I will never forget the day I learned that I had won a job at Sun Microsystems
back in 1994. I had been trying to get in there for several years, following fellow
TRW employee Chuck Otts. He regaled me with tales of the wonderful company, which
at the time was just on the verge of becoming a household name. I had interviewed
with Southern Area chief systems engineer Dave Edstrom and his sidekick Dennis
Govoni, who each gave me a fairly grueling technical interview. When my new boss,
Sue Walls, left a message on my answering machine that she was very interested in
hiring me, I was ecstatic and jumped up and down screaming in my apartment.
I was a systems engineer ("SE") at Sun, which was a technical expert in the
sales group. It requires an unusual mixture of skills: you have to be very technical
yet articulate enough to talk to different levels of a customer's organization,
from the low-level techies to the CIO. Eventually, I became a Principal Engineer,
an elite, peer-reviewed position in which I had some significant influence
on Sun's hardware products. All told, I was with Sun for 16 years, all the way until its
unfortunate end on January 27, 2010.
Sun's unoffical motto was "kick ass and have fun", and we did. Working hard and
playing hard was all part of the wonderful ethos at Sun Microsystems.
You know how some people complain that they never recognized the "good times"
when they were having them? We never had that problem, and always knew that
our time at Sun would be the most special of our careers.
Sun Photos
In 1995 I did a job rotation for several weeks in Brian Wong's lab in Menlo Park. Brian was literally the man who wrote the book on Sun server sizing and configuration and I spent my time working on a white paper. Brian very kindly gave me an acknowledgement as "Sun SE extraordinaire" when his sizing and configuration guide was turned into a book.
In 1995, the Federal Sales Region held an off-site meeting in Annapolis, MD.
I was involved in mentoring new hires to the Federal Region beginning with my early days at Sun. There was a fairly rigorous new hire training program which I helped develop, and "graduation" included propeller beanies for all the graduates.
Our classic April Fool's day prank in 1997. The pranksters, Dave Edstrom, Neil Pierson, and I had our picture taken for posterity before we broadcast to everyone in Sun around the world.
One of my all-time favorite "mentees" was Rob Hines, who began a stellar career as a sales rep shortly after graduation my new hire regimen. Here's me and Rob at our boss Sue Walls's house for a barbecue. Rob went on to become a vice president at Salesforce.com.
At our Southern Area off-site meeting in Key Biscayne in 1997, fellow SE Mike Dye and I went mano a mano in the hotel pool after maby beers one night. Mike missed his turn but came back to beat me barely in this photo-finish.
One of the most fun things I ever did was dress up as Santa Claus for our office's annual Christmas Family Party. There were arts and crafts for the kids, who were required to bring a toy for the needy to attend, and then a visit with Santa including a toy and a photograph. As a lifelong bachelor, I was completely unprepared for the things the kids came up with, and they are some of the fondest memories I have. Here's me with elves Judy May and Vicki Krisak.
Goofballs: Kerry Mull, Harry Foxwell, Dave Edstrom, me, and Spiro Alifrangis at the Sun Performance Group dinner cruise on board the Spirit of Washington, April 19, 2005.
In 2008, I did an anti-IBM tour through Latin America using some material I named "Blue Away". Here is me in front of the Brazilian Sun team.
In 2008, I did a swing through Latin America on an anti-IBM tour. I took some time to visit Corcovado while in Brazil.
This is the SPARC Products Specialists Team at our team meeting in Dallas in 2007. Many of us did not survive the Oracle acquisition of Sun in 2010, but those of us who did became the IBM Competitive Tiger Team shortly afterward, and have been taking out all the SPARC gear we put in over all those years at Sun.
When Sun sales rep Garry Jakoby wanted to express his gratitude for some work that Vicki Krisak and I had done for him while he was on vacation, he took us all out on his go-fast boat in Chesapeake Bay. Here is Vicki and Mark Krisak along with Katie May and me.
