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What if Sun Microsystems acquired Apple in 1996?

100 points by Apocryphon 5y ago

voidfunc 5y ago
I found the forum thread really hard to follow... I'm not sure it matters if Sun buys Apple. Jobs probably ends up taking NeXT in the direction he took Apple upon return. Steve Jobs is the key to a lot of stuff and the revolution in personal and consumer computing in the 2000's. I don't think it matters what company he does that under.
- gumby 5y ago
  Jobs was leading NeXT nowhere. He needed the infrastructure of an Apple to make it viable.
  - flomo 5y ago
    Besides NeXT being largely unsuccessful, it was also entirely enterprise-oriented. In an alternate history, perhaps Jobs leverages his fortune and hollywood connections to start "iPod Inc." He always envied Sony's expertise at consumer gadgets.
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      Thinking about it Apple is really just an iPod Inc: looking at the iPhone and airpods as evolutions of iPod (iPod touch is the missing link)
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Looks like that's what happens in this timeline in page 2, when NeXT merges with Pixar in 1999.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Mac never has grown beyond a small slice of the overall personal computer market. iPod, iPad, iPhone, etc. were absolutely revolutions that created and dominated entire markets, even today. However IMHO Apple still never got beyond a niche of the market for desktop/laptop computers. They build beautiful desktop/laptop hardware but the market seems happy with cheap devices that run Windows.
  - lost_soul 5y ago
    You're not wrong but there is a cachet with Macs that is undeniable. It's not unusual for the executives or creatives to use Macs in an otherwise fully Windows based organization.
  - travisgriggs 5y ago
    I don’t know. Obviously windows machines outsell macs. But when I go to (programming) conferences, I always count the machines in the room. 40-60% are macs, the remainder a mix of windows and Linux. When I visit any of my 3 kids on their respect campuses. I see the same. Some times even stronger. I spent time in Boston 2 weeks ago and rode the tubes a lot. I saw a LOT of MacBooks. Way more than all other laptops combined.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Try to go to developer conferences on developing countries, or those unlucky ones not part of Gsomething, and those numbers will surely be others.
  - necovek 5y ago
    I would venture to say that it was iPod + iTunes that brought Apple back, and then iPhone was just the icing at exactly the right time (Nokia was also prototyping "internet tablets", albeit with resistive touch screens). They did make the most of it, and they are definitely the show-off market leader (when you want to show off your laptop, that's what you get ;). My company recently got me a MacBook Pro 14, and while it's fast, I don't enjoy using it for the same reasons I hated my old XPS13: I hate the keyboard and glossiness of the screen (and sharp edges too). I am a Thinkpad X1 guy, those are machines I happily go back to.
  - tsunamifury 5y ago
    The Mac laptop has gone back and forth being the top laptop manufacturer in the world. It’s currently third but has been 2nd and first. It’s always been the most profitable. I don’t even like apple but you are so incredibly wrong it’s laughable. This might have been true 20 years ago but dude. Apple is huge and it’s personal computing is huge too.
- legalcorrection 5y ago
  I don't think that's necessarily true. There were many millions of people using Macs and many of them were intensely, religiously loyal to Apple, regardless of the technically (de)merits of the system. Launching a new OS as an upgrade to that massive install base is very different than trying to take a high-end workstation and turn it into a mass market product. And it's an interesting question how much that pre-existing Apple user base was instrumental to the success of the iPod.
- jshier 5y ago
  Of course it matters, as NeXT was nearly out of business by the time Apple bought it. All of their hardware products had failed and their attempt as a cross platform SDK, OpenStep, was barely holding on. Their only successful product was WebObjects (which Apple quickly destroyed) and even that was fairly limited. Without being part of a billion dollar corporation it's unlikely Jobs could've funded his ideas from his personal fortune. I also think it's unlikely he could've done what he did at a Apple at a company where he had fewer checks on his impulses, as his time at NeXT proves.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    WebObjects port to Java was still done under NeXT's umbrella, and it was initially used for the store (no idea what powers it nowadays), and even then its fate was sealed under Steve's management.
- firecall 5y ago
  Jobs candidly admitted in an interview around the time that NeXT just didnt have the scale to make a difference. I forget his exact words :-)
- panick21_ 5y ago
  > Jobs probably ends up taking NeXT in the direction he took Apple upon return. NeXT was a pure software company and not a successful one either. The idea that they could start doing things like iPod is pretty out there.
  - TickleSteve 5y ago
    "NeXT was a pure software company" The iconic NeXT cube (and NeXTStations) would disagree with you there.
    - walrus01 5y ago
      By the time apple acquired them, their board had long abandoned the idea of being a hardware manufacturer due to collosal financial losses. The next hardware is cool to look at in retrospect but was very expensive and sold poorly. After 1995 or so next was in no financial state to design and ship any new hardware.
      - TickleSteve 5y ago
        Ignoring the quality of the business, NeXT is quite well known for their hardware.
        walrus01 5y ago
        historically and in the bigger picture of things, yes, but in the late 1990s by the time that it came to NeXT getting acquired by apple, their hardware was long since irrelevant.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      You should look up the history. At that time they basically were a software company and not very successful either. Without being bought by Apple its likely they would have died. Its actually kind of crazy how high NEXT got valued.
      - 5y ago
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  I don't think Jobs could have done much with Sun, or much more with NeXT, which had pretty much run out of road by then. Sun was professional, Jobs was consumer. Jobs needed to be top dog and in charge of concept, and he couldn't have done that at Sun. He also needed some constraints and consumer focus, which Apple provided. NeXT was basically a vanity project. It was poorly run from a business POV, but developed some decent tech. The real primary motivation wasn't to make money, it was to keep some attention on Jobs and maintain his profile as an Important Innovative Person. Sun was engineering-led not image-led and wedded to workstation/server. That market turned out to be a relatively short-lived spasm - a legacy of the mini market pioneered by DEC - in a much longer consumer-oriented tech history. So there was an impossible tension there. It might have worked if Apple had remained a completely independent division and Jobs had been given a free hand to run it. But that was never really remotely likely. It might also have worked if Jobs had any interest in the server/business market. But he really didn't - possibly because it was "boring" and not mass market, which meant less attention and praise for him.
