I think this sorta forgets how slow the cpus were - I was running mostly ASIC design workloads on big Sun hardware in 2001 and we eventually got some x86 boxes that were only 32 bit but could run some of our jobs - and the single-threaded perf of these commodity machines was amazing compared to the Sparc boxes. When x86-64 came around, this was the death of all the Sun hardware in that group.

Also sometime in 2000 I had interviewed at Compaq - the old Alpha group who I think later worked on Itanium at Intel. They were constantly frustrated because they couldn't even get a build from Synopsys of the design tools they needed to run on Alpha and were forced to use Sun hardware they described as "gasping and wheezing" to design their crazy fast cpu.

Sun lost on a bunch of fronts, but I think the amazing thing is they let happen to them what they did to the other big UNIX vendors before - they were eaten from the bottom by faster cheaper hardware.

Sun's various divisions all cared very much about their respective vendor lock-in, so they didn't innovate fast enough. The divisions that didn't have that innovated. On the way downward Sun cannibalized itself (think Sun PS getting closed).

That's the whole gist.

I can deny it. It was OK, but not amazing. I had to make pretty frequent repair calls on their gear--much more frequently than the less-technologically-amazing-but-solid-as-a-rock Dell and Compaq gear. IBM, Digital, and HP (yes, that HP, before they lost the Way) also had very good UNIX gear, but Sun had the mindshare during the '90s.

In terms of performance, even Linux 0.x on a 33Mhz 486-class processor could outperform a uniprocessor Sun/SPARC box at a fraction of the price.

I also question the sanity of anyone who thinks Sun's choice of 13W3 for a video connector was a good one. :-)

I loved Sun hardware but I'll deny that they were ahead of their time after 2003 or so. I had a boss who loved his pizza box but Intel/Linux crushed them in the 2000s on a price/performance basis.

One of the things that Larry Ellison found utterly baffling when he acquired Sun was the way that sales commission was calculated. It was all on the value of the contract, with no requirement for the contract to be profitable.

At least in the later stages of life Sun sales folks were literally selling the company into bankruptcy. They'd find out what competitors were offering, undercut it to the degree they'd make a loss, just to get the contract and their sweet commission.

To not realise you've got this going on really speaks to how little they were interested in the actual running of the business.

> You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them).

From Brian Cantrill's original HN comment in 2011(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033): "I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC". SPARC stopped being ahead of its time way before being bought by Oracle.