Silicon Graphics is my favorite logo from this era, but Sun is solid. I have great memories of being assigned my very own Ultra 2 desktop with Creator3D graphics on the first day of my first tech job.
> Silicon Graphics is my favorite logo from this era...
Agreed. The 3D-pipe cube was beautiful. I believe they changed this logo to a simple "sgi" one by year 2000.
tbh, if the company still existed today, with the 3d-pipe logo, I would still class it my favourite logo. :-)
I really wanted one of their machines back in the day.. being a teenager. Of course, you need to money for one. How times changed when 3d cards came along, giving us SGI-powered-like machines for a fraction of the price.
Yes, this is the kind of logo that will last for a thousand years. Really gives a sense of spaciousness, I feel like I can really stretch my elbows in this logo.
It's pretty, but it doesn't look cyclic to me. It looks like "throw everything in this pit in the middle, where nothing can leave." The "cycle" part is important in recycling! I actually prefer the U.S. recycling logo.
The negative space makes the cycle. The green arrows represent items going to a central location to be recycled, while the white arrows represent them going back out into the world.
I can't make myself see a swastika even if I look for one. Can we really not use any symbology with 90-degree rotational symmetry but no mirror symmetries, ever again?
Ugh, a seamless combination of a swastika with an arrow cross. I don't think this would go well in Europe.
(It's not just me. The page has a legal disclaimer:
"This image shows (or resembles) a symbol that was used by the National Socialist (NSDAP/Nazi) government of Germany or an organization closely associated to it, or another party which has been banned by the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany." )
I just realized that the PNG file for the logo hosted on wikimedia, is 232KB!
That is a lot, that's unnecessarily large for such a simple logo, so I used vtracer, a raster image to SVG vectorizer, written in Rust, and SVGO, a SVG optimizer, to create the SVG file version of the logo, it is 16KB. a 93.1% improvement in size! (and they look the same)
The 2 commands used:
> wget 'https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png'
--2024-05-14 17:33:31-- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png
Loaded CA certificate '/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt'
Resolving upload.wikimedia.org (upload.wikimedia.org)... 185.15.59.240, 2a02:ec80:300:ed1a::2:b
Connecting to upload.wikimedia.org (upload.wikimedia.org)|185.15.59.240|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 237484 (232K) [image/png]
Saving to: ‘SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png’
SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigr 100%[=============================================>] 231.92K 821KB/s in 0.3s
2024-05-14 17:33:32 (821 KB/s) - ‘SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png’ saved [237484/237484]
> vtracer --input SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png --output SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png.svg
Conversion successful.
> svgo --precision 1 -o SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png-opt2.svg -i SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png.svg
Done in 73 ms!
63.162 KiB - 76% = 15.148 KiB
> ls -lah
total 114M
drwxr-xr-x 2 wis wis 4.0K May 14 17:34 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 wis wis 4.0K May 14 17:29 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 wis wis 232K Jan 12 2019 SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 wis wis 16K May 14 17:34 SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png-opt2.svg
-rw-r--r-- 1 wis wis 64K May 14 17:33 SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png.svg
Makes you think how much the Wikimedia Foundation can improve the loading experience for users and save in bandwidth costs, if they optimize all the PNG raster images that can/should be optimized, which this file is a prime example of.
I think it's up to the users themselves, who sometimes also write bots like this. I have encountered a lot of such effort when clicking on an image, especially on the more popular ones. As an example, check this out: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tux.svg
It's even better when you see the logo is made of 8 switches. In other words, 8 bits that make a byte. I'm a former Sun employee and loved that logo so much.
If you look at it from different angles, you can see "Thy" and, at the same time, a flying wild goose, symbolizing the airline's ability to cover long distances and soar high above.
The logo SUN Microsystems had is a 4-way ambigram with rotational symmetries. Designed by Professor Vaughan Pratt of Stanford, the logo features 4 interleaved copies of the word "sun", forming a rotationally symmetric ambigram, with the letters U and N in each word forming the letter S for the next word.
You can read the word "sun" if you rotate your head by 45°, 135°, 225°, or 315°.
It reminds me of Columbia Sportswear's logo [0] but it's cleverer. There's a third logo that reminds me of both of those but I've forgotten whose it was...
It is nice, unless you stare at it too long - in which case you might suddenly find yourself gibbering madly, staring at the walls, and chanting Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn! Iä! Iä! Iä! Iä! over and over again...
Oh wow, this book cover art-piece has the same concept, but even more impressive; the Sun logo has 3 "sun" words in the logo not 4 (I know I also thought they were 4 initially), but this art piece has the word "Al-Khwarizmi" 4 times, one for each edge of the square.
Edit: I can't count, both have 4 words, one word for each edge.
I have a circa 2000 Specialized Hardrock Comp 17" white/blue mountain bike and I always thought it was cool that the aluminum frame was "Designed by Sun Microsystems" complete with this logo.
Yet one more amazing thing that Dr. Vaughan Pratt invented. Its depressing how big of a gap there is between the top computer scientists and everybody else.
