that it would have been better than javascript.
JS at the time was obviously thrown together in a huge rush as a very poorly designed landgrab during the dotcom IPO goldrush.
"Designed by committee" as the alternative is a false dichotomy.
There was already much better work in languages for this kind of purported requirement of non-programmer (or less-programmer) use. JS obviously didn't even try to address those users.
And there were certainly better languages for letting full-programmers accomplish the same things.
Even Sun themselves internally had better work on multimedia Web browser at the time.
Instead, some team just threw anything at being able to make the press release they wanted to make, ASAP, not caring whether it was trash, or they could've even done better within the press release time constraint if they cared.
There's a market out there, and a first-mover advantage. Technologies are embedded in and product of existing political, social, and economic processes, not standalone entities.
Think of all the other "worse" languages that triumphed over their purported betters.
I agree that first mover advantage is an important concept. I don't know how much it applies to the JS launch situation, but there was definitely a rush.
Netscape and Sun plan to propose JavaScript to the W3 Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an open Internet scripting language standard. JavaScript will be an open, freely licensed proposed standard available to the entire Internet community. Existing Sun Java licensees will receive a license to JavaScript. In addition, Sun and Netscape intend to make a source code reference implementation of JavaScript available for royalty-free licensing, further encouraging its adoption as a standard in a wide variety of products.
The 90ies had quite a few pretty visionary people. CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free on 30 April 1993, enabling its widespread use.
At that time there were still CompuServe, AOL, Minitel and BTX around - not just walled gardens but walled worlds but a handful of people already saw and shaped the future...
Another testament to how incredibly forward looking Sun Microsystems was. Truly a champion of open systems.
It wasn’t forward facing from a morality standpoint. It was a business strategy. Every tech company open sources (or tries to standardize) things where their competitor is stronger.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Doesn't that article contradict your statement? It gives a bunch of examples of companies supporting open source for sound business reasons, and then claims that Sun is doing stuff with unsound business motivations.
This was written in 2002, I can’t fault Joel for not having perfect foresight.
But if I squint I can see the strategy. First you got to get rid of the industries dependency on Microsoft, if you can get developers comfortable with Java, Microsoft Windows was not going to focus on making Windows Servers the best place to run Java.
Java could have very well been the “nose of the camel in the tent”.
Javascript was definitely an attempt to commoditize “where you run applications” to get more people running apps in the browser.
I think the motivation is backwards. Many employees and even executives are highly motivated by moral arguments. They want to do good in the world, and get paid for it. But to do so they have to justify it with a business case.
IOW, the moral argument comes first, the business case follows.
I posit that no non founder executive does anything without thinking about profit first.
If I remember this correctly, the move was largely an attempt to make the OS irrelevant by moving applications to the Web. Long term, this more or less worked, but the revolution didn't come quickly enough to save Sun or Netscape.
You're reminding me of when Sun was using the slogan "The Network is the Computer," and even put it on a T-Shirt or two. Most tech-types I knew chuckled a bit. Someone had a T-Shirt printed up saying "The Network is the Network. The Computer is the Computer. Sorry for the confusion."
But I think what they were trying to say was "in the future, the data you use will be spread out all over the network," which, yes, was an advanced concept in 1995. And I hope it was a business strategy to try to sidestep MSFT's desktop dominance (otherwise they were doing it by accident.) I think Sun did a great job of helping create a world where your desktop OS didn't matter that much (I use FreeBSD, Linux, Win10 and occasionally macOS on a daily basis.) But it seems to me Sun really missed the mobile revolution. In the late 2000s, we had a Sun guy come and try to pitch the latest SPARC CPUs for mobile designs. IIRC, they had great per/cycle power numbers, but were just CPUs (not SoCs) and it was hard to throttle them down to the point where you could get decent battery performance. Alas, so much great technology, now wasted.
I remember being confused by that tagline and also by Sun's later pitch: "We put the dot in dotcom"!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042291
DonHopkins on April 15, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Solaris 11.4 free for non-production personal use
You've hit the nail on the head, that's a perfect analysis, and it wasn't an isolated incident!
But they'd been like that for a long time, since before I started there in 1990, long before Java. They DEFINED themselves in terms of Microsoft, to the extreme extent that when Sun Microsystems fell apart into separate divisions, they actually named one of them "SunSoft" to directly position it against Microsoft. As if.