At Sun, April Fool's Day was the only truly global religious holiday and Sun
employees were recognized far and wide as the greatest corporate pranksters in the world. I am lucky enough to be good
friends with Dave Edstrom, who
spent many years as the Chief Technologist for Sun's Southern Area sales force, before
moving on to several other top spots at Sun. But in my mind, Dave's most prestigious
title was Chief Prankster, and I was happy to help him out. Here are some
highlights of the goofs we pulled over the years.
My buddy Terry Mayer was in need of a good whacking, having helped
to play a good joke on me involving a banquet, a gold watch, and the untimely
demise of a poor sap named Gerald Stanley. So some kidnappers and I had a whole lot
of fun with him soon after Sun provided the computing muscle behind Pixar's Toy Story.
The classic McLean office goof against our senior network engineer
while he was in California for two weeks. The prank was accentuated by the
ingenious real-time video feed set up by fellow prankster Neil Pierson (remember, there was no video on the web in 1997!). We thought it couldn't get any better
than this until we concocted ....
We pulled off the Sun Microsystems April Fool's Day Prank of the Year for 2001 against our
Southern Area sales vice president, Gary Grimes. This one prompted a call to me
from someone in Sun's external communications department, who got an inquiry from a major
news outlet wondering if this prank was a serious comment by employees
on Sun's recently-announced SunONE
platform.
SunRise Club
SunRise Club was something everyone in the sales organization aspired to. It was
awarded to every sales person who made his or her sales quota for the year and to a
handful of systems engineers like me who were chosen by their management to go.
It was a three-day blow-out party with all expenses paid in some exotic part of the
world, and every other year it was held in Hawaii.
I was fortunate enough to be selected in 1995 and my friend Katie May and I headed
to the Hilton Waikoloa Village on Oahu for the official party, which included a formal ball and a special
Sun-only concert by Gladys Knight. Katie and I followed up our stay in Kona with a
few days in Kauai, where we hiked the Na Pali
Coast and enjoyed a relaxing week exploring the beaches.
I qualified for Club two more times while at Sun, but 1995 in Kona was by far the
best and most extravagant.
SunRise Club 1995
By the first day of SunRise Club, fellow SE Chris Kelly had spelled out the Sun Microsystems logo on the volcanic rocks in Kona.
SunRise Club 1995 was held at the beautiful Hilton Waikoloa Village in Kona, an enormous sprawling hotel with lots of coves and salt-water lagoons throughout the complex. Katie and I took advantage of every minute of it.
The Hilton Waikoloa Village has a lot to entertain people, including a wonderful dolphin encounter.
On the second night of SunRise Club, Katie and I enjoyed dressing to the nines at the formal and dancing ourselves silly.
My boss, Susan Lambert, with Katie and me at the second night formal.
Chuck Otts was the guy who brought my résumé to Sun and kicked off the process to get me hired there. Here he is contemplating his glow stick at the Gladys Knight concert.
A somewhat fuzzy Steve Fritzinger enjoys the Gladys Knight concert on our last day in Kona.
My sales area vice president Gary Grimes and Katie really hit it off. Several years later, Gary's wife, Sandy, could not remember meeting me but still remembered Katie ;-)
Here's sales rep Jim Davis and Dave Edstrom and their wives at the big Gladys Knight concert on our last night in Kona.
Susan Lambert at the Gladys Knight concert.
Katie and I at the big Gladys Knight concert on our last night in Kona.
Katie and I did some horseback riding on the Big Island before heading off for a week in Kauai.
Here's Katie and me in Hanalei Bay shortly before taking a boat tour of of the Napali Coast.
Before we took off for Kauai, Katie and I spent a day on the water. I had just gotten scuba certified and was anxious to try out my new skills in the beautiful blue Hawaiian waters while Katie snorkeled above me.
While in Kauai, Katie and I hiked up the Napali coast. Here is the magnificent view from the top of the ridge.
