My 1985 version of the Sun Microsystems Catalyst

The book above is my 1985 version of the Catalyst. As it states on the cover:

A catalog of third-party referrral software and hardware from Sun Microsystems

Catalyst

Spring 1985


This Catalyst was "only" 360 pages in length. In the latter part of the 1980's, our Catalyst catalog became much larger. Why is this so significant? The number of high quality software and hardware Partners a computer company has will always be a fundamental requirement for success. Sun Microsystems has always been a very Partner centric company. Andy, Vhinod, Scott and Bill understood from February 1982 that Sun will live or die with their Partner network. Sun's Partner infrastructure is what I first noticed about Sun in 1984. Although, as my wife likes to remind me, I was too stupid to realize how successful Sun would be back in 1984.

The Catalyst was the "kerthump" factor that all of the Sales Reps (SRs) and Technical Systems Engineers (TSEs) used to drop from four feet above the customers desk to emphasize the strength of Sun's software and hardware partner solutions. You would simply not go on a sales call without bringing a long a few Catalyst Catalogs. On the back of the Catalyst was the price $24.95 We never sold it as far as I know.

It is fun to look through this Catalyst and see a 15 MFLOP board level array-processor that went for $14,900.


I am a HUGE believer in Sun's Partner ecosystem. Sun is first and foremost an infrastructure supplier and we depend on our Partners to complete a customer solution. I will be dedicating a reasonable number of cycles in Edstrom Photons-Electrons to discuss interesting technical solutions Sun's Partners are creating. I will talk later this week about where the name Edstrom Photons-Electrons comes from....