Jolitz Heritage Site - Chronicling the Legacies of the Jolitz Family of Silicon Valley, including the accomplishments of William Jolitz, Lynne Jolitz, Rebecca Jolitz, Ben Jolitz, and William Leonard Jolitz.
Symmetric started out as a limited partnership, funded by Technoloy Funding, Incorporated.
Which is still run by its founder, the same who invested in Symmetric - Charles R. Kokesh.
Charlie liked our push into systems and networking.
A networked BSD based systems company was built off a small investment.
William Jolitz and two others founded Symmetric Computer Systems, Inc,
a computer systems manufacturer and vendor. Symmetric
designed, programmed, and build many products,
the most famous of which was the Symmetric 375.
October 26, 2002. "Looking for Symmetric 375", "met Mr. and Mrs. Jolitz, who did the first work on porting BSD Unix to the 386" at Vintage Computer Faire 2002. NASA Ames Research Center. Showed the original Symmetric Computer Systems operational running wire-wrap (20,000 connections, 25x22 inch board) Proto I computer (in the case) from 1983. Also showed a final production unit operational with 4.3BSD SYMMETRIX from 1987. Discussion and display board on “Funding a Systems Startup” about Symmetric Computer Systems, a venture-backed company founded by William Jolitz in 1982.
William and Lynne Jolitz were inspired to work on 386BSD by the experience with
Symmetric Computer Systems (see "William Jolitz and Symmetric Computer Systems") and the uses of BSD on a ubiquitous platform it inspired.
BSD needed to jump to the 386. According to the website (see the_past() - name_origin):
In looking for the good, the simplest spanning name to grab mindshare was chosen.
Just as Windows and UNIX have been named the same all along, saw no need in any
different name. Others, in attempting to look for the bad, chose to narrowly view the name as applying to a specific chip to force an
unearned claim of obsolescence. Inside all of them, the machine dependant names are all "386".
William Jolitz and two others founded Symmetric Computer Systems, Inc,
a computer systems manufacturer and vendor. Symmetric
designed, programmed, and build many products,
the most famous of which was the Symmetric 375.
The Vintage Computer Faire was held last weekend at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View last weekend. Sellam Ismail, VCF Coordinator and vintage computer collector, was kind enough to send me a couple of passes. Unlike the cozy NASA-Ames location of several years ago, the Vintage Computer Faire, typically home of games, small computers like t ...
Matt Marshall mentioned an old defunct company that I was rather fond of - Miniscribe. Now, Miniscribe in the 1980's went from nothing to making and selling quite reliable 85 MByte drives (full size) at what was then a really great price (around $850 in quantity). It was the
Went to the 2004 First Robotics Regional Competition in Silicon Valley, held at San Jose State University. And it was awesome to see all these kids running their "bots" through the paces. Got some great footage, even though Los Gatos High School's robot broke midway through competition.
Seeing the excitement, the fun, and the high-tech hijinks reminded me of the days when we were putting together workstati ...
A teeny tiny acquisition announcement brought back a lot of memories today.
Remember Santa Cruz Operation - no, not the SCO you read about fighting IBM and Novell, but the "old SCO"? Bob Greenberg and friends did a very brain-damaged version of Unix for the PC (originally derived from Version 7 and System 3) way back in the dark ages. Bob had done a Version 6 Unix derivative ...
Alright! Yes, sometimes I do read slashdot when it's amusing, and the discussion of how you can create your own custom panic screen (or BSOD window) for OS/X via an API is amusing (my son Ben points this stuff out for me - he feels it's one of his sacred tasks). Joke panic screens have been around a long time, but the battle over "how much information to give people" has led to many not-so-amusing battles, especially when we were creating Lynne's Take on Tech - Sure We're Open Source - Not
Alas, apparently that silly press release last week has totally confused the writing fraternity into thinking the 1990's were actually the 1980's (see Fun Friday - Homer's Illiad to be "Improved" for Silicon Valley). Aside from the fact that Clinton and Reagan were both absolutely adored by the American people, I don't think the 1980's were really enough like the 1990's to easily confuse the two decades, do you?
OK, most people think that startups are done by 20-something guys who sleep on the floor, talk really fast and don't use deoderent. Well, that was kind of true 20 years ago, and that is the type of guy who some VCs like to fund thinking "Wow, they'll work day and night and all I have to do is pay their parking tickets". But what about those "moms" who are also "entrepreneurs"? Well, according to Marianne Costantinou of the San Francisco Chronicle, a women who has kids and wants to run a busin ...
Well, my book review Free Culture And the Internet discussing Larry Lessig's latest book is now on the newstand in Dr. Dobbs Journal. After I had Coffee with Larry Lessig back in April of this year, he kindly had a copy sent to me.
My background in this area is most extensive - in fact, it predates Dr. Lessig's professional interest by a bit. ...
Dennis Rockstroh of ActionLine in the Merc attempted to handle the frustration of a Sony Vaio user recently. Turns out the poor man continually had the power just blit out on him while working on his laptop. Back and forth to the factory it went, never seeming to get any better. Dennis helped the gentleman get a replacement laptop from the factory, but no one seemed to understand why such a problem was occurring and why it required a complete replacement to rectify. Sony didn't wish to ...
The desperation for eyeballs on news websites has led to a lot of "People" styled columns, especially in the NY Times. But I just couldn't resist commenting on the "Who's Smarter: Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg?" column, if only because I know something of the players and their backers.
I know journalists like to fancy that there's something special about succeeding in this field - after al ...
Three very interesting little open source stories passed my desk recently that I found shone facets on open source issues.
Last week, the Industrial Commercial Bank of China has signed a deal with Unix-clone Turbolinux to run open-source software in all of the bank's operations. "Linux deployment is growing in China, with software makers targeting segments such as banking, insurance and wireless applications. Intel last year began a program to boost sales in China of desktop computers ...
Well, given the egos in Silicon Valley, it comes as no surprise that a press release like this would appear. It was so inaccurate that the Wall Street Journal got fooled and then had to reverse themselves and say Bill Joy is not a "venture partner" after all. Steve Lohr of the NY Times commen ...
While we were working on getting all those Jolix 386BSD fans their Porting Unix to the 386 articles (we have been swamped BTW - and yes, there's more coming), a few other items of interest this week...
If you made money on Google (or if you wished you had made money on Google), you might try using The Google Test to eval ...
Judy Estrin and I have both been around in Silicon Valley. I was at Symmetric Computer Systems soldering the first five motherboards for the 375 while she was at Zilog with Bill Carrico (who was the product manager for the Z80). Paul Baran, a great influence on my work in layer-4 switching using dataflow techniques (InterProphet patents) was a student of her father's at UCLA (where my son is off to in a couple weeks, but in physics, not computing).
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds. - George Eliot.
Today is a special day. Exactly 14 years ago today, after 15 monthly feature articles on Porting Unix to the 386 appeared in Dr. Dobbs Journal, 386BSD Release 0.0 went public.
A number of 386BSD enthusiasts have noticed that we always favored holidays for releases. St. Patrick, as ...
