Comment by throw0101a
3 hours ago
> 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:
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.
It wasn't just the chip, it was the whole ecosystem.
Could an every day consumer buy a Sparc motherboard, chip, and build their own system? No. There may have been one or two vendors that did that late in the 90's, but they didn't stick around.
It's the platform that's proprietary.
Sun used a lot of open parts, but they had absolute control over the platform. Everything in your solution came from Sun or a Sun partner. Fujitsu doing weird stuff with Japanese mainframes was an interesting fact but irrelevant to 99% of Sun's user base.
Intel/AMD combined with EFI or IBM-compatible BIOS? You can get that from anybody. An HP server is basically interchangeable with a Dell.
Sun was proprietary in the same way Apple is.