Any old Silicon Valley companies I should consider taking a look at?

I worked for Sun for 10 years. Regardless of what happened, they were without a doubt the BEST company. The culture there was amazing and every employee was paid very well and treated with respect. I still have a hand-written letter from Scott McNealy. RIP Sun. Gone but not forgotten!

Once Redhat appeared and Oracle certified itself on Redhat it killed a lot of Sun accounts. We had an significant investment in Sun hardware and within a year it was all replaced with Redhat on Compaq servers. The saving in yearly licence costs was eye-watering.

What a great video!  Brought back so many memories...

In 1985 my first SUN was a SUN 3/50 workstation with the shoebox 40 MB hard drive, 4 MB of RAM, and a monochrome 19" monitor using SunTools as the windowing system.  It ran like a dream, as crisp and snappy as anything before or since.  Ethernet ran at 1mbps, using fat yellow cables as thick as your thumb.  The cable was marked on 1-meter intervals; if you cut it anywhere except on a mark, you created reflections in the signal that took the network down.  Brave people attached drop cables with vampire clamps to avoid cutting the cable, but that was risky.  The actual connection to the workstation was a separate drop cable with a 19 (?) pin connector with an annoying snap clip that always bent and broke.  

It is difficult to convey how much fun we had and how exciting computing was back then.  Technology has matured and has become boring.  Kids today have no idea how great things were back then.

I'd love to see you do a similar piece on the windowing wars, from SunTools to SunWindows to XWindows and NeWS.

I had a summer job at Sun in 1996, it was an absolute dream, the epitome of cool for a computing student job. Having that on my CV opened so many doors. I miss them.

I’m not a computer geek (I’m an MD). I started using computer in USA in 1983 and grew up with few systems that you mentioned. Now I’m retired and don’t use computer that much. Latter makes me cry as I feel like a dead person, tears flowing, I returned back to india after 42 yrs in USA working and teaching at Medical Universities, I thank you for taking me through the computer memory lane.

We used Sun workstations in our undergraduate lab at the university back in the 90s.   I sometimes feel nostalgic for Solaris.

I worked at Sun from 2006 until the Oracle acquisition. A company who were truly, tremendously good to their employees, with incredible internal resources and staff. But every year after the first was one crisis after another.

Amusingly Sun was, like all other enterprises at the time I joined, a total Blackberry shop. How quickly RIM's empire collapsed after the iPhone was released was interesting to view from that perspective considering how things were going internally.

I have some issue about how 'openness' is discussed in the video. Context is really important here. During the mid to late 1980s, most server companies supplied hardware with their own OS and tools. For example, my experience was with Data General MV series computes. You got AOS/VS, INFOS II, DG COBAL, DG Business Basic, etc. They also had their own terminals that were their own standard. You could find third party hardware but it needed to support the Data General hardware in some way. Basically, you were tied to a closed set of standards. Open systems (as was the term used at the time), was about using open standards rather than vendor specific closed standards. No one, at least at the time, was expecting the software to be open source as it was generally expected to be closed. What it was important that you would have common and agreed standards. Granted there was competition in this area which is why we had the UNIX wars but it's important not to confuse open systems with open source. The arrival of Sun was with open systems, not open source. I do appreciate that some people were interesting in open source at that time but it was a small minority and it was not a thing within the market at that time. Open source was much more of a 90s thing.

Being from Linlithgow Scotland where Sun employed 800 people and had a manufacturing plant, it had a big effect on the town when they closed the manufacturing plant.  There is now a smaller presence at the site with Oracle.

Thanks very much for this. I was a Sun engineering workstation customer, and later worked at Sun until the acquisition by Oracle. The thing that amazed me was, while all you presented here was happening, there was an eerie sense of calm internally. There is a saying by, I think, Euripides that goes, "Whom the gods wish to destroy, they send 40 years of success". Despite the precipitous decline, I saw no sense of concern or panic in my VP peers.

Imagine if xerox had seen the potential of what they had.
Who ever made that decision should be remembered as one of the biggest missed opportunities.

I really enjoyed this. I'd love to see a similar piece on Silicon Graphics.

I miss Sun. I still have a couple SPARCstations sitting in the spare bedroom, a SPARC 20 and an Ultra 5. I haven't powered them up in years, though. I was given the 20 and I bought the Ultra 5 new, way back in the 1990s. They, and the IPC and IPX I used to have, made a nice little home network.

I worked in the Milpitas manufacturing building then the Sparc development group from 97 to 04. It was the best job I ever had and the 90s were a true boom time. Huge Christmas parties, quarterly outings, white water rafting, Napa wine train. And tons of Tshirts!  But boy did that come to an abrupt halt. Fun while it lasted.

Sun workstations with Solaris were marvelous systems and we used them extensively at my place of work.  Their reliability was an asset in those days.  I still remember fondly using the unix base system with Motif GUI.

I was involved in hardware acquisition for a German university and we used to order SUN workstations per default. As soon as PCs had decent network cards, however, the game was over for SUN. Their prices were hopelessly non-competitive compared to what a PC with a network card cost. Similar story for NeXT; interesting hardware and OS at the time but was just too late, i.e., too expensive.

Man, what a walk down memory lane. My first experience with computers was using a terminal to log into a mainframe just to play Star Trek. Sun was always in the background somewhere over the next decades. So many companies have crashed and burned.

A key moment in the development of Linux was when IBM adopted it for use on its computers, sometime around the year 2000. It was a brilliant move by IBM, which then had a much bigger reputation than today. IBM's stamp of approval made a lot of people more willing to consider Linux, and strengthening Linux helped to undermine both Sun and Microsoft.

In their hay day they were the best. We used to joke that the NT in Windows NT stood for Nice Try. I had always loved sun servers and I always wanted to get my hands on the bigger ones. In 2005 I was on the team that did the largest install of Sun servers in Europe at commerzbank in Frankfurt Germany. I thought I had died and gone to heaven, lol.  such a Great Project