I am forwarding this not because Sun (the company) is particularly leftist (and Scott McNealy definitely is not). My intention is to hopefully trigger some curiosity among non-techies about recent Internet history (1985 and later), and the vital role that Sun (a company that I greatly admire for its technical output) played in it. As the piece below notes, starting with their seminal "The Network is the Computer" approach, Sun got it right almost each time (it mattered) through the 90s.
<http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_19/b3983043.htm>
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This is a good (if too brief) article.
Sun was truly the touchstone of high performance computing and innovative network concepts and technologies all throughout the 1990s. A highlight of my career was working on a farm of Sun computing machinery outfitted with ultraSparcs - burning cycles to simulate the human nervous system.
Microsoft, in contrast, has long been the used car salesman with a very nice suit and a tower of hair but merchandise of questionable quality - to say the least. Certainly, very little that's nontrivial has come from Redmond. To them, an annoying bit of animation named "clippy" - allegedly employing some sort of AI - was the pinnacle of technological achievement.
The center (at least, the center of intriguing technologies) has shifted to Google which has constructed a globally distributed supercomputing platform with a variety of front end interfaces...one moment it's a search engine, the next an email widget, the next a mapping tool and so on.
In a way, this is the partial fulfillment of concepts pioneered by Sun. Google has obviously taken the concept of the "network is the computer" very much to heart.
In my dream world, this eventually evolves into something similar to Star Trek's imagined universal computing system: LCARS.
Ideally (as depicted in Trek), computing power will become a utility which we plug into as needed, using off-net storage and processing when required but mostly, we'd take advantage of a staggering amount of arithmetic logic, memory and processing capability hosted on machines distributed across the globe.
This is technically feasible now (and to a large extent built) but runs afoul of the needs of various sectors of capital who impede its flowering
LCARS explained:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lcars>
Google as supercomputer
<http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/05/07/19OPstrategic_1.html>
.d.
--------- "For ten years Caesar ruled with an iron fist. Then with a wooden leg; and finally with a piece of string."