alt Hacker NewsHowever, I did consider it a bit of genius when, toward the bitter end, they pretty much went all-in with the PCI-bus, ATA disks, and all those PC-compatible interfaces replaced the Sun-specific ones which had been so distinctive (and expensive) up until then.
It must've cushioned the blow for orgs that were still investing in new Suns but were able to plug in regular commodity peripherals, at long last.
Sun used common stuff quite early on, well before "the bitter end". They adopted PCI in 1997. Their workstations they moved from SCSI to ATA around the same time, though the servers are still with the SCSI family today. Regardless, mostly you couldn't plug in generic hardware anyway because there are no Solaris drivers for most of it. Honestly, it was never a big deal.