The management at Sun didn't consider Java to be a programming language or software platform, they considered it to be first and foremost their primary weapon of mass destruction in their apocalyptic war against Microsoft, and they didn't consider Java developers to be loyal cherished customers, they considered them to be disposable brainwashed mercenaries in their World Wide War against Microsoft.
It was funny when Sun proudly and unilaterally proclaimed that Sun put the "dot" into "dot com", leaving it wide open for Microsoft to slyly counter that oh yeah, well Microsoft put the "COM" into "dot com" -- i.e. ActiveX, IE, MSJVM, IIS, OLE, Visual Basic, Excel, Word, etc!
And then IBM mocked "When they put the dot into dot-com, they forgot how they were going to connect the dots," after sassily rolling out Eclipse just to cast a dark shadow on Java. Badoom psssh!
https://web.archive.org/web/20200814053447/https://www.itbus...
Sun totally dropped the ball fighting their true original enemy AT&T, and they should have put all that effort and energy into improving SunOS and railing against AT&T after SunOS finally beat System V in the Unix market, instead of capitulating to AT&T AFTER SunOS won the Unix war against System V, and then rolling over, giving up, selling out to their mortal enemy, and becoming Solaris.
To port my favorite cross platform Apple/IBM joke:
Q: What do you get when you cross Sun and AT&T?
A: AT&T.
Great hilarity, with the AT&T joke.
I would add things are rarely only one thing. Did Sun cherish Solaris and Oak/Java developers? Absolutely. Did they cherish all of them equally? Absolutely not. Did they also see them as disposable pawns in a war against MSFT? Not as much at the beginning, but pretty much exclusively towards the end.
You still can't pay me enough to use Eclipse. Well, that's not completely true. I got paid to use Eclipse a couple jobs ago. I wasn't happy about it, but I was too lazy to write something better.
And there's probably another discussion in here about how the market changes and if you don't change with the market you turn into IBM or CA. (Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.) IBM came late to the PC party and had to sell it's soul (use an open architecture) in order to not be steam-rollered by Apple (and Commodore and Atari of all people.) MSFT famously came late to the intarwebz and it took Bill Gates to personally beat up some vice presidents to get them to focus on it. I think we just violently agreed that Sun was too focused on defending their web dominance from MSFT that they sort of ignored Leenucks for too long (and as best I can tell just ignored mobile.) Imagine what the landscape would look like if Sun added third-party intel servers as first class supported systems for OpenSolaris (and maybe started OpenSolaris a little earlier.) That was probably too much for Sun management to put their brainstems around at the time.
A big problem was certainly that Linux on commodity boxes became an industry standard. In 2000 it was still seen by many corporations as hobbyist amateur system. But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world and for many use cases a Linux box for 1000 bucks would do the same as a 10000 bucks Sun server.
Teenagers pick free software because a) they're broke, and b) there's way more videos about the free software on Youtube. 10 years later they pick the same software at their job
The Linux (and LAMP, etc.) adoption happened before YouTube, Stackoverflow, ChatGPT and the other recent ways that people decide what tools to use, when they have a choice.
Agreed, the tools you learned in school influenced what you use in your job (when you had a chance to influence that), and that was understood by marketers since before Linux. I even know one top CS department that was threatened by a major software company of no internships and other sanctions, if they moved to Linux rather than teach classes with that company's software, and the company seemed to follow through on the threat when the department did Linux anyway. (Nowadays, CS departments are run more like vocational schools, or hoping students do startups, and are generally teaching whatever tools they think industry is using at the moment, rather than leading.)
Related: Apple aggressively getting the Apple II series into schools, influencing what's bought in affluent homes, even before the students are old enough to get jobs.
From what i remember from Bryan Cantrill's talks there were talks about open sourcing Solaris years before sun actually did that.
If Solaris was open sourced say, five years earlier, it would probably have been a major player in the OS space today. (we'll never know, of course, history took a different turn).
> But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world
IIRC i read/heard somewhere that there were also talks for Google to use sun hardware or the solaris OS for their internal infra. I don't remember the source for that though :(
Save Sun?! SUN never died or loose. They WON: got accuried for BILLIONS of dollars by Oracle. It was not a fire sale
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It’s really hard to understand today the level of hype around Java and OOP in the 90s. The fact Netscape changed the name from Livescript to JavaScript may be an indicator. This was also peak Sun, they were really driving the web in this era.
