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Comment by DonHopkins

1 day ago

>Sun's Workstations Still Shine, But Rivals Cloud The Outlook

>Daily Gazette - Nov 10, 1991

>Associated Press (Google News Archive)

>Sun touts an "all the wood behind one arrow" slogan, meant to describe a company focused on one goal - workstations. As an April Fool's joke in 1990, Sun employees built a 60-foot-long arrow in McNealy's office with the point going out the window.

Phrase: more wood behind, all the wood behind one arrow

2 comments

DonHopkins

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A terrible ill-formed neologism, widely adopted by dopes who never had an original thought. It is about as predictive of an empty statement as that guy who who emphasizes his inchoate thoughts by claiming the proof is in the pudding.

  • McNealy's other terrible ill-formed neologism was "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!"

    Yet now he's hugging the Trump Tree!

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39501069

    DonHopkins on Feb 25, 2024 | parent | context | favorite | on: Institutions try to preserve the problem to which ...

    >exhortation I assumed you were talking about Sun, and I read that as "extortion".

    It reminds me of the vicious intimidation tactics that Sun executives made their poor sysadmin enforcers perform on their behalf, to ruthlessly coerce other reluctant executives and employees to run Solaris instead of SunOS!

    http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...

    I remember an all-hands meeting where Scott McNealy told everybody, "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!"

    After the meeting I went to my manager and demanded a tree: I never knew about any trees! Why did everybody get a tree but me? I want my tree! I promise I will not hug it.

    So he gave me an old set of SunOS manuals.

    ChuckMcM on Feb 25, 2024 [–]

    One of my mentors was Steve K. at Sun who I consulted with about how badly Sun did changes. It really pissed me off that Sun wouldn't put NIS+ into SunOS because they were allegedly worried it would "reduce the incentive to migrate to Solaris."

    I would say I was not particularly successful at being a 'change agent' there.

    DonHopkins on Feb 26, 2024 | parent [–]

    It's not just changing badly, but changing to the wrong thing. They'd beaten AT&T in the Unix marketplace, then celebrated by getting in bed with them.

    >Michael Tiemann is vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat, Inc., and former President of the Open Source Initiative. [...] He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. [...] Opensource.com profiled him in 2014, calling him one of "open source's great explainers."