Back in one of my first mom-and-pop ISP jobs, my boss was interested enough in exotic hardware that he decided to buy a Sun Microelectronics motherboard with an

Back in one of my first mom-and-pop ISP jobs, my boss was interested enough in exotic hardware that he decided to buy a Sun Microelectronics motherboard with an Ultrasparc IIi CPU. We were able to put it in a large form factor ATX case, find a compatible video card and Ultra2 SCSI drives and install Solaris 2.7 (or 2.8?) on it. We later deployed it as an LDAP and MySQL server amongst other things. It was a real eye opener for me having come from the world of Windows/Linux on x86. Later he bought a bunch of DEC Alpha motherboards and CPU's as well, I had fun installing Debian and compiling pre-1.0 versions of Gnome for them. These experiences made me far more comfortable with non-x86 systems and I'm grateful for that exposure more than 20 years later.