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For us dell has become that. Rep changes all the time, what appears to be random pricing and long unclear delivery dates. Instead I can for example go to Thomas Kren and configure my serves online for a fraction of the cost. They have what they list in stock, delivered a few weeks later. Everything is clear and hasle free.

At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.

Yeah, and then Dell more-or-less turned into that. Companies get big, customers and sales get more complicated, process gets more calcified.

SUNW would probably still be around if the whole x86 commodity pizza box revolution hadn't happened OR if they had pivoted away from SPARC earlier and went heavily into x86. Example: buying from IBM doesn't sound too different from buying from Sun, but they're still around because mainframes will be around until the Earth implodes (probably).

(I think that their channel/partner programs along with their professional services org are big reasons why Dell is still a key player in the datacenter space. You can buy Dell direct, and the sales process is still "good" as far as enterprise sales goes, but bigger players usually get their Dell kit through distributors/vendors with Dell professional services handling architecture, build-out, enablement, etc. I'm not sure how much energy SUNW invested in this, as they were before my time, but this combo is a major revenue driver for them.)

> Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell.

In a time frame like 1999 to 2002, much more broadly than that, just the increasing gap in cost vs what you would get between buying any hardware+OS package from a legacy Unix-like vendor (Sun, DEC, SGI) and doing your own thing on a FreeBSD, OpenBSD or Linux on x86 hardware.

Dell was obviously a top choice, but by 2000 or so, Linux or FreeBSD had become good enough that you could do exactly the same thing for a fraction of the cost and run it on x86 hardware you had purchased from either Dell or one of the top 5 or 6 Dell-competitors.

As compared to, as you say, sitting through sales meetings, price quotes, revisions, a long slow and arduous process to arrive at a figure where you come to a conclusion "yeah you can spend $60,000 on these Sun servers or we can buy $20,000 of x86 servers and get creative with our own software stack to do the same thing in house".

At a certain point 1U and 2U server hardware got fast enough on boring standard x86 single or dual socket motherboards from Taiwan, in the era of like the 1.2 GHz Pentium 3 with 512KB cache, that the performance was pretty damn good and the machine cost a fraction of what the equivalent Sun or SGI rackmount machine would cost. This is in the era before a multi core x86 CPU existed. And you could be sure that its BIOS and motherboard were already OK for use with a current Linux kernel, we're talking about motherboards from Supermicro, Tyan, intel whitebox reference server boards, etc.

One of the first "expert systems" was one that helped you spec your DEC computer. It was easy to order a VAX that was missing necessary hardware (or had incompatible hardware).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xcon

If you click through to the anecdote[0] mentioned in the article, the problem was not with having to contact a sales rep. In fact the startup wanted a sales rep. Sun specifically asked them to use the website:

> More than once though, the Sun people did suggest I just buy the servers off the web site.

Dell was just the only one to callback.

I don't doubt your experience but that was at the height of Sun's business, not it's nadir as this article is about.

[0] - https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-m...

Sun commercial sales reps, at least in Europe, were astoundingly slimy.

I had a colleague where almost his whole job consisted of beating them in sheer sliminess, and at this he was good. I don't think we ever paid 30% of the prices they'd start at, but the process of achieving this was disgusting, and there was still the sense everyone was being screwed.

So when we could move to Dell we did.

Forcing customers to talk to sales is actually a failure mode.

I’ve had that experience with dell consistently over the last 6+ years. While with other vendors I can do everything over email from start to finish, Dell insists on meetings, follow-ups on topics that I said I am not interested in talking about, services that I do not need, meetings with teams I am not interested in meeting, reps that straight up skip meetings, so I have to console a junior rep that got stuck in a meeting that is above their pay grade. Different reps same slimy bs.

ordered small item from Dell 7/31, still not received.

Yeah it was so much more accessible to play around with configs and pricing and then all you needed was a credit card.

Even now I think enterprise companies should be more open about what's possible and what the price and delivery date would be without having to talk/chat/email anybody. Even for something like a Juniper $100k+ device it would be kind of cool to configure it.

And that is the "thing". Every failed mini company had the same exact issue, seems customers had to beg and/or go through hell to purchase equipment. Never mind that the hardware was more expensive than what you cold buy from companies like Dell.

IBM is not much better than what I hear, but somehow they keep surviving. Probably because of their mainframe business.

On the other hand, Sun and DEC hardware from then still works today, if you care to power it on. How many dell devices do?

