Comment by PaulHoule

> Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps.

SPARC was not proprietary, buy fully licensable:

* https://sparc.org

Fujitsu sold their own SPARC servers for many years with their own CPUs, and many third-parties put Fujitsu SPARC CPUs into (e.g.) laptops:

* https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...

Can you get an x86_64 CPU from someone other than Intel or AMD? x86 is much more proprietary than SPARC ever was.

Sun used the non-proprietary Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) for booting (also used by Apple with PowerPC), and SBus (IEEE 1496) for cards before moving to PCI. SCSI and Ethernet/IP were there since forever as well.

The "proprietary" label on Sun, at least when it came to hardware, was always a mystery to me.

Dell puts a fair amount of engineering into their servers (as do other main brands like HPE and Lenovo) so it's unfortunate they've lost their roots from the old mail order sales company.

If someone else is paying I'd prefer one of these big OEMs for established firmware lifecycle, spare parts and long gray market availability, shock (shipping) and thermodynamics engineering. If I'm paying, Asus or MiTAC (Tyan) are good enough.

> Dell's business is incredibly easy to replicate

Your sentence is a tacit admission that you don't have a very deep understanding of logistics and integration and what it has taken for Dell to build the deep supply chain they have. Yes, it's a commodity system; that's the point; but it's still leagues better than a Supermicro, right? Think about the difference there and why people still shell out for a Dell instead of a Supermicro or Exxact or plain whitebox hardware. There's a lot to a solid Dell server that you might not realize, from disk controllers to iDRAC....

> a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps.

this is apple today.

Really? When I first met Sun machines they were selling 68k-based Sun machines that were better specced than Apple and Amiga and such but left them dependent on Motorola’s architecture that had indirect address and thus no future.

Sure they had an in house chip development ARM team right at the time when RISC economics looked good but CPU architecture had to work harder and harder to beat the memory wall and SPARC was not competitive by 2005 and “Hail Mary” projects like CoolThreads were difficult and expensive but did not deliver for customers.

Hypothetically customers could benefit from that proprietary stuff but they benefit even more from rapid progress is competitive, commodity markets.

When I was working at the library circa 2005 we were thinking about replacing all the Windows computers that patrons used to access the online catalog (and other services) with a web browser with Sun Rays, we probably would have bought a few hundred of them and we would have bought some SPARC servers to back them up.

We could have gotten Netscape to run under Solaris but after a week of effort I wasn't able to get Mozilla to build, so no modern web browser. So no Sun Rays. No servers. DTrace and ZFS were great innovations but without the magic of "can run the software you need to run" they are just Blub. Had Sun done the work to get Mozilla running on their machines and forgotten about DTrace and ZFS people might still be using Solaris... but instead DTrace and ZFS found an audience by supporting... the commodity OS!

(arguably at that time supporting a web browser was the #1, #2 and all the way through #99 task that the Solaris team should have been working on at that time and everything else from Java to Tcl to ZFS was a dangerous distraction... and that's how companies in a position like Sun die)