A Digression: Days in Windows Engineering

As I started to go into my gadget dive, I began to think about the origins of how I had ended up becoming so engaged in these issues and that in turn led to memories of Sun Microsystems.

Sun has finally been folded into Oracle and this has lead to a flood of reminiscences on the Sun Alumni Yahoo Group and related areas.

I highly recommend www.consultingadultblog.blogspot.com written by Nancy Hauge an early Human Remains manager / director at Sun. It is both poignant and hilarious, even if you don't know the actual people. Of course she has an advantage. HR gets all the best weird behavior.

New York to California

I joined Sun in February 1988 and showed up for work as an SE in the New York City sales office on the day that the Sun 386i was introduced. If you remember that unit, you either worked out of Billerica, MA where it was designed and made (NOT California) or you had to support them. The office was buzzing with visitors and so real work didn't start for another day or so.

I had interviewed with Peter Young, my new manager, and Harry Kaplan - a fellow SE. Harry had spent my entire interview telling me what a wonderful, exciting time I was going to have. He didn't ask a single question. Looking back on it, I suspect that Peter had told Harry to sell me on Sun.

And Harry was right. My early years working at Sun were exhilarating, fun, heady. Being a workaholic was effortless.

The funny thing about the 386i is that you won't find it on most lists of official Sun products. I have a 10th Anniversary Year Book someplace and it never appeared there. I spent a lot of SE time on the 386i.

In those days, the Hamilton Group (DEC, IBM...) were targeting Sun and for a variety of political reasons windowing systems and development toolkits were leading conflict points. Sun's windowing system at the time was transitioning from SunView to NeWS. Of the SEs in the NYC office, I initially had the most experience with both PostScript, NeWS, and SunView (others joined over time), so I got to act as the East Coast troubleshooter for those issues. I moved from being a District SE, to a Regional SE, and then finally an Area SE, finally reporting to Peter Young again.

After 3 years I was recruited to move to California where I spent about 9 months as a Technology Evangelist in SunSoft Corporate Marketing and then moved to the Solaris Windows Engineering group where I spent close to 6 years.

Moving In

I transitioned into the Windows group as a first level manager just as they were moving from MTV14 to MTV21. We sat directly over the cafeteria, which definitely had its perks. In addition to convenience, there were afternoon events scheduled there 2-4 days a week and that meant Free Food after the parties broke up (or during the meetings if you were brazen). Free Food tends to keep engineers happy.

Moving in was a bit chaotic for a while. Rooms weren't set up properly or weren't comfortable or didn't have the right furniture. The facilities people were always circling around trying to satisfy and fix things.

Jackson and Robert were great friends (still are, I assume). Robert is a towering 6'3" plus and Jackson is almost a foot shorter. They had been assigned offices next to each other. Robert nominally reported to me although I never could get him to do anything he didn't want to.

A day or so after the official move, the facilities people came by Jackson's office to hang his white board. They had him stand up so that they could get the height set to the optimal spot. Quickly done.

Then they asked, "Do you know this guy next door - Robert?"

Jackson said he did.

"He's not here right now but we could install his white board. How tall would you say he is?"

Without missing a beat, Jackson said, "Oh about the same as me."

Robert never complained that the bottom of the whiteboard hit his knees. He liked that he could sit in his chair and reach the top.

What Robert didn't like was the room temperature.

Robert had an interior office but the temperature control seemed to be geared for the window offices, which also happened to face south and Robert was constantly cold. There were only a couple of thermostats for the whole floor, all on the windows side.

Robert started badgering the facilities people for his own thermostat. This led to long discussions about why that wouldn't be possible. The HVAC systems wasn't set up to accomodate that. And so forth. But Robert kept persisting.

Another person in the group was a compulsive scavenger and there is no better time to scavenge than right after a group move.

One night this person found a box left behind by the facilities people and it was filled with unused thermostat covers.

The next day, Robert came in and was pleasantly surprised to find that he finally had his own private thermostat. He made sure that all of his peers knew that he had been vindicated at last and had won the critical moral battle with facilities.

Robert set the thermostat to an ideal temperature and settled in. But every time he got up to go to the bathroom or to get coffee or attend a meeting, "someone" would slip into his office and turn the thermostat back to a lower setting.

Robert would come back, rant and rave, reset the thermostat. This went on until Robert started leaving irate and threatening PostIt notes on the thermostat demanding that the temperature setting be left alone (to no avail).

Meanwhile, Robert had also noticed that setting the temperature higher didn't make his office more comfortable. Irate phone calls to facilities ensued.

Finally, a long-suffering facilities HVAC person came by to figure out what was going on. As Robert vented about his frustrations, the guy scratched his head. It just didn't make sense. It wasn't even possible to install a thermostat in this location.

So he pulled out his screwdriver and removed the cover of thermostat, revealing a smiley face, complete with tongue, drawn on the blank wall.

At last check, no one had ever officially 'fessed up to Robert, although I know he has his suspicions.

My lips are sealed.

Next up: Storage Wells