DonHopkins 5y ago
I used to wonder about that at the time, but they would have both wanted to be in the driver's seat, and it simply wouldn't have worked. But the world would have been a better place if IBM had bought Sun instead of Oracle. Which bring me to this old joke: Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? A: IBM.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  I always thought Sun would have been a good cultural fit for Google.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Quite a bit of Sun software engineering ended up at Google so you're not wrong. Especially after Oracle shut down all Sun software development and laid everyone off in 2017 there was a huge wave of referral hiring.
  - invalidname 5y ago
    Eric Schmidt was the CTO of Sun for a while and brought that culture to Google. I see a lot of the problems Sun had in Google and IMHO it's about to collapse under its own weight and lack of focus.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    Taking into account the elegance of SUN OS and Solaris compared with Android and the usability of OpenLook compared to Android GUI, i would doubt it.
  - mcv 5y ago
    A lot of people at the time thought Google should have bought Sun. Google was heavily involved in Java at the time (with Dalvik especially), and got in a lot of trouble with Oracle when they bought Sun.
  - cestith 5y ago
    I really wish Compaq after buying DEC would have bought Sun, BeOS, and Apple rather than get acquired by HP.
vegetablepotpie 5y ago
> August 10, 1997: Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced yesterday that it has completed the acquisition of Apple Computers > November 8, 1997: Apple released a new version of the Macintosh personal computer yesterday … the MacUltra is powered by a 300 MHz UltraSPARC II microprocessor. The MacUltra is shipped with the “Macintosh Solaris” operating system – a version of Sun’s Solaris OS with a classic Mac OS-derived desktop environment and full compatibility with classic Mac OS application In 3 Months they switched architectures, integrated a DE on top of a new OS, and wrote an emulator for a new architecture. Impressive.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  They already had an official emulator they sold that ran on SPARC/Solaris, for 68k software at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Application_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Application_Environm...
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Way too mainstream. Imagine Pomegrenade running on up to 4x4 Ross-Cypress-Fujitsu asynchronous CryoSparx, consisting of Suns (Hyper?)News-thing with seamless classic Mac OS integration, that ADB/Localtalk stuff for periphery, and so on.
cbreynoldson 5y ago
Would've been interesting to see Sun collide with Alan Kay at Apple
alberth 5y ago
Larry Ellison offered to Steve Jobs that he’d buy Apple for him. Steve and Larry were extremely close friends (in each other’s wedding). Steve declined. About a decade later, Larry acquired Sun. https://www.cio.com/article/238191/how-larry-ellison-plotted-to-buy-apple-and-make-steve-jobs-ceo.html/amp https://www.cio.com/article/238191/how-larry-ellison-plotted...
- srvmshr 5y ago
  > Steve and Larry were extremely close friends (in each other’s wedding). Trivia: Steve Jobs was Ellison's wedding photographer. Ellison trusted no one except Steve when it came to aesthetics.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  As Apple users we really dodged a bullet there lol. Imagine being sued by Apple because of some license condition :)
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    You mean like being kicked out of the store?
neilv 5y ago
Sun might've shed the Newton, but I suspect they would've had their own vision for networked mobile handhelds or otherwise very portable devices. For consumer mobile in 1996, maybe they'd think more like Internet-connected handhelds based on HotJava (Web browser with Java-based content handlers installed on-the-fly, in this case partly for networking efficiency, partly disconnected operation, partly promotng their vision of Web). While also making compatible HotJava browser available for all the popular desktop platforms. (And JavaScript never took over.) But for corporate IT customers, they might still push more their your-desktop-everywhere thin client ideas, of course served by Sun servers in the data centers. But also based on Java.
invalidname 5y ago
Ex-Sun guy. Sun was terrible at mergers and bought/killed products on a regular basis. The culture difference between Apple/Sun is so big... There's absolutely no way this would have worked. I would have loved to have a proper Sparc. Those machines were amazing and their UI/UX sucked so bad. Sun never found an opportunity it couldn't botch.
- walrus01 5y ago
  I have to agree because I don't think apple would have successfully turned sunos into a unix-based macos9 successor. If you look at the earliest versions of OSX it's NeXT with a macos9 skin on top of it. But it's recognizably NeXT.
- linguae 5y ago
  A sad example of a Sun acquisition that went nowhere was Lighthouse Design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design), a software company that specialized in productivity software for NeXTSTEP. One of the company's most famous products was Concurrence, a presentation tool that Steve Jobs used and influenced the design of Apple Keynote. In an alternative timeline, Lighthouse Design could have been the premier developer for Mac OS X. Sun bought Lighthouse Design at a time when it invested in NeXT's OpenStep API; in fact, there was a port of OpenStep to Solaris. However, Java ended up taking off around 1995-96, and Sun's strategy changed from supporting OpenStep to promoting Java. Lighthouse Design's software didn't fit in this strategy, and sadly the software has been abandoned, even though Sun was in a great position to polish and update the software when Mac OS X was released. I understand why Lighthouse Design was sold, though. Before Apple bought NeXT at the end of 1996, the future for NeXT-based software companies appeared bleak, and these companies faced the challenging prospects of (1) porting their software, implemented using NeXT's then state-of-the-art APIs and tools, to platforms that were more commercially viable yet lacked such tooling, and (2) competing with the 800-pound gorilla that is Microsoft; WordPerfect, Lotus, and Claris tried but to no avail; how was Lighthouse Design going to compete against Microsoft? Being a productivity software company was tough in the 1990s; if you targeted mainstream platforms (Mac and Windows) then you had to compete against Microsoft, and if you targeted non-mainstream platforms (OS/2, NeXTSTEP, BeOS), then while you're shielded from competing against Microsoft Office, you're gambling on the success of these platforms (and had these platforms became commercially widespread, Microsoft would have just ported Office to them, anyway).
greggsy 5y ago
I’ve been loving the 90’s computing nostalgia theme on HN lately - keep it coming. Sun are obviously best known for their Sparc systems, but their x86 workstations were beautiful and well ahead of their time in terms of serviceability. The classic design would still look modern today.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  As somebody to young for this, what x86 workstation are you referring to?
