[vcf-midatlantic] Oracle finally kills off Sun

[Bob Applegate]

> On Sep 11, 2017, at 9:34 PM, Ethan via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic at lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
> 
>> The geek side of me really enjoyed learning/understanding the SPARC back in
>> the day, but unfortunately..  it's gone.
> 
> How many $150,000 servers did the gov't buy that could of been handled by $5000 PC boxes. Although Linux wasn't quite as mature.
> 
> Same fate of Silicon Graphics tho.

Sun was extremely well embedded in other markets that people don’t really know about, but even those markets were slowly moving to PC hardware and Linux once they matured.  I worked in the telco business and our customers (makers of the central office switches) had zero interest in any computing environment that wasn’t from Sun.  We had one customer quite enraged when they saw development on Linux systems in our lab and made it very clear they never wanted the sales department to pitch any products that weren’t available on Sun hardware.

This particular market also had a LOT of money and didn’t quibble about prices as long as they got exactly what they wanted.  Sun also had a very good QA process with lots of traceability which is extremely important for applications that were expected to run for years non-stop.  Sun offered on-site maintenance that could get to any site anywhere in the world on short notice; Oracle is probably still providing that service until all the old switches get powered down.

Bob