alt Hacker NewsI think Sun was trying to be more friendly for customers who needed to run a little PC software in addition to real workstation software.
Incidentally, we were a Sun ISV and customer out in the Silicon Forest, where Sequent was located (and Intel, Tektronix...). I initially learned C++ and Smalltalk from an adjunct professor from Sequent. Also where Cray Research Superservers (nee FPS) was, who developed a multiprocessing SPARC system before Sun. Which is how, as a teen, I got sent by a marketing guy to onsite at Cray, to "port" some of our software to the Cray S-MP. It was a nice time and place, with a little like a mini version of being in Silicon Valley, but with more rain.
yup - the job interview I was talking about was for EasyStreet, one of the big local IPSs in the Portland area. we were located in beaverton off of Allen.
I also spent a lot of time in the old sequent campus, at the OSDL, and a bunch of time at OGI before it got subsumed.
I still remember the day when Microsoft visited the office, saw I had a Microsoft keyboard connected to my sparc, and asked if I ran internet explorer (they had a solaris version). I laughed and said, "no, I only have 96mb of ram, you can't run internet explorer in only 96mb of ram".