alt Hacker NewsAround that time I was working as a Solaris admin, C/C++ systems programmer and software packager, our manager gifted us all a SunBlade 1000 in my final year there, although we all used Windows laptops for our day to day work.
I got blank look when I asked "why?". Sure they were snappy, and you could run StarOffice on them, but really there wasn't a lot that they were useful for in our day to day work. Nice machines to be sure, but completely extraneous. I already had a fleet of Sparc build servers running everything from Solaris 2.5.1 through 2.9 which I used to build and package open source stuff for our corp servers. Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere.
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I used a Blade 2000 as my main machine until the early 2010s. Doing UNIX work on Windows back then with cygwin was way more painful than it is nowadays, and the hardware was a lot nicer than x86 desktops (and workstations offering things like ECC would've seen you in the same price range anyway).
Back then with just dual cores running heavily loaded VMs always was annoying, and slowed your main system down noticeably - so I preferred not doing that on my x86 box. My Sun on the other hand had three SunPCI cards I used for Windows development and testing - which had pretty decent performance, still allowed me to have the disk images on my UNIX filesystem, but didn't ruin my native performance.
> Turned out there were just some leftover funds at the end of the financial year in our departments budget and he had to spend it somewhere.
Ah, the beloved "use it or lose it" end-of-year crap. So much needless waste just to keep the beancounters happy.