  - scrlk 5y ago
    In the mid-00s, Sun started building x86 workstations using AMD Opteron CPUs when they were trouncing any Intel chip. The Ultra 2x/4x series looked great: http://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/ultra_20m2/ http://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/ultra_20m2/ IMO the best implementation of the design came in the SPARC versions where the optical drive and IO were combined in to one 5.25" bay (e.g. Ultra 25, pg 4: http://archives.retrobridge.org/sun/system-handbook/3.4/Systems/Ultra25_shared/documents/Ultra25_Ultra45_JTF.pdf http://archives.retrobridge.org/sun/system-handbook/3.4/Syst...).
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      I knew about the AMD Server but I didn't know they had Workstations too. These to look pretty awesome.
    - awiesenhofer 5y ago
      Oh wow, didn't know these were a thing! They look great, now I kinda want one, haha. Though I wonder, who bought these over similar Dell/HP/etc boxes? Did they have any special features or was it mostly just about them running Solaris first-party?
    - greggsy 5y ago
      Yep, I had an Ultra 20 opteron. Nice machine.
didip 5y ago
Success could be possible only if they also bought NeXT and replaces Scott McNealy with Steve Jobs.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Jobs was never interested in Server and that where Sun could have made the most bank looking back at it from now. Sun would have been a natural as cloud company and a x86 server and NAS vendor.
  - smackeyacky 5y ago
    They tried and failed, the dotcom bust did them in, there was so much sparc hardware on the 2nd hand market it killed their server business for a while. Their x86 servers were never as good as HP/Compaq and a lot of their ancillary hardware like tape backup was rebadged from HP. When servers got going again, price became absolutely key and Linux had become so good it made solaris seem like yesterdays news. I do like this alternative timeline, but if Apple went Solaris it wouldn't have surprised me if Microsoft did a linux distro in the early 2000s which would have really made for a strange future.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      > Their x86 servers were never as good as HP/Compaq Some of their x86 AMD server were pretty good. > When servers got going again, price became absolutely key and Linux had become so good it made solaris seem like yesterdays news. Technically this is very questionable. I would argue Solaris was way ahead at that point. > I do like this alternative timeline, but if Apple went Solaris it wouldn't have surprised me if Microsoft did a linux distro in the early 2000s which would have really made for a strange future. Not sure I understand that logic.
      - smackeyacky 5y ago
        Solaris was technically better, no question, but linux got "good enough" and for most customers that put expensuve Sun licences out of the question. Back then, Microsoft saw sun as a major competitor, I don't think its out of the question they would have tried selling Unix again. They did in the 1980s.
martyvis 5y ago
There is another alternative timeline were HP and Apple merged. https://link.medium.com/ya6XVMlk8ob https://link.medium.com/ya6XVMlk8ob
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Dell licenses Mac software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28769531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28769531
panick21_ 5y ago
Those companies are so different and by that point it was a bit late. Its more likely that they both would have gone bankrupt in 2000. Apple did seriously consider moving to Solaris by the late 90s, had Solaris been Open by then they very likely would have. I think maybe in the early 90s if Sun had adopted SPARC instead of PowerPC and changed to Salaris giving Sun a real "PC" division. That would have been more sensible. The more interesting possibility (and more realistic) would have been a merger with SGI. Together maybe they could have both done better. I think had this been done in the 90s putting together the best from Solaris and IRIX (and hopefully Open Source) combined with push for x86 Solaris on PC compatible. Or more if you want to be really aggressive try to create a lower cost SPARC 'Home Workstation'. Taking on Wintel before Windows 95 might have been possible. Even if only far a small part of a big market.
Animats 5y ago
Here's an alternative story. In 1993, Sears exited the mail order business. In 1994, Amazon was founded. It might have been different. Sears already owned Prodigy. The World Wide Web already existed in the early 1990s. PCs had been available for over 10 years. Modems had reached 28Kb/s. What if Sears had simply put their huge catalog on line and started taking orders? Sears already had the logistics infrastructure for deliveries. Amazon might never have launched.
- walrus01 5y ago
  Where prodigy failed was not pivoting from its walled garden custom binary app of content to a general purpose dialup ISP. By the time they thought to to do it, it was late 1996 or early 97 and plenty of other generalists were in the market (netcom, mind spring, etc) Who knows what might have happened if they'd brought all of sears products online for purchase, in their existing standalone prodigy browser software...
- mulmen 5y ago
  I don’t know how Sears failed so hard. I worked for them as a frontline sales rep at the turn of the century. I’d love to hear a story from the bigwigs. The POS system was archaic, even at that time. Nobody trusted inventory counts, it was never accurate. But the website was always worse. Plus we had no workable access to it. It took an eternity to load a page. And what you saw was worthless. Sears treated the website with contempt. We had a mandatory company wide meeting on a Sunday night. They played a pre recorded message from the CEO telling us how important family was to the company. He was at home with his family. We weren’t. That never registered with Sears. My job at the time was ostensibly to sell hand tools, or lawn tools, or consumer electronics. But that wasn’t the point at all. We got paid commission. The item was nothing. Maybe 3%, probably less. A few dollars. But a successful Sears card signup? That was a flat $20.00 payout. Add on a warranty? 30% commission on the warranty. Bonuses were paid to management based on the ratio of sales with addons. So for a sales rep like me we will take any sale. But my boss would prefer I not sell a TV at all if I don’t get the warranty. Sears was a predatory business for decades. I don’t know when they lost their way but it was long before the turn of the century. Modern business would do well to study how Sears failed.
masswerk 5y ago
Love this! However, I think, "Macintosh Solaris" certainly would have been "System S". :-)
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  There's a "System V" joke to be made there, although it's a little late (in Mac OS versions) to quite make sense.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
I think the opposite might have actually happened. If Jonathan Schwartz hadn't pissed Steve off by talking to the press, macOS would have had ZFS and might ave acquired Sun.
aa-jv 5y ago
I would have killed for an SGI laptop back in those days. It always amuses me that the best Unix laptop workstation vendor ended up being Apple.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Sun on their glory days used to have laptops as well, oh well.
