> even though Sun's proprietary stack was expensive & sticky What is he referring to? I'm in the semiconductor industry and in the 1990's everyone had a Sun w

> even though Sun's proprietary stack was expensive & sticky What is he referring to? I'm in the semiconductor industry and in the 1990's everyone had a Sun workstation on their desk. We had large 16 CPU Sun servers in the closet for bigger jobs. Since everything was either command line or X11 it was easy to set your DISPLAY variable and display things remotely. All of the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools ran on Sun / Solaris. Some of these tools from Cadence and Synopsys have list prices of over $1 million per license. Those big Sun monitors with DB13W3 connections were expensive. We started putting Linux / x86 boxes with 21" monitors on engineers desks and running programs remotely from the big Suns. We even started stacking the old desktop Sun workstations in the closet and running stuff remotely from them because people liked the bigger PC monitors. By 2000 the EDA software companies were recompiling their software for Linux. I talked to a few and they said it was a pretty easy recompile. x86 was getting to be faster and so much cheaper. We added a couple of -sun and -linux flags to the CAD wrappers. Everything was still connected over NFS with the same shell and Perl scripts. Honestly the transition was pretty seamless. When AMD released their first 64-bit chips we bought a lot of them and retired our final Suns that were only around for >4GB jobs.