This was my first visit to a Sun Microsystems campus, when Dan Maslowski brought me on as a contractor in the summer of 2007. I flew to Colorado from London, after dropping off my daughter Rossella on her way to do her senior year of high school at Woodstock. While I was there, Sun held a talent show among its employees, and a few other things happened.
Open Source Grid & Cluster Summit, 2008
Held in Oakland in May, 2008. I think I went primarily to film Dan Templeton giving a workshop.
Sun Community One, 2008
During my time at Sun Microsystems, I was involved in many events. Community One took place in San Francisco and was a Big Deal, including custom illustrations from Hugh MacLeod who was also at the time a Big Deal. Yes, that’s Ian Murdock, who had joined Sun a year earlier to try to Linux-ify Solaris.
Roxio party, 2000
Sometime in 2000 we had a fancy party to celebrate the spinoff of Roxio from Adaptec. Apparently we put on headgear to dance “YMCA.” The guy on the floor was the new CEO, Chris Gorog, whose claim to fame was that he’d produced a few little-known movies. But he was a Hollywood guy, and the Adaptec board rather grandiosely saw Roxio as a media company. Um, yeah… sorta.
CeBit, 2000
IN 2000, I went to Germany to help staff the Adaptec/CeQuadrat booth at CeBit, at the time the largest tech conference in Germany (and maybe all of Europe). CeQuadrat was another small CD-recording software company that Adaptec had bought, so we had acquired a(nother) bunch of German colleagues – I don’t remember whether this happened before or after Adaptec bought Toast, the most popular CD-recording software for Mac. I made friends among both teams, some of whom remain in touch today.