I needed to add a bunch of capacity running Sun/Solaris back in the late-90s. Same thing: pointless meetings with sales reps without clarity in pricing. Finally, I found the gear we were looking for on eBay, bought it, drove over and picked it up in my Ford Explorer, and had it up-and-running in one day. To my surprise, people in my company were PO'ed. But I had air cover because the CEO found out and loved it.

> - UltraSPARC was more than a decade too late to make up for SPARC falling way behind x86_64. Sun needed to give up on SPARC, but again, vendor lock-in sounds sweet but turns out to be poison.

UltraSPARC came out in 1995, and Athlon 64 in 2003. I'm confused on how it could be late?

> - The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid. The only interesting effect of this was to make Sun a target of acquisition for Oracle. [..]

I disagree with this assessment strongly. I believe Oracle wanted Java and only Java. All other Sun properties were collateral damage of the acquisition. It might be weird that Oracle now owns MySQL, but Oracle never cared about it. (Of course, both your and my assessment are mere opinions.)

Scott McNealy had a few choice words in retrospect[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40950311

Good timing. But on the other hand if you had sold AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, ORCL, AVGO, ADI, KLAC, LRCX, etc at the Internet bubble top then you would have missed out on huge gains since then.

I think motif was fine for its time, but definitely not much better than OpenLook.

However, 30 years ago, developing a standard SunOS app with devGuide was the most enjoyable and productive programming I've ever experienced. Simply layout your GUI, link actions to methods, generate code, fill in the abstracted methods, compile and run. I didn't have to learn X or any other bloated low level graphics library.

AFAIK, nothing has been easier, especially XCode.

I used a machine that had 8MB of RAM and a huge b&w monitor. One day I found out it would crash if your process forked more than 127 times. These things were so cool at the time but are nothing compared to a Raspberry Pi.

I appreciate this comment for reviving memories of pine and lynx and all of that

> I do blame them, along with the rise of Java ...for convincing me to drop out of computer science and switch to Computational Math for my bachelors degree.

I avoided studying CS for this reason: I saw my girlfriend's Java textbooks and thought if I had to appreciate this, I wasn't cut out to be a programmer, and stuck to network engineering. Years later, after 'Gang of Four' style OOP started dying, I have some code in a new things people use here everyday.

I was spoilt by SGI and their wonderful interface, where every detail was awesomely cool. The Sun machines were just old-fashioned at this superficial but important level of how it all looked, but only if you knew better, and that meant experience of SGI. In the world of IRIX, we had CPU-eater desktop wallpaper, meanwhile, on Sun, you had some badly drawn window decorations.

I imagine this to be the awful GUI that you speak of.

I say look and feel is superficial, however, when you have to learn a variant of UNIX with slightly different command line switches to the UNIX you know, with an interface worse than even Windows (3.11), for it to run dog slow, a lot of copium is needed. A poor interface gets in the way of what you are trying to do, a cool interface just lets you get on with it.

I think this sorta forgets how slow the cpus were - I was running mostly ASIC design workloads on big Sun hardware in 2001 and we eventually got some x86 boxes that were only 32 bit but could run some of our jobs - and the single-threaded perf of these commodity machines was amazing compared to the Sparc boxes. When x86-64 came around, this was the death of all the Sun hardware in that group.

Also sometime in 2000 I had interviewed at Compaq - the old Alpha group who I think later worked on Itanium at Intel. They were constantly frustrated because they couldn't even get a build from Synopsys of the design tools they needed to run on Alpha and were forced to use Sun hardware they described as "gasping and wheezing" to design their crazy fast cpu.

Sun lost on a bunch of fronts, but I think the amazing thing is they let happen to them what they did to the other big UNIX vendors before - they were eaten from the bottom by faster cheaper hardware.

I can deny it. It was OK, but not amazing. I had to make pretty frequent repair calls on their gear--much more frequently than the less-technologically-amazing-but-solid-as-a-rock Dell and Compaq gear. IBM, Digital, and HP (yes, that HP, before they lost the Way) also had very good UNIX gear, but Sun had the mindshare during the '90s.

In terms of performance, even Linux 0.x on a 33Mhz 486-class processor could outperform a uniprocessor Sun/SPARC box at a fraction of the price.

I also question the sanity of anyone who thinks Sun's choice of 13W3 for a video connector was a good one. :-)

I loved Sun hardware but I'll deny that they were ahead of their time after 2003 or so. I had a boss who loved his pizza box but Intel/Linux crushed them in the 2000s on a price/performance basis.

Sun's various divisions all cared very much about their respective vendor lock-in, so they didn't innovate fast enough. The divisions that didn't have that innovated. On the way downward Sun cannibalized itself (think Sun PS getting closed).

