I showed Oliver a post from Brand New this morning about the redesigned logo of the Science Museum in London. The “before” logo looked like this:

Oliver said that this reminded him of a logo he’d seen before, something to do with the sun or with solar.

He searched Google for “sun logo” (no luck) and “solar logo” (no luck) and then for variations that described the logo he had in his mind “logo italics horizontal vertical.”

No luck.

I tried to walk him through different approaches to matching what was in his mind with what could be found on Google, but the exercise ended in failure.

Five minutes later, after I’d left the picture, I got an email from Oliver with the Sun Microsystems logo attached:

That was it.

This is remarkable because:

1. The old Science Museum and the Sun Microsystems logo do, indeed, share a fundamental design concept, but one that’s difficult to explain (“squared-up lettershapes arranged interestingly?”).
2. Through some mechanism that I didn’t bear witness to, Oliver completed the task once I was done interfering.
3. Sun Microsystems went out of business?!

Somewhere in the back of my mind I recalled that Sun had been swallowed up in the last decade (it was Oracle, 7 years ago, in 2010), but I’d lost track of how that proceeded, and that Sun had ceased to exist as a brand.

There was a time in the early 1990s when I used resources from the Sun-sponsored sunsite.unc.edu at the University of North Carolina several times a day; back in the day, this site, and its cousin at MIT, tsx11.mit.edu, were the place to go for Linux and related software.

The original PEI Crafts Council webserver, and much of what underlay the original Province of PEI website used resources from those two sites. At the time it was impossible to imagine a world where Sun Microsystems didn’t play a significant role in the Internet. And now it’s gone.

Also, my son is pretty sharp.