I just received an email beginning:
Dear Geoffrey:
Congratulations on your 20 years of service with Sun!
In recognition of this milestone, we are pleased to offer you an award for your contribution and dedication to our company. To view your award options, please visit the website below. [Etcetera.]
Who’d have thunk it? [And come to think of it, where did that expression come from?]
I remember one hot summer day going to see Barry Folsom at the Sun sales office in Waltham. Barry had just been hired by Bernie Lacroute to head up the planned-but-as-yet-unstaffed East Coast Division of Sun. I asked Barry if his job offer was still open (he’d tried to hire me into the Rainbow group at Digital); he responded by asking me if I had any thoughts about how to accomodate IBM PCs in this new Network File System stuff that Bill Joy, Bob Lyon and Rusty Sandberg had come up with. “Yeah, I think so; I’ve been looking at NFS for our [Mosaic] OS,” I mused, and the rest is history.