As someone who was buying hardware in the late 1990s, it is hard to overstate the difference in buying experience between Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell. The former forced you into a live sales meeting, endless quote revisions, it was a nightmare. I remember calculating the server rails and power cords for a new Alpha server were going to cost more than a shipped/delivered Dell server that I could get the next day.
The ultimate value of Sun, Digital, or even SGI was the fact that they were both hardware and operating system software companies. When they went down, it was a big blow to the American computer tech industry.
coreyh14444 · · focus · HN ↗
Danox · · focus · HN ↗