That's the whole gist.

One of the things that Larry Ellison found utterly baffling when he acquired Sun was the way that sales commission was calculated. It was all on the value of the contract, with no requirement for the contract to be profitable.

At least in the later stages of life Sun sales folks were literally selling the company into bankruptcy. They'd find out what competitors were offering, undercut it to the degree they'd make a loss, just to get the contract and their sweet commission.

To not realise you've got this going on really speaks to how little they were interested in the actual running of the business.

> You can't deny that Sun hardware was top tier and always ahead of its time (until Oracle bought them).

From Brian Cantrill's original HN comment in 2011(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2287033): "I never hesitated to tell anyone that was listening that our x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC". SPARC stopped being ahead of its time way before being bought by Oracle.

> Why would someone who is developing their software on an x86 box with Linux care about ... Solaris?

There was a time when ZFS would have been a good answer for this. Of course, now it's available on FreeBSD and Linux.

At one point also there was zones, but again, containerization is pretty standard elsewhere now.

I guess also if you go further back, like the Linux 2.6 era, which is close to when Solaris was open sourced ... the 2.6 release involved a concerted effort to improve SMP support. So maybe you'd be interested more in commercial Unix in the 2.4 era, for better SMP. But again, Linux surpassed this ~20 years ago.

I’m interested in oxide, but I feel like you could level the same criticism. The startup cost of using azure or aws is almost nothing. The cost to use oxide is 6 figures?

I feel like they need to run a public cloud just to let people tinker with lightweight stuff and scale up to owning the thing.

That said, I’m also a moron about certain things, and this might be a moronic take.

I mean, flashback to 2010 ... zones, dtrace, smf, iscsi and zfs were very well integrated together and lightyears beyond what was available in the Linux space at the time.

Zones were lightweight, more akin to the Linux vserver project or lxc. You could make a zone on its own zfs filesystem, clone the zone (which creates a zfs clone), launch the clone, run a throw-away task, tear the zone down which also discards the zfs snapshot+clone. It was quick and cheap but also half a decade before Docker was released or popularized.

zfs integrated into other parts of the system just as well. eg: iSCSI volumes backed by a zpool and export properties configured in zfs. All of these technologies were built with the idea of being "self-healing." Meanwhile, Linux has a disparate iSCSI daemon, lvm+ext4/reiserfs, initd, and probably 20 different tools to learn if you want to grab metrics across the stack like dtrace on Solaris was capable of.

The out of band management was amazing too. Yes, some x86 hardware had ilom but like everything else in the space, it's bolted on and not truly integrated.

Sun made really nice stuff that outpaced Linux in a lot of ways. The ecosystem came from a time of competing BSDs and looked for paying customers for the engineering marvel they had created. They were used to customers figuring out how to use Unix, and the Linux crowd at the time still fit that rubric. The OS was not optimized for low-latency terminal interaction and thus "felt slow" (aka: Slowaris) but a well tuned DB on Sparc really cooked.

Finally, I went to a few Sun events and had Sun reps come and look at what we were doing. They were definitely happy to help with any kind of outreach/onboarding we needed. The issue was none of "onboarding" but was a lot of "Linux is a movement." In early times, Linux was an anti-corporate movement and some of that energy carried through to the 2010s. It's sadly ironic because Sun itself has roots in open standards and an anti-establishment mentality.

This. Sun behaved like it had vendor lock-in. Who wants a vendor like that?!

Solaris x86 launched in 1993. I had one on my desk at work in early 1997, running Common Desktop Environment.

Even back then, the CTO of our startup said Sun had missed the boat on dominating x86 Unix. They could have had a larger role in x86 Unix world if they had wanted to. It was definitely a misstep for Sun.

Having said that, throughout the 1990s Sun was amazing. They were even good right up to the Oracle purchase, although by that time RHEL on HP (or Dell) servers was eating their lunch.

Well, definitely read Jason's blog entry that I linked to[0], which gets into the structural problems. To be clear, there were some extraordinary sales folks at Sun (as was said to me when I first came to Sun: "Remember that our sales folks are so good that they sold Solaris 2.3 on Viking!"), and I always personally got along very well with them. I was happy to be put in front of customers, and they were happy to use me -- and some of my fondest memories were with sales folks in some of the geographies which were particularly strong (shout out to Sun Canada, Sun Australia, and to the Wall Street and Itasca offices in the US).