kochbeck 5y ago
During US v Microsoft, I was in the middle of writing a brief to the court arguing that the solution to Microsoft’s monopoly was not to split the OS from the application groups, but rather to disallow Microsoft from publishing its own compilers anymore. Because, you see, then they would be forced to have fully documented OS calling structures, because they would have to communicate them to the compiler vendors. In spite of their weakened state at the time, IBM would have gladly bought Microsoft’s dev tools groups, dooming them thoroughly as they attempted to merge them into the VisualAge group (née CSet). I always believed the net effect of this would be that Microsoft would suddenly have to do an about face and support one of the OSS compiler chains, probably GCC. At the time, they had a current Mach-compiled version of Windows that was still being maintained, and odds are Windows—not MacOS—would have been the ascendant Mach-based OS, because MS would have lost a lot of its ability to fix its problems by losing control of its dev chain. They’d need more radical abstraction than the NT kernel was giving them at the time. Because it was still a branch from OS/2 1.2 which was… special and half-baked. (It’s important to remember that Linux was still considered a toy by most—the “serious” OSS OS was still BSD. And if you had real workloads you ran Solaris, even though you knew Sun was somehow going to doom themselves. The world then looks nothing like the world now.) This really would have obviated the need for Apple to sell to Sun. Instead, MS would never have made the rescue investment, Sun would continue to skitter off the rails, and Apple would have sold to… I dunno, probably someone weird like Sony. Remember them? Because MS going to Mach would have poisoned the shift from Copeland to NeXTStep… the world barely wanted one Mach-based OS, much less two. One neat side effect, though, is we would have probably seen something a lot like WSL back in 2000 or so. Because the Mach Win build took much more advantage of the OS “personalities” features than MacOS did. Back then, all of this mattered a lot, because things were far less elegant than they are now. It’s hard to imagine how far we came in the intervening 25 years. So very far. But in the middle of writing that brief, Judge Jackson shot his stupid mouth off, and I was like, “Welp, nobody’s getting split up now.” And I put it in my archive of good ideas that aren’t gonna happen. So no, I don’t think there was ever a real scenario where Sun bought Apple.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  Perhaps you could try reading the timeline's account of U.S. v. Microsoft, the three parts of which are present on the first and second pages of the link.
int0x2e 5y ago
Another interesting question (to me at least), is what if Sun had made Solaris open source about 10 years earlier. I think there's a chance what is now Linux (and potentially Android as well) would have adopted the Solaris kernel. The differences may not have been great to some, but I believe we may have been about 10 years ahead in the opensource OS game by now, since the Solaris kernel was such an advanced thing at the time, and with the thriving Linux community it could have really flourished...
privatdozent 5y ago
Snapple
jasoneckert 5y ago
I'd like to think that if Sun bought Apple in 1996, we'd eventually have this product (and yes, I'd buy it): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E4elko8VIAUS8Nz.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E4elko8VIAUS8Nz.jpg
- nukemaster 5y ago
  My Pinephone looks like that. Just run FVWM with the MWM theme.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Forget themes - I have successfully run actual CDE on my pinephone. It's a bit cramped (probably should play with the resolution and/or dpi), but it works. (This works because CDE is open source builds fine on aarch64. I forget if I used the AUR package on Arch Linux ARM or just did a git clone && ./configure && make && make install.)
    - nukemaster 5y ago
      I really should give CDE another shot. Last time I tried building it I ran into trouble but I may have been on Alpine.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        Yeah I don't know that anyone's tested it on Alpine (or any musl system, actually), but it works fine on every GNU/Linux system I've tried. Also depending on when you last tried, it uses autoconf now so none of the weird `make World` stuff.
thinkyfish 5y ago
Enjoy your Oracle oPhone(TM).
phoehne 5y ago
One thing I've learned over the years is how sales people are rewarded is important to the products a company decides to sell. It actually drives the product mix and constrains their choices about new markets or new approaches. Enterprise companies reward sales people on commission on large deals structured across hardware, software, support and services. Those companies are allergic to "retail" opportunities. It suspect it would have been impossible for Sun to sell affordable computers individually or in low quantities because no sales person would have been compensated. Most people wonder why "great technology" dies at the hands of corporate overlords. I don't. I look at where the incentives lie and if they lie on big deals in an industry that's becoming commoditized, that company is likely toast. Why doesn't the business change to accommodate lower cost, commodity systems or servers? Even in the late 1990's the writing was on the wall. For years as SGI came out with more $40,000+ workstations competing with $10,000 high end x86? Why did Sun push our company in 2000/2001 to buy (relatively mediocre) preforming SPARC $75,000 servers when the industry was clearly moving to commodity x86/64 at $20,000? The high prices lead to bigger deals and more commission. I was briefly the beneficiary of the Sun startup program and we bought some Sun x86 hardware at reduced rates. Without that program, I would not have been able to afford what was well designed and good quality hardware. I would simply have gone for DELL x86. I was also a Sun reseller for a while, and it was always about the packaged deal. The sales people have an incredible amount of sway. After all, with no money coming in, you don't last long. (For normal companies - zero revenue unicorns make no sense to me). They will actively undermine any effort to change the situation. They will ridicule and belittle the new technology. But they're sales people and not technologists or developers. It's like watching the dinosaurs make fun of the asteroid. (What a big, dumb rock!) They would rather have yet another bad sales quarter in an endless string of bad sales quarters than attack their compensation. It's especially fun when it's the end of the quarter and you finally get the call from a sales rep. They're desperate to meet their quota so they'll make a deal on your pathetically small order. They idea that a customer could get on a website and just buy the product at a reasonable cost without having to have a sales meeting to upsell them on another batch services, is incomprehensible to them. Had Sun bought Apple? It would have been some vaporware product announcements until they realized their sales people weren't interested, sold off any assets of value, and shoved the rest of it in a warehouse as IP. They would go back to trying to hold the line against pesky cheap PCs (which aren't real workstations) and x86 servers (which aren't real servers).

