IEEE 1275 was published in 1994 AFAICT, which was when Sun was still robust. Sbus/IEEE 1496 was published in 1993 (though the first Sun's started using it in 19

IEEE 1275 was published in 1994 AFAICT, which was when Sun was still robust. Sbus/IEEE 1496 was published in 1993 (though the first Sun's started using it in 1989). Before that Sun used VMEbus for their Motorola 68000-based systems. SPARC was licensed starting in the early 1990s as well: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC#SPARC_architecture_licensees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC#SPARC_architecture_licen... You could buy Tadpole's SPARC portable in 1992: * http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32324/Tadpole-SPARCbook-3/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32324/Tadpole-SPARCbo... While GPLing was late in the game, non-Sun SPARC OEMs were available for decades. You can still buy SPARC servers from Fujitsu it seems.