Tom Lyon's Personal Blog
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
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.
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
I wrote this years ago during a fit of cynicism (happens a lot). However, Silicon Valley has been bery, bery good to me. The Big Stock Option Valley (sung to the tune of The Big Rock Candy Mountains) In the Big Stock Option Valley there's a job that pays alright Where the options grow … Continue reading The Big Stock Option Valley