OTD 2005: Nuova Systems is founded, and I get to carry a $10M check to the bank. Steve Mcgarrett Tani Rey GIF by CBS I was especially careful handling the check, because when Ipsilon was funded back in 1994, one of the VCs lost his check in the bushes outside the office! In 2004 I … Continue reading Founding Nuova Systems
1/ Today would've been the 100th birthday of William L. Lyon, Jr. - my dear father, Lyon family patriarch, inveterate tinkerer, lover of math & science tricks & puzzles, and a kind, humble, and generous man/nerd. And he kept the lights on for the City of El Paso. 🧵 2/ Daddy was born in 1922 … Continue reading William L. Lyon, Jr.
1/ Almost the 49th birthday of Ethernet (3Mb)! Here's another History lesson and a story about my role in "holy wars" with 3Mb Ethernet and UNIX. Few people realize how long-lived and widespread 3Mb Ethernet became... 🧵 2/ May 22, 1973 is considered the birthday of "3 Megabit" Ethernet, when Bob Metcalfe published his memo … Continue reading 3Mb Ethernet and Holy Wars
40 years ago today: I joined a tiny startup called Sun Microsystems. What a ride! Here's the never-before-told story of how I arrived at Sun as employee #8! 🧵 I started out in Silicon Valley in June of 1978 working at Amdahl Corp. porting UNIX to the mainframe, a revival of the work started at … Continue reading Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago
Preface This series was originally a DriveScale blog series, and is recovered here thanks to the Internet Archive's Wayback machine. Intro One of the DriveScale predictions for 2020 is that 2020 is the year of the SmartNIC! But, what is a SmartNIC? In this blog series – covering 7 decades – you’ll learn more than … Continue reading From Punched Cards to SmartNICs: A Personal Journey
After I left Sun in May of 1994, I became an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Mohr, Davidow Ventures. My good friend Jon Feiber (Amdahl & Sun) had left Sun to become a venture capitalist there. The job of an EIR is ill-defined, but it hopefully leads to a company. I had a couple of ideas I thought … Continue reading Ipsilon Networks, Inc.
Lost in the digital wilderness at an early age, Tom Lyon was adopted by feral punched card equipment that taught him to speak FORTRAN and inducted him in the cult of the mainframe. After being rescued by a search algorithm of his own devising, he handily won a tri-state programming contest and was made to … Continue reading My Extended (Irreverent) Biography
Who's ready for more Networking History? - all about APPLETALK! When the Apple Macintosh came out in 1984, it came with a new serial port implementation. Initially, it looked like nothing special - a port for a modem, a port for a printer. But internally it used the Zilog Z8530 SCC, which was a deviation … Continue reading Appletalk History
0/ More Ethernet history? Learn why Ethernet Switching is an (extremely successful) ABOMINATION!!! 1/ So, the DEC/Intel/Xerox 10Mb Ethernet spec came out in 1980. The same year, ISO published a draft of the 7 layer OSI model (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model) 2/ Now, unlike the later OSI *protocols*, the OSI *model* was widely regarded as a good thing, … Continue reading Ethernet History – The Switching Abomination
1/ How about an Ethernet history lesson? And a story about why I'm responsible for one of the most hated features of SunOS! 2/ The DEC, Intel Xerox Ethernet spec was published in 1980 after many years of Ethernet development at Xerox PARC led by @BobMetcalfe , Dave Boggs, and Ron Crane. This is a … Continue reading Ethernet History – MAC Addresses in SunOS