So this isn't about the people at all (they will express the same frustration!) but about leadership that wasn't interested in running a business. I do want to stop short of overly personalizing it, but the simple truth is: Scott visited customers where they lived -- and Jonathan more or less didn't.

[0] https://fullhoffman.com/2006/03/20/the-sun-doesnt-shine-on-m...

I feel like Sun's main problem was that that era was pretty much the steepest part of the Intel S curve as far as chip performance goes, and it was outpacing the older chips on fab progress alone. I'm pretty sure had something like TSMC been around then at current strength, and Sun fabbed their excellent designs there, we'd have a mirror of what Apple is doing but in server space.

> I probably don't have much incentive to pick up.

This is what Dell got right - for their sales team, this was an easy process - the product line was simple and easy to customise. Their sales reps wouldn't spend much time creating the proposals and could spend the remaining time building relationships with a lot more customers, some of which wouldn't fail.

> curious why sales didn't pick up the phone. Were they "bored?"

Unless you create incentives for bringing new customers, they'll leave the new names for last.

I don't know what Sun's strategy was in the 2000s, but doing all of the R&D to develop exotic new hardware and then focusing the sales force on software seems like they're getting the worst of both worlds.

My personal favourite UI was HyperNeWS built on Sun's NeWS.

Edit: Writing PostScript and having no discernible security probably didn't make NeWS a great fit for the world of the Internet - but it was a lot of fun.

> What everybody except Steve Jobs got wrong was not taking user interface seriously enough.

But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI. I was there, back when Xorg didn't even exist, running X and messing with modelines on Linux. All the window manager sucked big times.

Sun, just like SGI, got attacked by cheap beige PCs running either Windows or Linux.

I don't think their UI had much to do with their downfall and, arguably, SGI's UIs were better than the competition and they still disappeared too.

Also weren't most machines sold by Sun servers anyway? Their famous "We the dot in .com" tagline.

I worked at Sun labs and used a Sun Ray daily for a whole summer. It worked...OK. Definitely not "Incredibly well". We had a network of a few hundred Sun Rays and two E10Ks backing it. More than a million for the servers and $1000k a piece for the Sun Rays was not cheap. Basically any $1000 laptop was more powerful, without the need for a crazy powerful Sun server. The experience of taking out my ID card, walking down the hall to another cubicle and popping it in and getting my session was magical. But I did that less than once a week, so I don't think it was overall worth it. The Sun Rays also had a pretty crappy LCD, about 1-2 years behind the SoTA.

It was a cool idea. It will keep coming back again and again. But at Sun's price points around the early 2000s, it was a loser, and I actually agree with the market in this instance. Sun Ray was a flop.

Is this how the whole LLM thing will go down once providers raise prices?

it is often cheaper to buy a spare of something and throw it in a cupboard rather than have a support contract.

I have a bunch of Aruba switches and this is what we do, because it's a lot cheaper.

Remember, "The Network is the Computer".

Which is why it is kind of ironic having folks discussing microservices as something groundbreaking.

Counterpoint: it actually sucked. Entire universities lost a day's work when their editors were all fatally stuck in an rpc.lockd bug.

Java applets!

Right before they fell face-first into the grave, they did finally ship the v20z, which was a completely reasonable way to run Solaris x86. Its management board ran Linux on PowerPC, for irony purposes.

Part of my maturing with getting older in addition to the above is that luck is a larger factor than most people are willing to admit. So I'm with you that GTM is just as important as engineering, but execution on all fronts is what tilts the luck factor. And with luck you get exceptions which is why you can get companies that seem to succeed despite themselves.

I remember the attitude was that solaris was for serious professionals and had the highest calibre of code. For the most part it seemed true and these were solid workhorses. But, i did end up finding concurrency bugs when they introduced their multi-core integer computing behemoth.

MS Word was a descendant of Bravo and Gypsy on the Xerox Alto, not ND-NOTIS. NOTIS is an interesting footnote in the history of software, but PARC's influence on early microcomputing is well-known and recognized.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto#Software

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_(editor)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_(software)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ND-NOTIS

Berners-Lee made the first web server true but it was on a NeXT not Norsk Data

I actually haven't read a ton of these, so would love to be pointed to what you have found. But yes, everyone will be biased, and I am too. I think that the organization that I was in fucked up plenty (when I joined the company in 1996, SunSoft was led by truly one of the most incompetent executives I have ever encountered, a bumbling oaf that Sun kept putting in charge of different business units, letting him asphyxiate them one by one), but the fact that everyone also sees something else wrong probably tells you a few things: everyone at Sun earnestly wanted the company to succeed; Sun did a bunch of stuff right; Sun did a bunch of other stuff wrong.

