Yes DEC did have clusters, and I remember booting my Alpha workstations from a Sun SPARCStation 20 over DECNet as an AutoClient and I know DEC had hardware clustering and VMS working together as a distributed system, but since I came at the end of that era and only worked with Ultrix and DECUnix, I don't know any more about it which is why I couldn't go into detail. I only go into detail when I know about something and usually I've done that something myself.
Prime had remote procedure calls. Their MIDAS product (index sequential files, basically key-value store with multiple indexes) allowed multiple nodes to access the same file by allocating a "slave" on the node hosting the file, forwarding all calls over the network, and returning call results. OS file access worked the same way, using the same slave for all remote procedure calls. Source code designed for local file access didn't require any changes to be used for remote files, just like NFS.
I'd say Sun had a pretty good example to go by for NFS. In fact, if you want to see this in action, I wrote a Prime minicomputer emulator and have remote disks available between 5 different revs of their operating system, spanning a 10-year period.
Telnet em.prirun.com 8001 and enjoy!
So, in that spirit: Sun emphatically did not "ignore the internet" (?!) -- and was in fact a pioneer of distributed systems in many ways. Instead of rattling off the many important, early distributed systems that Sun built -- or the many pioneers of distributed systems that Sun employed -- I will vector you to a single Sun-authored paper circa 1994, "A Note on Distributed Computing"[1] (and to Chris Meiklejohn's discussion of it at Papers We Love[2]). The paper itself drips with wisdom that still feels current and important a quarter of a century later -- and it very much reflects the zeitgeist of the time at Sun. Please read the paper -- and more generally, take the time to educate yourself as to the history of our domain and the many people and companies who have made seminal contributions to it; the generations whose shoulders your work stands upon will thank you for it!
[1] https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love/blob/master...
This is the company that had "the dot in .com" as its marketing slogan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njnNVV5QNaA
https://slashdot.org/story/00/04/20/1542217/sun-no-longer-th...
Look at that 1994 paper, none of the things in the paper show any background to build a distributed key-value storage or really anything for the cloud. I'm not sure why people are trying to claim otherwise. Even ZFS from a decade later reflects both a complete lack of experience in distributed systems and ignorance towards the internet.
That's far too aggressive a response for someone who's being sloppy with terminology themselves. "Distributed" covers many different scales. You also use "clustering filesystem" as though it's a synonym, which it very much is not. Among those who have actually built both, like me, distributed and cluster filesystems are very different things. It's fine if you think "true" distributed systems means global scale, but if you're not even explicit (let alone correct) about it you should hardly be condemning others for using definitions closer to general usage. And you definitely shouldn't be pretending to read people's minds with claims about what they "gave no thought" to or "have no idea" about.
P.S. Since I can't reply to your comment below which was quite rightly flagged into oblivion, no, I didn't have anything to do with GFS.
And whether you "flagged" my comment or not, that's irrelevant to me.
I worked at a company circa 2005 where we had a platform as a service built on top of Solaris 10 and zones, on-premise infrastructure which you now call cloud. Fully configured and serving Sun clusters would come into existence by merely DHCP booting from the OpenBoot PROM (Sun had to give us patches for the OBP for DHCP booting). I happen to know this, because I was one of the senior system engineers who helped architect it and then built it. We had it powering tens of thousands of servers. We were one of the first users of IP Multipathing in Solaris ("IPMP"), a technology Sun engineers invented to provide redundancy for network connectivity for the clusters. Amazon wasn't even a smear yet. That was in 2005. Which year is it now? How many years ago was that?
Oh, and SUN was the Stanford University Network.
Edit: I mean, this is the company that gave us the 8 Fallacies of distributed computing, as they were 20yrs ago
They didn't. Not that any of it is important anyway. All 80s and early 90s networking tech was ridiculously broken, which should be obvious, since distributed systems field was just born at that time (first papers in like 1978). Things started to get useful only by the end of nineties. But by that time Sun's tech was nowhere near anything internet companies were doing. So later when things got to infrastructure Sun's engineering was really really behind, they had to start from scratch on anything that internet companies were learning and doing for many years. And this was very different time consuming knowledge, not something where someone could use their OS level expertise. Which also makes it very hard to compete with companies that are much farther ahead, especially with this silly "our tech is the greatest" attitude making it hard to even realize how far behind you actually were.