The Java hype was totally unprecedented and probably never repeated. The CEO of a big tech company was on network TV promoting a programming language. I heard stories on NPR in the car. My mother called me to ask me "about this Java thing." Java was everywhere and going to be in everything.
In was accompanied by a huge and successful push into universities to make it the standard didactic programming language. Even MIT switched from Scheme to Java.
I was on the crest of this wave—I actually taught myself Java and Scheme the summer before my freshman year @MIT—so I’m fairly certain that’s not quite right.
The intro CS curriculum stayed on Scheme until it switched to Python something like a decade after the Java hype cycle.
What I believe did change was the intro software engineering lab (6.170) switched from CLU (?) to Java around that time.
In 2015, when I started my CS degree, Java was still the first language we learned.
IN 2020, when I started my CS degree, we first learned Python and then quickly switched to Java for the remainder of the program.
Similar for electrical engineering - we first learned Java in basics of programming and later on python for math stuff
I started in 2003, learned C++, then did the majority of my courses in C++ with a class in Java with self-taught Python, C#, and PHP along the way for coursework.
Can someone fill me in, but is there still the derogatory "Java school"? I find that silly because most jobs in programming use some sort of managed memory programming language so teaching everyone in Java makes a lot of sense.
That's also why Apple renamed OpenStep to Cocoa. Java was supposed to be the primary development language for Mac OS X (because Java and Cocoa go great together).
For a while you could write OSX stuff in Java. I did. They also had some pretty okay JNI bindings for stuff like quicktime, so I was able to write a java application that used quicktime to load and display videos. I needed to analyze video streams for my dissertation, so I wrote some custom visualization stuff in java that used the quicktime bindings. Good times.
Well, having a platform agnostic runtime, you could throw arbitrary code at, was potentially a great deal. It was one of the founding concepts for ARPANET, which never took off, since nobody wanted to run foreign code from the network on their machines. For a platform agnostic runtime, OO may have seemed to fit well, by encapsulating data, handlers and logic into interacting objects. (This is close to the original use case for OO as described by Alan Kay.)
Fun fact: Java was also renamed from formerly Oak.
So if JavaScript was made on this day, today, it would be named AIScript? Got it. Totally hard to understand the level of hype.
> This was also peak Sun, they were really driving the web in this era.
That's not how I remember it. That's how Sun would have liked to see it but it was Apache on Linux or BSD (or even SGI) that was far more prevalent, at least near me. And I spent a good bit of time in the same building as the local Sun dealership. You could not have paid me to use their warmed over and overpriced hardware. And that really is what I associated both SUN and SGI with: companies wasting money.
But hey, we're in a bubble so party like it's 1999. It's fine if your customers are doing the hype thing, but there is no reason to follow them off the cliff. Someone yesterday asked why Bezos doesn't buy one of the big AI players. That's why.
Nobody was using Linux to host a web site in 1995. So much history being rewritten in this thread.
Well, I was and I know plenty of others that did the same. Slackware was 1993. By 1995 we even had Red Hat.
In 1995 NCSA was running just fine and from December onwards there was Apache. I had the first commercial version of the cam software out (which ran on SGI) and a year later it ran on PCs as well.
You were hobbyists, which was a tiny group compared to ISPs, where Sun’s hardware dominated. IBM and HP were competitors but they were less successful with ISPs. Were you in the US or Europe at the time?
You and your friends were probably hobbyists, hackers or small hosters. Datacenters (remember Exodus?) were full of Sun hardware, racked up & labelled with the ‘hot’ startups of early dot-com.
FreeBSD was fairly popular for hosters as well, from what I recall.
Sun systems were extremely popular in corporate Silicon Valley in the 1990s. VCs would push the more expensive systems onto their well-funded start-ups. Here's a big check, do what the other well-funded start-ups are doing and buy Sun. More cost effective Apache systems were very widely being used by start-ups on tighter budgets. But even Yahoo for example scaled itself on Apache, as did Geocities.
Can confirm. The dot-com era startups I was involved with all had Oracle DB on Sun hardware. Apache was common. Java was somewhat common if you could deal with its slowness. C++ was common if you could deal with memory problems or needed more speed / efficiency than Java.