Ultimately, the leadership of the company needs to bear the responsibility for the outcome -- and I think it's pretty telling that Sun's executive leadership basically went on to do more or less nothing after Sun. I loved Sun -- but it was a breeding ground for engineers, not executive leadership.

I seriously don't know what Sun could have done to survive - once Linux was stable, running Linux on commodity hardware was just a better solution than anything Sun could offer.

That doesn't exist. No department is every completely at fault. No department has enough budget to sink a company alone. It is always a lot of departments that don't turn in expected results - often for reasons not in their control.

The fault is always upper management not doing their job. Even if one department really would be that bad (which again they are not), upper management allowed them to be that bad.

Oof, the killing and subsequent unkilling of Solaris x86 in 2002 brings back very bad memories -- Sun management at its worst. It also highlighted the relative power of Sun's engineering in that everyone in Solaris knew it was the wrong decision, and we more or less disobeyed orders: during that period (January 2002 to August 2002, when it was reversed), we didn't change our treatment of x86. (And in particular, breaking x86 was grounds for a putback to be backed out.)

When Solaris x86 was unkilled (and then became increasingly important as x86 eclipsed SPARC), there was damage done that I don't think we ever fully repaired.

I worked at sun (sunsoft) right out of school near the peak. It was great. I was very excited to have all of the sources for sunos easily available to read.

Later, in grad school I went to work at a startup… google. For me it recaptured everything I liked about Sun. And had the same CEO.

Great perspective to share, thanks.

> They didn't understand horizontal scaling

What of Jini, JavaSpaces / Linda, JXTA, "grid computing"?

Were they too early? Dismissed as (Bill Joy's) hobby projects?

At the time, I was very enthusiastic. Especiall grid computing. So much so that when cloud computing arrived, I couldn't recognize the sea change. Square peg, round hole.

We even POC'd some Jini support. Demo'd for hardware manufacturers, customers, our dealer channel. Customers loved the idea.

But like UPnP, Jini failed to get traction.

As for JXTA (peer-to-peer), although I didn't gave any skin in that gane, I really expected it to vecome the norm. eg My brother (for his ISP) POC'd video delivery in anticipation. But that got mooted pretty quick.

Arguably, AWS Lambda (et al) was is "dumb" grid (run anywhere in asandbox) and the OpenClaw agentic (madness) is the "evil" incarnation. (I'm aware of efforts like Emerald AI (et al) to make a "smart" grid.)

Our Sun rep served us well at an academic library. I had no problems provisioning a server with a nice storage array. When things fell apart at Sun our sales engineer from Sun wound up working for us.

I did get to sit in front of the consoles that served the whole school (via telnet) and even hard rebooted them a few times and I wasn't even in a techy major. Just had good relations with the head of school IT. That much exposure was enough to crave a similar computing experience and that's when I installed Linux at home right after college.

I mean in a way isn't that what Oxide is doing? Aren't they just providing you the hardware to do cloud hosting yourself on prem?

Brian, I know you lurk and post here but i'd love to see those designs make their way to the store so the general public can purchase them.

Yes. The software really wasn't all that great. I played a lot with Sun gear and had SGI stuff as well, the polish of the SGI machines vs the 1980's vibe that the Sun gear gave off was on a completely different level. Sun was quality hardware but the software was really a time capsule of what Unix workstations had looked like in the past.

I still feel like we're catching up to SMF.

But yeah, the lack of package manager hurt a lot, and there were competing third-party package managers which had totally different pro's/con's and packages and were incompatible with each other... what a mess.

Compared to apt/yum it was kinda comical... but the first party software really was excellent otherwise.

Not to mention the horrible installer. At that time, Debian and Red Hat installs were super-easy compared to Solaris. And Sun controlled their own hardware stack too!

Not in 2000, at my employer back then, our Linux server was only good as MP3 storage exposed via Samba/NFS.

All development and production deployments was being done across Solaris, Aix and HP-UX in regards to UNIX flavours.

The linux kernel didn't even gain SMP until 1996. Solaris was running circles around it both before and after that point. Solaris was vastly more mature and stable.

Of course, after that, Solaris just kept running in very expensive circles while linux went on to make steady progress.

it was called "Slow arse". This was because it was rather reluctant in handing out resources (memory fe). Having fought it, I remember the system APIs being really well defined and picky (which was good). At one point, the C compiler had some identity issues "am I 32 bit, or 64 bit?"

Eh, depends when. In 2005, sure. Not so much in the 1990s