Filesystems (or datasets) are carved out of a pool, not out of physical disks directly. There are vdevs on top of physical disks.
That's like people who are stuck back in the '80's because of ext3 arguing that ZFS is crap because it doesn't come with fsck or "some sort of repair tool" -- they just can't wrap their head around the ZFS concepts.
The ZFS team was well aware of this and that's why they made the trade-offs they did. They picked a subset of problems and they solved them. Even in hindsight, to me at least, it's obvious why.
But to suggest that Sun Microsystems doesn't exist because the company's engineers picked only a subset of problems they knew they could solve is... either terribly ignorant or wilfully malicious, or both, since malice often stems from ignorance. Sun Microsystems lost because they were too expensive, more expensive than garbage intel personal computer servers and because Solaris wasn't open source code in 1993. It's that simple.
Careful now, you're on thin ice: Sun Microsystems might have been a pioneer in distributed cloud computing, but nobody did it better than SGI: once they had the NUMALink technology from CRAY, they invented cluster routing in hardware which would linearly scale with added router modules. I had Origin 2000's hooked up and scaled them linearly thanks to NUMALink, the hardware routing bricks and the crossbar switch on the motherboard. And IRIX 6.5 was aware of it all and used it!
I'd hit the power button on one server and the other one would come up; after the systems booted, each having 8 GB of memory and 8 processors, I logged into a single IRIX instance with 16 GB of RAM and 16 processors. The only company to come even close to that was DEC, years prior, but nobody perfected it so throughly like SGI engineers. What CRAY started, SGI engineers finished. Sun only came with hardware which had the crossbar switch after SGI, and they never had their own hardware router bricks. By router I don't mean network router, I mean cluster scalability router which had nothing to do with TCP/IP networking.
My real issue with them is hubris. There's a certain cadre of Sun alumni, highly visible on forums such as this, who would have us believe that they were absolutely always doing the best work on the most important problems. I think that denies credit to others who were doing work just as good on problems just as important, at companies which weren't driven into Oracle's arms by all the waste. Having known many of those people over the years - it's not for me to judge whether I'm one of them myself - I find that offensive. Sun just wasn't all that and the sooner we shed that particular piece of idol worship the better the industry will be.
It's like watching an Amiga demo: one has to understand how hard it was to code the effect to appreciate it -- a normal person off of the street just sees some graphics and hears some music. Sun engineers not only did great things well, but they popularized them too because they wrote intimate diaries in the open about their work over the span of ten years. They raised an entire generation of IT professionals and taught them what it takes and what it means to be an engineer.
I wish I knew who the engineer(s) behind SGI inst(1M) is(were), but unfortunately I don't because they never put names and faces on their products.
Please, try learning something new instead of getting stuck on the first thing you found when you first entered the industry and spitting all over everything else. Go look through the conference proceedings, even from Sun's glory years, and you'll find plenty of papers from people elsewhere that have had a far more profound effect on software practice today. This fanboi behavior does nobody any good, least of all you.
Yes I'm a big fan of their work, not least because their products work damn well, especially when solutions in GNU/Linux are compared to theirs. Did they screw up over the years? Yes they did, the USB subsystem in Solaris is an infamous fuck-up of epic proportions. Ironically it has nothing to do with distributed systems. But the things they really put effort into like Sun clustering, NFS and networking work and work damn well.
As for me and learning something new, I do that all of the time. The problem is that most of the new things coming out aren't new at all and certainly aren't better.
And you know what, for a passionate computer enthusiast, I'm sick and tired of IT and all this bullshit.
Well, I'd be the first to say that Sun was often doing substandard work. The implication that they were doing no work is just insane though.
Sun moved in to this stuff. They understood it. They just weren't successful at figuring out how to run a business with it.
In the end, the world is much bigger than the tech we build & consume.
They were a pioneer in distributed systems computing. Not many computer companies can claim that. Even fewer companies can claim engineers which hold patents which now power the InterNet, like Radia Perlman does for the spanning tree routing protocol. If that's not distributed, I don't know what is.