[vaxman]

No, it was actual bankruptcy (Chapter 11, Holloween 1985..pre IPO). SPARC really hurt DEC. Until that point none of the half-dozen Unix-based platforms could offer enough performance to offset the disadvantage of its architecture and relative lack of standards.

[pfdietz]

Huh. I cannot find any information about that on the net. Sun had positive net revenue in both 1985 and 1986, so this seems very weird.

[vaxman]

Well, bear in mind that as a DECie, I was being fed information by DEC. The story on EasyNet (a social media system for 200,000 workers in DEC's famed "matrix management") was that Reorganization allowed them to finish SPARC and that led to a highly successful IPO but by 1989 they were floundering due to the difficult customer transition process (from 680x0 to SPARC). But also worth noting, in October 1987, the stock market had its first significant "correction" since 1929 which really hurt DEC stock that, at that time, held the same position in portfolios that AAPL does today and it never recovered. The primary beneficiaries of DEC's collapse were the PC manufacturers building Windows NT "servers". SUN survived with DEC's old Engineering/Science/Academia/FinTech customers and eventually found its way back when the Internet took off (only to later be beaten by PC manufacturers allowing LINUX installs).

[icedchai]

I think something is off. Sun IPO'd in 1986. The first SparcStation wasn't released until 1989. I can't find any evidence they ever declared bankruptcy of any sort...

[vaxman]

Yes, the SPARC processor went under development in 1984ish, IPO in 1986, market "correction worst since 1928" in 1987, but SPARCstation 1, the first commercial system with SPARC, was not released until 1989 and SUN drifted sideways because of the difficult transition to RISC (and System V?) from CISC (and BSD4.2) until the Internet taking-off (due to Vincent Cerf releasing async-PPP as Microsoft RAS) generated massive server demand beginning around 1996 (followed by dot-com bubble, crash, nuclear winter, rise of free software particularly LINUX and ultimately death of SUN). Drifting sideways after 1989 on the remains of DEC's high-end business (with DEC's low-end aka "departmental" business going to the PC's running Windows NT "server") was preferable to what happened to virtually every other major computer manufacturer of that era (including IBM --those monsters simply laid off hundreds of thousands of Americans, sold off their PC assets to ChYna and opened massive plants in Bangalore to write code in SUN's Java set-top-box language).

[pinewurst]

The Sun 4/260 workstation and 4/280 server were introduced in 1987. I did a truly trivial port of a complex AI framework to it at that time. The lower priced 4/110 was introduced in early 1988 (I bought one at the huge Sun auction post SS1 introduction).

The first shipping SPARC implementation was Fujitsu’s MB86900 from 1986, which was used at 16.67 (260) and 14Mhz (110).

[icedchai]

Solaris / System V was definitely a difficult transition for them. Early versions of Solaris 2.x were pretty bad. They had to maintain SunOS 4.x well into the 90's. I think it was finally obsolete in 1995 when the new Ultra line wouldn't run it.

[pfdietz]

Yeah, I'm going to call shenanigans on that claim. I think you were fed misinformation. Sun suffered just one quarter of loss until 1999: that was a $20.3 M loss on $431 M in revenue for one quarter in 1989. I suspect the turbulence Sun experienced then was blown wildly out of proportion in the EasyNet echo chamber.

[vaxman]

Possible but DEC wasn't known for that level of BS --I think some of the confusion may have come from the fact that SUN acquired a storage vendor in Colorado during that time that had massive revenues but was drowning in debt and that company did file bankruptcy on Holloween, 1985 --perhaps not because SUN needed a storage vendor in Colorado, but because they got the the cash infusion without the debt. Can't really be sure what the competitive marketing folks were referring to, just be certain that I am accurately recalling the summary of what was on Easynet in those dark years. I am a polaroid head and held the top technical position over thousands of engineers as a teen...for me, the attention to legal/business/politics came later in life.