TOGETHER with other members of the IT Journalists Association of the Philippines (more popularly known as CyberPress), I had dinner with executives from Sun Microsystems Philippines led by its president Cynthia Mamon and chief operation advisor Lim Teow Siang.
Here’s a pic of me and Cynthia.
It was basically a small-get-together for tech journalists that also marked the 25th anniversary of Sun. I couldn’t help but feel a bit nostalgic.
No, I wasn’t covering Sun (a name derived from Stanford University Network) when it started 25 years ago in the US on Feb. 24, 1982. I’ll leave it up to the older tech journalists to reminisce over those days, heh. But I was old — or geeky enough — to answer when we were asked what the original name of Java was: Oak.
Sun Microsystems Philippine, Inc. was one of the very first IT companies I was covering when I became a staff writer for the defunct Metropolitan Computer Times in 1996. Back then, the company was still known as Philippine Systems Products Inc. — PSPI became Sun Microsystems Philippines in July 1999 following Sun’s investment in the Philippine company. It’s also memorable because my very first foreign trip was to Ho Chi Minh City to cover the Sun Asia South Symposium.
So I was covering Java back when it was a new thing — I’m talking about the days of Sun’s then Java evangelist Miko Matsumura and the excitement we felt when Cynthia declared that the Philippines would raise an army of Java evangelists. These were the days when the Web was just beginning to make its presence felt in the Philippines, and we actually had events like the Browser Bruiser Battle between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and the then market leader Netscape (the Netscape guys, by the way, didn’t show up for the scheduled man0-a-mano at Internet World Philippines). Fun times.
Anyway, here’s a clip of Lim (whom people call T.S. for short - no relaion to T.S. Eliot, heh) responding to my question on the current state of Java — whether it has diverged from Sun’s original direction and what the future will be like for this platform.
Thanks to Sun’s corporate communications people Menchu Hernandez and Gerilyn Baltan — it was a fun evening.