The VCs I talked to said it was a business decision. They had money to invest, so startups could afford to buy soft & hard-ware that had gone through a QA cycle or two. The VCs figured the exit strategy for most of their startups would be via acquisition, possibly by another startup so they wanted to have a standard environment to make integrating companies tech stacks easier. Or at least less distracting.
I have this vague memory of Yahoo! execs complaining about Viaweb / Yahoo! Store being written in Lisp and management freaking out that they couldn't hire enough Lisp people fast enough. Or at least that's the story that was going around the valley. (Isn't Paul Graham around here somewhere? Or someone who could point to a canonical reference where he talks about Viaweb getting acquired by Yahoo!?)
Seems like just yesterday. It's also about when my daughter was born which also seems like yesterday.
I was doing a whole lot of Netscape plug-in development around then. And traveled to Netscape's and Sun's offices in CA several times.
Exciting era it was.
Nice anecdote. What are you doing now? Are you a developer still or the VP of a company?
> Sun's offices in CA
So basically everywhere in Santa Clara County and more.
Love the optimism of this bit:
> JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications
I read this as a negative. As in, as soon as someone without experience touches JavaScript, everything becomes complex quickly.
Which is probably somewhat true now in the GenAI + over-engineered framework age.
Some VB applications were very nice design wise, and ditto with TCL/Tk. They were it a bit loated for its era (Pentium I-III), but I've seen worse JS aberrations.
Quick note that JavaScript was written in ten days by Brendan Eich.
Ken Thompson built Unix over a 30 day period.
Youth - go forth and build us something cool! It might work out.
You can tell
Remember the old Bjarne Stroustrup quote: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."
For sure. And, to quote the Systems Bible: Any complex working system is only the result of the growth of a simple working system. It works. It worked then, and it works now. That doesn’t mean we have to like it. Replacing it is likely impossible.
Exactly. https://live.staticflickr.com/4066/4704268314_78149c3afc_k.j...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich
> He served as the Mozilla Corporation's chief technical officer before he was appointed chief executive officer, but resigned shortly after his appointment due to pressure over his opposition to same-sex marriage. He subsequently became the cofounder and CEO of Brave Software.
FWIW... I worked with Brendan @ Mozilla for over a year. Dude expressed zero problems with my queer lifestyle that I didn't hide. I think the problem people had with Brendan was not his opposition for same-sex marriage, but his support for an organization that opposed same-sex marriage. It's a subtle distinction, but one worth making. People are complex.
Sorry, what is the distinction? Being nice to people you know in person but trying to take rights away from the much larger group of people you don't know in person seems, well, worse?
the distinction is between practicing interpersonal bigotry and supporting institutional bigotry. don't be fooled by a warm handshake and a nice smile.
The little quote from DEC led me to do some reading... crazy to think there were DEC manufactured(in the U.S. !) processors that could, in 1995, run JavaScript, Linux, BSD, Windows 2000, and Plan 9.
You're talking about MIPS?
DEC Alpha processors.
I know. I was trying to be snarky. I still have an AlphaServer that I boot up from time to time to relive the glory days. Alphas were too good to be allowed to continue. I understand that intel won in the marketplace and DEC did some pretty stupid things, but I would be happier if they won with products that weren't so crappy.
As mfro said, Alpha. DEC never manufactured MIPS processors; it bought them from (amazingly enough) MIPS Inc, and used them from 1989 in DECstation RISC boxes.
DEC launched its own RISC architecture, Alpha, in 1992. I'm pretty sure DECstation was discontinued by 1995. DEC never did deliver OSF/1, its next-generation Unix, to DECstation despite promising to do so.
Right around this time I got to go to the bookstore at UCSD and buy a Sun desktop machine. I also bought a shrink-wrapped compiler, a shrink-wrapped Sybase, and a shrink-wrapped Netscape Enterprise Server.
I built a lot of server side javascript web apps in Netscape enterprise server, and a built a windows shell in javascript with netscape (I had to get a code signing certificate to remove the chrome in Netscape). Over 300 public workstations in the libraries ended up running that funky javascript shell (replacing all the green and amber screen terminals).
Writing the server side apps and hacking together that shell is basically what taught me programming. That plus I had to migrate a bunch of perl 4 code to perl 5.