100 points by Apocryphon 5y ago

I found the forum thread really hard to follow... I'm not sure it matters if Sun buys Apple. Jobs probably ends up taking NeXT in the direction he took Apple upon return. Steve Jobs is the key to a lot of stuff and the revolution in personal and consumer computing in the 2000's. I don't think it matters what company he does that under.

gumby 5y ago
Jobs was leading NeXT nowhere. He needed the infrastructure of an Apple to make it viable.
- flomo 5y ago
  Besides NeXT being largely unsuccessful, it was also entirely enterprise-oriented. In an alternate history, perhaps Jobs leverages his fortune and hollywood connections to start "iPod Inc." He always envied Sony's expertise at consumer gadgets.
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    Thinking about it Apple is really just an iPod Inc: looking at the iPhone and airpods as evolutions of iPod (iPod touch is the missing link)
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    Looks like that's what happens in this timeline in page 2, when NeXT merges with Pixar in 1999.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
Mac never has grown beyond a small slice of the overall personal computer market. iPod, iPad, iPhone, etc. were absolutely revolutions that created and dominated entire markets, even today. However IMHO Apple still never got beyond a niche of the market for desktop/laptop computers. They build beautiful desktop/laptop hardware but the market seems happy with cheap devices that run Windows.
- lost_soul 5y ago
  You're not wrong but there is a cachet with Macs that is undeniable. It's not unusual for the executives or creatives to use Macs in an otherwise fully Windows based organization.
- travisgriggs 5y ago
  I don’t know. Obviously windows machines outsell macs. But when I go to (programming) conferences, I always count the machines in the room. 40-60% are macs, the remainder a mix of windows and Linux. When I visit any of my 3 kids on their respect campuses. I see the same. Some times even stronger. I spent time in Boston 2 weeks ago and rode the tubes a lot. I saw a LOT of MacBooks. Way more than all other laptops combined.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Try to go to developer conferences on developing countries, or those unlucky ones not part of Gsomething, and those numbers will surely be others.
- necovek 5y ago
  I would venture to say that it was iPod + iTunes that brought Apple back, and then iPhone was just the icing at exactly the right time (Nokia was also prototyping "internet tablets", albeit with resistive touch screens). They did make the most of it, and they are definitely the show-off market leader (when you want to show off your laptop, that's what you get ;). My company recently got me a MacBook Pro 14, and while it's fast, I don't enjoy using it for the same reasons I hated my old XPS13: I hate the keyboard and glossiness of the screen (and sharp edges too). I am a Thinkpad X1 guy, those are machines I happily go back to.
- tsunamifury 5y ago
  The Mac laptop has gone back and forth being the top laptop manufacturer in the world. It’s currently third but has been 2nd and first. It’s always been the most profitable. I don’t even like apple but you are so incredibly wrong it’s laughable. This might have been true 20 years ago but dude. Apple is huge and it’s personal computing is huge too.
legalcorrection 5y ago
I don't think that's necessarily true. There were many millions of people using Macs and many of them were intensely, religiously loyal to Apple, regardless of the technically (de)merits of the system. Launching a new OS as an upgrade to that massive install base is very different than trying to take a high-end workstation and turn it into a mass market product. And it's an interesting question how much that pre-existing Apple user base was instrumental to the success of the iPod.
jshier 5y ago
Of course it matters, as NeXT was nearly out of business by the time Apple bought it. All of their hardware products had failed and their attempt as a cross platform SDK, OpenStep, was barely holding on. Their only successful product was WebObjects (which Apple quickly destroyed) and even that was fairly limited. Without being part of a billion dollar corporation it's unlikely Jobs could've funded his ideas from his personal fortune. I also think it's unlikely he could've done what he did at a Apple at a company where he had fewer checks on his impulses, as his time at NeXT proves.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  WebObjects port to Java was still done under NeXT's umbrella, and it was initially used for the store (no idea what powers it nowadays), and even then its fate was sealed under Steve's management.
firecall 5y ago
Jobs candidly admitted in an interview around the time that NeXT just didnt have the scale to make a difference. I forget his exact words :-)
panick21_ 5y ago
> Jobs probably ends up taking NeXT in the direction he took Apple upon return. NeXT was a pure software company and not a successful one either. The idea that they could start doing things like iPod is pretty out there.
- TickleSteve 5y ago
  "NeXT was a pure software company" The iconic NeXT cube (and NeXTStations) would disagree with you there.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    By the time apple acquired them, their board had long abandoned the idea of being a hardware manufacturer due to collosal financial losses. The next hardware is cool to look at in retrospect but was very expensive and sold poorly. After 1995 or so next was in no financial state to design and ship any new hardware.
    - TickleSteve 5y ago
      Ignoring the quality of the business, NeXT is quite well known for their hardware.
      - walrus01 5y ago
        historically and in the bigger picture of things, yes, but in the late 1990s by the time that it came to NeXT getting acquired by apple, their hardware was long since irrelevant.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    You should look up the history. At that time they basically were a software company and not very successful either. Without being bought by Apple its likely they would have died. Its actually kind of crazy how high NEXT got valued.
    - 5y ago
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
I don't think Jobs could have done much with Sun, or much more with NeXT, which had pretty much run out of road by then. Sun was professional, Jobs was consumer. Jobs needed to be top dog and in charge of concept, and he couldn't have done that at Sun. He also needed some constraints and consumer focus, which Apple provided. NeXT was basically a vanity project. It was poorly run from a business POV, but developed some decent tech. The real primary motivation wasn't to make money, it was to keep some attention on Jobs and maintain his profile as an Important Innovative Person. Sun was engineering-led not image-led and wedded to workstation/server. That market turned out to be a relatively short-lived spasm - a legacy of the mini market pioneered by DEC - in a much longer consumer-oriented tech history. So there was an impossible tension there. It might have worked if Apple had remained a completely independent division and Jobs had been given a free hand to run it. But that was never really remotely likely. It might also have worked if Jobs had any interest in the server/business market. But he really didn't - possibly because it was "boring" and not mass market, which meant less attention and praise for him.

