Comment by notacoward

> In an environment ... they were among the best-behaved

I wouldn't say McNealy was that different than any of those, though others like Joy and Bechtolsheim had a more salutary influence. To the extent that there was any overall difference, it seemed small. Working on protocol interop with DEC products and Sun products was no different at all. Sun went less-commodity with SPARC and SBus, they got in bed with AT&T to make their version of UNIX seem more standard than competitors' even though it was more "unique" in many ways, there were the licensing games, etc. Better than Oracle, yeah, but I wouldn't go too much further than that.