How much was the student discount back then? I vaguely remember SGI coming to my University and having a complete system for like $2000 back in the day (1996 or 1997). IIRC a Pentium Pro based system would have been similarly priced.
About 2 years before Javascript existed I was very much into the web, first using the Lynx browser, and later Mosaic on an Amiga. I had also been doing a lot of AREXX script programming on the Amiga at the time. I remember telling a friend "This web browser thing really needs a scripting language", like I wished AREXX (or some language) could automate the web browser.
When Javascript first came out in Netscape, my prayers were answered, and there was no looking back. I've been coding Javascript every day since it was released in Netscape.
JavaScript is an easy-to-use object scripting language designed for creating live online applications that link together objects and resources on both clients and servers. While Java is used by programmers to create new objects and applets, JavaScript is designed for use by HTML page authors and enterprise application developers to dynamically script the behavior of objects running on either the client or the server. JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications. JavaScript's design represents the next generation of software designed specifically for the Internet
"Capital I" internet. Love this aesthetic.
It is a proper noun, in contrast to the other internets. If there is a guy called Guy you would not call him guy.
It still annoys me whenever the public internet known as the Internet is misspelled with a lower-case i.
Hmm. Trying to remember if places I've worked at talked about "The Intranet" or "the intranet." I guess you could use "Intranet" as a proper noun if you're talking about the one in use at your company but then "intranet" if you're talking about the concept of an internet inside your company's firewall that's not connected to the Internet.
There are millions of intranets but only one Internet, that's the whole point.
Right, but there are scads of "internets" (with the lower-case 'i'), which is exactly the point.
Yep, we write "the Internet". When was the last time someone wrote "an internet"? :)
Three responses ago.
But yes, capitalized "Internet" refers to the "Connected Internet," of which there is only one. The first rule of SIPRnet is no one talks about SIPRnet. But if we did talk about it, the comment would likely be that it is like "the Internet" but not "the Internet."
If you spend time in academia or academia-adjacent industrial research, you sometimes hear "an internet" (always with lower case to signal it's a common noun) to describe a network of networks. But you are right... that use is not growing and if anything shrinking.
Maybe some aliens out there have their own internet. But then is the internet just the sum of all intranets and thus in a way just the top-level intranet?
They were practically daring Microsoft to create VBScript, which it did.
And later it created JScript. Embrace and extend... this is the way.
That was an insane time. The pace was unreal. I remember Netscape 2.0 had at least 6-7 beta releases prior to the full release. And each one just dropped something massive and fundamental to the Internet - JavaScript (then called LiveScript IIRC) being one of those things. Just casually dropping what would dominate the entire industry in a browser beta.
The only other period I have experienced that comes close is what is happening now. What an incredible time to build.
LOL. And Netscape 1.1 just casually birthed SSL (2.0) for the world and future generations.
It was actually created in around 10 days by Brendan Elch at Netscape, originally called Mocha.
"Don't trust anyone over 30." -Jack Weinberg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Weinberg
Written by AI?
"AT&T;'s support for JavaScript is more than support for cool technology -- it is support for an open standards process."
It's kind of funny to see how the endorsements were talking about rich multimedia integration, when your output options with JavaScript 1.0 were: writing into a textarea, writing into a form input field, or setting the state of other form elements (like checkboxes or select elements) – that's your rich multimedia experience!
Of course, there was the infamous `document.write()`, when the document was loading and the document stream was still open, but this was more of a hack than an interaction model.
I think they were talking about using JavaScript to setup message queues between Java Applets and the Applets would be doing multi-media-esque things.
Some seems to be server-side (LiveWire), as well, which was a Netscape product long before Node.js, but I'm not sure if this was already available, then. (When was the Netscape Enterprise server launched?)
I'm also not too sure, if LiveConnect (the connection between JS and Java applets and vice versa) was already a thing, when JavaScript was announced. (I think, this came a little later.)
Edit: I've a Netscape JavaScript book from when this was still in beta. (My first reading on the subject.) It does mention applets on a single page and that you may address them per ID via LiveConnect in a single sentence. So this was already implemented, but it wasn't advertised prominently. The book is all about form based examples.
(The applications in this book were the same that were demoed as showcase applications by Netscape on their website – and probably represent a significant part of what these voices reacted to.)
