Sun Pictures
In preparation for the upcoming gathering, I thought I would try to get my very limited supply of photos available online. I am hoping to follow this up with some scanned documents that should bring back more memories - and perhaps I will even scan those at a more appropriate size.
People...
Only two photos here, from 1985. The father of all of this, Rick Cattell and my first (and only) officemate, Bob Marti. IIRC, Bob had his PhD from ETH(? - where Wirth taught for many years?) and may have left Sun to go to HP Labs. Note that rack of documentation that we all had in those days. These offices were on the first floor of building 5.
View Rick Cattell
View Bob Marti
Hardware
Also from 1985, we have a photo of 1MB of RAM - which went for $1500 (and that was a big advantage over DEC who was charging $4000/MB). As you can tell, this was way before SIMMs (I remember when Andy B made a presentations on SIMMs to the SPD Engineering meeting - he said the price would drop to $100/MB and I remember being willing to spend $400 of my own money to upgrade my system from 4MB to 8MB).
View 1MB RAM
Also we have the insides of a Sun 2/180. View Sun 2/180
The Landscaping
Perhaps I was young and naive. Well, OK, I was certainly young and naive - but the Sun campus always struck me as quite idyllic. Here are two photos of the space between building 1 and building 5, also in 1985.
View Landscape1
View Landscape2
SimplifySQL is born
Jump forward to 1987 and some very early views of SimplifySQL. First, we have the strategy sketched out on Rick's whiteboard in his office in Annex 1 - which was away from the main campus - on the East side of 101 - on a road whose name currently escapes me. SD = SchemaDesign, DB = DataBrowse, QT=QueryTool, RW=ReportWriter; I = Ingres; U = Unify. Of course, we now realize that we were missing any type of FormsDesign system and had a little bit of confusion as to whom the target audience might be.
View Strategy
Now, we had to get some external resources to execute this strategy. Unify was very interested in working with us - but we were a little less interested in working with them. So Rick stalled them for time by saying we didn't have time to drive all the way to Sacramento - so they offered us their corporate plane. It was an offer we didn't refuse. It also led to my wearing a tie for the first time. So, thinking I was was looking like a successful executive type, I had this photo taken. I even had a copy made for my mom - whose first question, in looking at it, was "Why do you keep a roll of toilet paper on your desk"? (BTW, the answer was frequent nosebleeds).
View Richard as corporate shill
