Sun sold expensive hardware and low cost systems flooded the market with decent performance, so the sell was to businesses who liked the reliability and support

Sun sold expensive hardware and low cost systems flooded the market with decent performance, so the sell was to businesses who liked the reliability and support. First big deal was the megapixel workstation, meeting a science and engineering need. Motorola chips gave way to RISC, (SPARC) which worked well. Next big deal was the dot-com boom, and timing was perfect for expensive, powerful and reliable computers. Larger systems and networks of Suns powered many dot-coms, and even Pixar. [0] 100 E-4000 servers. But dot com faded (crashed) and compute farms were built on cheap redundant hardware. I was systems engineer in education sales, and it got tough. After I left, Sun eventually sold to Oracle. Sun bought Cobalt for the Qube, which was pretty cool for education but schools below college level ran on “educational” windoze apps, like the infamous “Reader Rabbit”, so we ended up with windoze servers running them and accessing them via Citrix to Sunrays, one per teacher. I’d have much preferred Linux apps ported to Solaris, the likes of the very amazing GCompris set of educational apps. There’s a TLDR kind of summary at Slashgear. [1] Sun pioneered lots of great technology, or advanced it. Some include Java, ZFS, and virtualization (Solaris Zones and E-10000 ) and more. I supported university computing before joining Sun, and it was a good fit. Sun had donated a raft of workstations. And universities made good use of the gear, such as NOW [2], the network of workstations. Arguably the progenitor of Google and Facebook style compute farms. [0]: https://www.hpcwire.com/1998/12/18/pixar-used-sun-systems-power-bugs-life-renderfarm/ https://www.hpcwire.com/1998/12/18/pixar-used-sun-systems-po... [1]: https://www.slashgear.com/1352662/forgotten-computer-companies-that-shaped-tech-world/ https://www.slashgear.com/1352662/forgotten-computer-compani... [2]: http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/ http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/