My memory is that around '98 people were falling over themselves to figure out how to wire up "components" made of applets. I think that stopped being a thing when people figured out SpyGlass/IE didn't use the same techniques to wire applets as Netscape. So props to you Microsoft, you made my life irritating for multiple decades (don't get me started about 1990 when I was a beta tester for Microsoft C 5.0.)
I remember using Netscape Enterprise Server suite, but didn't realize it had a JS engine in it. I do remember Rhino from a little later (though the wikipedia says it emerged in the late 90s.) And I have relatively horrible memories of the Netscape guys integrating the Visigenic ORB in both the enterprise server and Navigator. I wonder if Rhino was what they stuffed into NES/iPlanet/Sun ONE.
Would've been nice if they'd also released a decent standard library at the same time.
“This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
I thought JavaScript was originally called LiteScript?
"LiveScript" – all the proprietary Netscape technologies were named "Live…", as in LiveWire, LiveBridge, etc.
anyone got a time machine? lets go back in time and change their specification to typescript
alert('Yay!');
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If any language needs to rest in peace, it might be JS
It's time has come...
/s
(my 2c, an ex-JS guy. Sometimes I still wrangle with it)
"30 years ago today netscape and sun killed the web"
Modern web pages are like this now: <html><one.js><two.js><three.js></html>
Standards made by accident.
Seems that most of the standards people actually use were made by accident.
And with that, the internet started to die
> JavaScript is analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications.
Lies at the time. More accessible popular examples of extension languages already existed at the time (e.g., VB, Python, Tcl, various 4GLs, even COBOL), and none of them looked like this.
They gave it the syntax to look much like a systems programming language, and a semantics that wasn't all that great for this purpose. (Syntax inherited from Java, which was actually a very nice applications language at the time, but had to replace the C++ that embedded developers would have otherwise used for set-top-like boxes that Sun was targeting at one point for Oak (Java). And, hey, random non-programmers can totally pick up a semantics that's a mix of functional and block-structured imperative, with a prototype-delegation object model that almost no one has seen before, and lot of error-prone pitfalls.)
This is what happens when marketing, product management, and engineering aren't working together, or are thrown together much later in the timeline than you'd prefer.
> Netscape and Sun plan to propose JavaScript to the W3 Consortium (W3C) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as an open Internet scripting language standard.
But first, press release! Because we've assembled an industry gang of endorsements, to plow right over the W3C on a central Web standard, with this hasty kludge that one programmer whipped out from bad requirements and rush constraints, in literally a few weeks, knowing at the time it was a poor approach and he would've done better with even a little more time or better requirements.
"We'll deal with the tech debt later." We know how that played out for the industry. Now we have an entire field that is incapable of building a reasonably secure system for anything involving the Web. (Security isn't the only effect; it's just a harder-to-ignore example of what happens when everyone has to poke at big shoddy messes to do anything, and no one sufficiently understands what they're doing.)
And it didn't even selfishly benefit Netscape or Sun for very long. Maybe some people got their bonuses and promotions that year, but both companies were soon ruined, after some great earlier engineering and product work.
This is such a weirdly antagonistic take. Javascript was out there first, and it was good enough, and a vast improvement over both flash and java in the browser. There's no guarantee that some committee designed language would have ever made it out to the public, let alone that it ever would have gotten any kind of uptake, or that it would have been better than javascript.
JS at the time was obviously thrown together in a huge rush as a very poorly designed landgrab during the dotcom IPO goldrush.
"Designed by committee" as the alternative is a false dichotomy.
There was already much better work in languages for this kind of purported requirement of non-programmer (or less-programmer) use. JS obviously didn't even try to address those users.
And there were certainly better languages for letting full-programmers accomplish the same things.
Even Sun themselves internally had better work on multimedia Web browser at the time.
Instead, some team just threw anything at being able to make the press release they wanted to make, ASAP, not caring whether it was trash, or they could've even done better within the press release time constraint if they cared.
There's a market out there, and a first-mover advantage. Technologies are embedded in and product of existing political, social, and economic processes, not standalone entities.
Think of all the other "worse" languages that triumphed over their purported betters.
I agree that first mover advantage is an important concept. I don't know how much it applies to the JS launch situation, but there was definitely a rush.