[johndoe0815]

I would have loved to see an alternative future in which the open SPARC architecture (you can still get a license to build your own SPARC chips at sparc.org) kickstarted a similar development as the IBM PC did (unintentionally) a decade earlier.

Ideally this would have coincided with a Sun/Apple/NeXT merger so we would all use OpenSTEP for Solaris on open SPARC systems today :).

Well, we got something similar with the ARM Macs - though not really open for other manufacturers (at least you can install other OSes on the ARM Macs). The ARM Macs could be considered the last remaining Unix workstations - though Apple unfortunately tries really hard to hide more and more of macOS' Unix roots.

[morcheeba]

SPARC is still alive, thanks to its open licensing & established toolchain, for the niche rad-hard space market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEON#LEON3FT_processor_core

Although the company is moving to RISC-V for future processors.