DonHopkins 5y ago

I used to wonder about that at the time, but they would have both wanted to be in the driver's seat, and it simply wouldn't have worked. But the world would have been a better place if IBM had bought Sun instead of Oracle. Which bring me to this old joke: Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? A: IBM.

dehrmann 5y ago
I always thought Sun would have been a good cultural fit for Google.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Quite a bit of Sun software engineering ended up at Google so you're not wrong. Especially after Oracle shut down all Sun software development and laid everyone off in 2017 there was a huge wave of referral hiring.
- invalidname 5y ago
  Eric Schmidt was the CTO of Sun for a while and brought that culture to Google. I see a lot of the problems Sun had in Google and IMHO it's about to collapse under its own weight and lack of focus.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Taking into account the elegance of SUN OS and Solaris compared with Android and the usability of OpenLook compared to Android GUI, i would doubt it.
- mcv 5y ago
  A lot of people at the time thought Google should have bought Sun. Google was heavily involved in Java at the time (with Dalvik especially), and got in a lot of trouble with Oracle when they bought Sun.
- cestith 5y ago
  I really wish Compaq after buying DEC would have bought Sun, BeOS, and Apple rather than get acquired by HP.

vegetablepotpie 5y ago

> August 10, 1997: Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced yesterday that it has completed the acquisition of Apple Computers > November 8, 1997: Apple released a new version of the Macintosh personal computer yesterday … the MacUltra is powered by a 300 MHz UltraSPARC II microprocessor. The MacUltra is shipped with the “Macintosh Solaris” operating system – a version of Sun’s Solaris OS with a classic Mac OS-derived desktop environment and full compatibility with classic Mac OS application In 3 Months they switched architectures, integrated a DE on top of a new OS, and wrote an emulator for a new architecture. Impressive.

kalleboo 5y ago
They already had an official emulator they sold that ran on SPARC/Solaris, for 68k software at least https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Application_Environment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Application_Environm...
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Way too mainstream. Imagine Pomegrenade running on up to 4x4 Ross-Cypress-Fujitsu asynchronous CryoSparx, consisting of Suns (Hyper?)News-thing with seamless classic Mac OS integration, that ADB/Localtalk stuff for periphery, and so on.

cbreynoldson 5y ago

Would've been interesting to see Sun collide with Alan Kay at Apple

alberth 5y ago

Larry Ellison offered to Steve Jobs that he’d buy Apple for him. Steve and Larry were extremely close friends (in each other’s wedding). Steve declined. About a decade later, Larry acquired Sun. https://www.cio.com/article/238191/how-larry-ellison-plotted-to-buy-apple-and-make-steve-jobs-ceo.html/amp https://www.cio.com/article/238191/how-larry-ellison-plotted...

srvmshr 5y ago
> Steve and Larry were extremely close friends (in each other’s wedding). Trivia: Steve Jobs was Ellison's wedding photographer. Ellison trusted no one except Steve when it came to aesthetics.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
As Apple users we really dodged a bullet there lol. Imagine being sued by Apple because of some license condition :)
- pjmlp 5y ago
  You mean like being kicked out of the store?

neilv 5y ago

Sun might've shed the Newton, but I suspect they would've had their own vision for networked mobile handhelds or otherwise very portable devices. For consumer mobile in 1996, maybe they'd think more like Internet-connected handhelds based on HotJava (Web browser with Java-based content handlers installed on-the-fly, in this case partly for networking efficiency, partly disconnected operation, partly promotng their vision of Web). While also making compatible HotJava browser available for all the popular desktop platforms. (And JavaScript never took over.) But for corporate IT customers, they might still push more their your-desktop-everywhere thin client ideas, of course served by Sun servers in the data centers. But also based on Java.

invalidname 5y ago

Ex-Sun guy. Sun was terrible at mergers and bought/killed products on a regular basis. The culture difference between Apple/Sun is so big... There's absolutely no way this would have worked. I would have loved to have a proper Sparc. Those machines were amazing and their UI/UX sucked so bad. Sun never found an opportunity it couldn't botch.

walrus01 5y ago
I have to agree because I don't think apple would have successfully turned sunos into a unix-based macos9 successor. If you look at the earliest versions of OSX it's NeXT with a macos9 skin on top of it. But it's recognizably NeXT.
linguae 5y ago
A sad example of a Sun acquisition that went nowhere was Lighthouse Design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design), a software company that specialized in productivity software for NeXTSTEP. One of the company's most famous products was Concurrence, a presentation tool that Steve Jobs used and influenced the design of Apple Keynote. In an alternative timeline, Lighthouse Design could have been the premier developer for Mac OS X. Sun bought Lighthouse Design at a time when it invested in NeXT's OpenStep API; in fact, there was a port of OpenStep to Solaris. However, Java ended up taking off around 1995-96, and Sun's strategy changed from supporting OpenStep to promoting Java. Lighthouse Design's software didn't fit in this strategy, and sadly the software has been abandoned, even though Sun was in a great position to polish and update the software when Mac OS X was released. I understand why Lighthouse Design was sold, though. Before Apple bought NeXT at the end of 1996, the future for NeXT-based software companies appeared bleak, and these companies faced the challenging prospects of (1) porting their software, implemented using NeXT's then state-of-the-art APIs and tools, to platforms that were more commercially viable yet lacked such tooling, and (2) competing with the 800-pound gorilla that is Microsoft; WordPerfect, Lotus, and Claris tried but to no avail; how was Lighthouse Design going to compete against Microsoft? Being a productivity software company was tough in the 1990s; if you targeted mainstream platforms (Mac and Windows) then you had to compete against Microsoft, and if you targeted non-mainstream platforms (OS/2, NeXTSTEP, BeOS), then while you're shielded from competing against Microsoft Office, you're gambling on the success of these platforms (and had these platforms became commercially widespread, Microsoft would have just ported Office to them, anyway).

greggsy 5y ago

I’ve been loving the 90’s computing nostalgia theme on HN lately - keep it coming. Sun are obviously best known for their Sparc systems, but their x86 workstations were beautiful and well ahead of their time in terms of serviceability. The classic design would still look modern today.

