Ahh, ^H brings back memories. We had Solaris x86 machines in the computer lab at UC Santa Barbara when I was there from 97 to 02. They were deathly slow never mind that CDE was miserable too. I made it slightly less painful by loading the BSD versions of the utilities and using those. Pretty much gave up and ran FreeBSD on the desktop with Window Maker.

Sun got by because they had faster and more reliable hardware than what was available in the x86 space at the time. eBay's services ran on a handful of 64 CPU Starfire servers. And proprietary UNIX workstations had a bunch of specialized apps that weren't available on Linux at that point.

> My favorite anecdote exemplifying my opinion about Solaris at the time: you log into the console of your Sun workstation, running SunOS, with your Sun keyboard plugged in, and press backspace. It echoes ^H back to you. They couldn’t even figure out how to configure their own keyboards correctly out of the box.

That's really an old-school UNIX convention that should have died with the move from teletypes to CRT terminals. The default behavior was that ERASE was # and KILL was @ (rather than backspace and Ctrl-C). It was typical for these to get set properly on logging in.