Comment by bcantrill
9 hours ago
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.
Agreed. When I was in the labs (2007 - 2010), my workstation was an AMD with Solaris on it, with a modern window manager and all, with IntelliJ and a great development environment. I almost didn't know it was Linux. But by then the ship had long sailed.