panick21_ 5y ago
As somebody to young for this, what x86 workstation are you referring to?
- scrlk 5y ago
  In the mid-00s, Sun started building x86 workstations using AMD Opteron CPUs when they were trouncing any Intel chip. The Ultra 2x/4x series looked great: http://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/ultra_20m2/ http://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/ultra_20m2/ IMO the best implementation of the design came in the SPARC versions where the optical drive and IO were combined in to one 5.25" bay (e.g. Ultra 25, pg 4: http://archives.retrobridge.org/sun/system-handbook/3.4/Systems/Ultra25_shared/documents/Ultra25_Ultra45_JTF.pdf http://archives.retrobridge.org/sun/system-handbook/3.4/Syst...).
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    I knew about the AMD Server but I didn't know they had Workstations too. These to look pretty awesome.
  - awiesenhofer 5y ago
    Oh wow, didn't know these were a thing! They look great, now I kinda want one, haha. Though I wonder, who bought these over similar Dell/HP/etc boxes? Did they have any special features or was it mostly just about them running Solaris first-party?
  - greggsy 5y ago
    Yep, I had an Ultra 20 opteron. Nice machine.

didip 5y ago

Success could be possible only if they also bought NeXT and replaces Scott McNealy with Steve Jobs.

panick21_ 5y ago
Jobs was never interested in Server and that where Sun could have made the most bank looking back at it from now. Sun would have been a natural as cloud company and a x86 server and NAS vendor.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  They tried and failed, the dotcom bust did them in, there was so much sparc hardware on the 2nd hand market it killed their server business for a while. Their x86 servers were never as good as HP/Compaq and a lot of their ancillary hardware like tape backup was rebadged from HP. When servers got going again, price became absolutely key and Linux had become so good it made solaris seem like yesterdays news. I do like this alternative timeline, but if Apple went Solaris it wouldn't have surprised me if Microsoft did a linux distro in the early 2000s which would have really made for a strange future.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    > Their x86 servers were never as good as HP/Compaq Some of their x86 AMD server were pretty good. > When servers got going again, price became absolutely key and Linux had become so good it made solaris seem like yesterdays news. Technically this is very questionable. I would argue Solaris was way ahead at that point. > I do like this alternative timeline, but if Apple went Solaris it wouldn't have surprised me if Microsoft did a linux distro in the early 2000s which would have really made for a strange future. Not sure I understand that logic.
    - smackeyacky 5y ago
      Solaris was technically better, no question, but linux got "good enough" and for most customers that put expensuve Sun licences out of the question. Back then, Microsoft saw sun as a major competitor, I don't think its out of the question they would have tried selling Unix again. They did in the 1980s.

martyvis 5y ago

There is another alternative timeline were HP and Apple merged. https://link.medium.com/ya6XVMlk8ob https://link.medium.com/ya6XVMlk8ob

Apocryphon 5y ago
Dell licenses Mac software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28769531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28769531

panick21_ 5y ago

Those companies are so different and by that point it was a bit late. Its more likely that they both would have gone bankrupt in 2000. Apple did seriously consider moving to Solaris by the late 90s, had Solaris been Open by then they very likely would have. I think maybe in the early 90s if Sun had adopted SPARC instead of PowerPC and changed to Salaris giving Sun a real "PC" division. That would have been more sensible. The more interesting possibility (and more realistic) would have been a merger with SGI. Together maybe they could have both done better. I think had this been done in the 90s putting together the best from Solaris and IRIX (and hopefully Open Source) combined with push for x86 Solaris on PC compatible. Or more if you want to be really aggressive try to create a lower cost SPARC 'Home Workstation'. Taking on Wintel before Windows 95 might have been possible. Even if only far a small part of a big market.

Animats 5y ago

Here's an alternative story. In 1993, Sears exited the mail order business. In 1994, Amazon was founded. It might have been different. Sears already owned Prodigy. The World Wide Web already existed in the early 1990s. PCs had been available for over 10 years. Modems had reached 28Kb/s. What if Sears had simply put their huge catalog on line and started taking orders? Sears already had the logistics infrastructure for deliveries. Amazon might never have launched.

walrus01 5y ago
Where prodigy failed was not pivoting from its walled garden custom binary app of content to a general purpose dialup ISP. By the time they thought to to do it, it was late 1996 or early 97 and plenty of other generalists were in the market (netcom, mind spring, etc) Who knows what might have happened if they'd brought all of sears products online for purchase, in their existing standalone prodigy browser software...
mulmen 5y ago
I don’t know how Sears failed so hard. I worked for them as a frontline sales rep at the turn of the century. I’d love to hear a story from the bigwigs. The POS system was archaic, even at that time. Nobody trusted inventory counts, it was never accurate. But the website was always worse. Plus we had no workable access to it. It took an eternity to load a page. And what you saw was worthless. Sears treated the website with contempt. We had a mandatory company wide meeting on a Sunday night. They played a pre recorded message from the CEO telling us how important family was to the company. He was at home with his family. We weren’t. That never registered with Sears. My job at the time was ostensibly to sell hand tools, or lawn tools, or consumer electronics. But that wasn’t the point at all. We got paid commission. The item was nothing. Maybe 3%, probably less. A few dollars. But a successful Sears card signup? That was a flat $20.00 payout. Add on a warranty? 30% commission on the warranty. Bonuses were paid to management based on the ratio of sales with addons. So for a sales rep like me we will take any sale. But my boss would prefer I not sell a TV at all if I don’t get the warranty. Sears was a predatory business for decades. I don’t know when they lost their way but it was long before the turn of the century. Modern business would do well to study how Sears failed.

masswerk 5y ago

Love this! However, I think, "Macintosh Solaris" certainly would have been "System S". :-)

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
There's a "System V" joke to be made there, although it's a little late (in Mac OS versions) to quite make sense.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

I think the opposite might have actually happened. If Jonathan Schwartz hadn't pissed Steve off by talking to the press, macOS would have had ZFS and might ave acquired Sun.

aa-jv 5y ago

I would have killed for an SGI laptop back in those days. It always amuses me that the best Unix laptop workstation vendor ended up being Apple.

