Comments by "Scott Franco" (@scottfranco1962) on "The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems" video.

  1. What people miss about the RISC revolution is that in the 1980s with Intel's 8086 and similar products, the increasingly complex CPUs of the day were using a technique called "microcoding", or a lower level instruction set inside the CPU to run instruction decoding, etc. It was assumed that the technique, inherited from mini and mainframe computers, would be the standard going forward, since companies like intel were increasing the number of instructions at a clip. RISC introduced the idea that if the instruction set were simplified, CPU designers could return to pure hardware designs, no microcode, and use that to retire most or all instructions in a single clock cycle. In short, what happened is the titanic turned on a dime: Intel dropped microcode like a hot rock and created pure hardware CPUs to show that any problem could be solved by throwing enough engineers at it. They did it by translating the CISC x86 instructions to an internal RISC form and deeply parallelizing the instruction flow, the so called "superscalar" revolution. In so doing they gave x86 new life for decades. I worked for SUN for a short time in the CPU division when they were going all in on multicore. The company was already almost in freefall. The Sparc design was flawed and the designers knew it. CEO Johnathan faced questioning at company meetings when he showed charts with Java "sales" presented as if it were a profit center (instead of given away for free). I came back to SUN again on contract after the Oracle merger. They had the same offices and the little Java mascots on their desks. It was probably telling that after my manager invited me to apply for a permanent position, I couldn't get it though their online hiring system, which was incredibly buggy, and then they went into a hiring freeze so it was irrelevant. I should also mention that not all companies did chip design in that era with SUN workstations. At Zilog we used racks full of MicroVaxes and Xwindow graphics terminals. I still have fond memories of laying out CPUs and chainsmoking in the late 1980s until midnight.
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  2. "Stanfurd"??? Sorry I just had to.
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