Some of us Sun alumni have been chatting about CloudFlare adopting one of Sun’s earliest and most notable tag lines: “The Network is the Computer”. There’s a lot packed into this epigram, not the least of which is a ton of history.
When Sun originated that tag line around 1985—the company just approaching its 3rd birthday—it was actually quite audacious. It was a stake in the ground: Computers should be networked, or they’re… not computers. Well, at least, you’re missing out on their potential by a country mile. They’re “islands of automation”, and you can do better than that. Join us!
Sun put a network interface in every computer they built, from day one. That was not even remotely the norm at the time. But the part people tend to overlook is that Sun didn’t just say “networks are good”: they wanted it to be open networking.
At that time, if you wanted to network your computers, you paid extra for proprietary, non-interoperable networks. SNA for your IBM mainframes, DECnet for your DEC minis, Novell Netware for your PCs (because Microsoft was just a tad slow on the uptake, here, so another company had to fill the void).
But Sun said, “Nah. Let’s all use Ethernet and TCP/IP. Those are open standards.” (And kept pushing the envelope throughout our history. We were a major contributor to taking Ethernet from 10 megabits to multi-gigabits.)
More importantly, we pioneered software standards that made that hardware actually useful. We developed open network directories (YP) and open network filesystems (NFS), built on top of a generic open distributed interoperability standard (RPC/XDR). The Sun-organized “Connectathons” of the ’80s and ’90s were legendary meetups, where vendors from across the industry would test the interoperability of their implementations of these open standards.
(This isn’t to say that other companies didn’t have some good work out there. DEC had arguably one of the best distributed computing environments ever. But they were also the ones that had T-shirts in the ’80s that said “The network is the network; the computer is the computer. Sorry for any confusion.” Oops.)
So all props to Cloudflare for recognizing a great tag line when they see one, but… “the CDN is the computer” is not quite as world-changing as what Sun did.
Update: This post was based on a response I made to someone on Facebook, who was looking for comments about Cloudflare trademarking this tagline, for an article he was writing. Here’s the article!