pjmlp 5y ago
Sun on their glory days used to have laptops as well, oh well.

kochbeck 5y ago

During US v Microsoft, I was in the middle of writing a brief to the court arguing that the solution to Microsoft’s monopoly was not to split the OS from the application groups, but rather to disallow Microsoft from publishing its own compilers anymore. Because, you see, then they would be forced to have fully documented OS calling structures, because they would have to communicate them to the compiler vendors. In spite of their weakened state at the time, IBM would have gladly bought Microsoft’s dev tools groups, dooming them thoroughly as they attempted to merge them into the VisualAge group (née CSet). I always believed the net effect of this would be that Microsoft would suddenly have to do an about face and support one of the OSS compiler chains, probably GCC. At the time, they had a current Mach-compiled version of Windows that was still being maintained, and odds are Windows—not MacOS—would have been the ascendant Mach-based OS, because MS would have lost a lot of its ability to fix its problems by losing control of its dev chain. They’d need more radical abstraction than the NT kernel was giving them at the time. Because it was still a branch from OS/2 1.2 which was… special and half-baked. (It’s important to remember that Linux was still considered a toy by most—the “serious” OSS OS was still BSD. And if you had real workloads you ran Solaris, even though you knew Sun was somehow going to doom themselves. The world then looks nothing like the world now.) This really would have obviated the need for Apple to sell to Sun. Instead, MS would never have made the rescue investment, Sun would continue to skitter off the rails, and Apple would have sold to… I dunno, probably someone weird like Sony. Remember them? Because MS going to Mach would have poisoned the shift from Copeland to NeXTStep… the world barely wanted one Mach-based OS, much less two. One neat side effect, though, is we would have probably seen something a lot like WSL back in 2000 or so. Because the Mach Win build took much more advantage of the OS “personalities” features than MacOS did. Back then, all of this mattered a lot, because things were far less elegant than they are now. It’s hard to imagine how far we came in the intervening 25 years. So very far. But in the middle of writing that brief, Judge Jackson shot his stupid mouth off, and I was like, “Welp, nobody’s getting split up now.” And I put it in my archive of good ideas that aren’t gonna happen. So no, I don’t think there was ever a real scenario where Sun bought Apple.

Apocryphon 5y ago
Perhaps you could try reading the timeline's account of U.S. v. Microsoft, the three parts of which are present on the first and second pages of the link.

int0x2e 5y ago

Another interesting question (to me at least), is what if Sun had made Solaris open source about 10 years earlier. I think there's a chance what is now Linux (and potentially Android as well) would have adopted the Solaris kernel. The differences may not have been great to some, but I believe we may have been about 10 years ahead in the opensource OS game by now, since the Solaris kernel was such an advanced thing at the time, and with the thriving Linux community it could have really flourished...

privatdozent 5y ago

Snapple

jasoneckert 5y ago

I'd like to think that if Sun bought Apple in 1996, we'd eventually have this product (and yes, I'd buy it): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E4elko8VIAUS8Nz.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E4elko8VIAUS8Nz.jpg

nukemaster 5y ago
My Pinephone looks like that. Just run FVWM with the MWM theme.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Forget themes - I have successfully run actual CDE on my pinephone. It's a bit cramped (probably should play with the resolution and/or dpi), but it works. (This works because CDE is open source builds fine on aarch64. I forget if I used the AUR package on Arch Linux ARM or just did a git clone && ./configure && make && make install.)
  - nukemaster 5y ago
    I really should give CDE another shot. Last time I tried building it I ran into trouble but I may have been on Alpine.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Yeah I don't know that anyone's tested it on Alpine (or any musl system, actually), but it works fine on every GNU/Linux system I've tried. Also depending on when you last tried, it uses autoconf now so none of the weird `make World` stuff.

thinkyfish 5y ago

Enjoy your Oracle oPhone(TM).

phoehne 5y ago

One thing I've learned over the years is how sales people are rewarded is important to the products a company decides to sell. It actually drives the product mix and constrains their choices about new markets or new approaches. Enterprise companies reward sales people on commission on large deals structured across hardware, software, support and services. Those companies are allergic to "retail" opportunities. It suspect it would have been impossible for Sun to sell affordable computers individually or in low quantities because no sales person would have been compensated. Most people wonder why "great technology" dies at the hands of corporate overlords. I don't. I look at where the incentives lie and if they lie on big deals in an industry that's becoming commoditized, that company is likely toast. Why doesn't the business change to accommodate lower cost, commodity systems or servers? Even in the late 1990's the writing was on the wall. For years as SGI came out with more $40,000+ workstations competing with $10,000 high end x86? Why did Sun push our company in 2000/2001 to buy (relatively mediocre) preforming SPARC $75,000 servers when the industry was clearly moving to commodity x86/64 at $20,000? The high prices lead to bigger deals and more commission. I was briefly the beneficiary of the Sun startup program and we bought some Sun x86 hardware at reduced rates. Without that program, I would not have been able to afford what was well designed and good quality hardware. I would simply have gone for DELL x86. I was also a Sun reseller for a while, and it was always about the packaged deal. The sales people have an incredible amount of sway. After all, with no money coming in, you don't last long. (For normal companies - zero revenue unicorns make no sense to me). They will actively undermine any effort to change the situation. They will ridicule and belittle the new technology. But they're sales people and not technologists or developers. It's like watching the dinosaurs make fun of the asteroid. (What a big, dumb rock!) They would rather have yet another bad sales quarter in an endless string of bad sales quarters than attack their compensation. It's especially fun when it's the end of the quarter and you finally get the call from a sales rep. They're desperate to meet their quota so they'll make a deal on your pathetically small order. They idea that a customer could get on a website and just buy the product at a reasonable cost without having to have a sales meeting to upsell them on another batch services, is incomprehensible to them. Had Sun bought Apple? It would have been some vaporware product announcements until they realized their sales people weren't interested, sold off any assets of value, and shoved the rest of it in a warehouse as IP. They would go back to trying to hold the line against pesky cheap PCs (which aren't real workstations) and x86 servers (which aren't real servers).