Again though, after 1995-ish Sun just stopped "doing Unix", abandoned the community they created (who all trotted off happily to Red Hat et. al.), failed in their core workstation market, and basically spent their time milking server sales to conservative[1] IT departments who wanted to do "internet".
Their swan song ended up being Java, an interesting (but again poorly exploited) technology that had next to nothing to do with the environment on which it was incubated. Frankly Sun ran away from it so hard that Java ended up running best (!) on Microsoft Windows.
So basically it was 13 years, as I see it, from kids-with-soldering-irons-and-a-dream to world-changing-behemoth to company-your-grandparents-buy-from. That's fast even in Silicon Valley.
[1] The cool kids, obviously, were all running Linux in their datacenters already. Only the S&P 500 dinosaurs were buying Sparcservers, but there were a lot of dinosaurs.
Sun greatly revitalized "Unix" in the 00s! Need I refer you to Bryan Cantrill's screed about how OS research was not boring? The list of features that shipped in the 00s is amazing:
- DTrace
- FMA/FMD
- SMF
- ZFS
- the unified process model
- NFSv4
- CIFS
- and more
and this was while being hamstrung by a crappy SVR4 networking architecture that the networking team was able to kill off (thank goodness).
Some of these are things not yet re-invented elsewhere, others re-invented poorly:
- systemd is a bad SMF
- SystemTap is a bad DTrace
- eBPF is pretty cool but in
some key ways not as good as
DTrace
- ZFS remains unparalleled
Yeah, this turns into senseless flaming very quickly. But to be blunt, the fact that puts the lie to your point that all those technologies are "revitalizing" or whatever is that basically no one uses them[1]. They're interesting ways to win an argument on the internet (with which I won't engage), but not evidence that you're doing something actually important.
[1] Obviously people use them! But not at scale and not in such a way that it provides meaningful advantage over the people who don't use them. Again, they're fun things to argue about but not transformative in the way that early SunOS was.
The fact that they've been copied is telling enough: others needed things like those. Either Sun was too early with some of these or Sun couldn't capitalize on them, or both. Sun definitely was too early with certain things like cloud (the Sun Grid). Was SunOS 4 as transformative as BSD?
Again, 100% not going to engage on another senseless ZFS/dtrace/whatever platform flame. But this point is worth responding to:
> Was SunOS 4 as transformative as BSD?
SunOS was BSD! 3BSD was absolutely transformative. But 4BSD launched after Joy and much of the team were already working at Sun, and almost all future "BSD" innovations of note were actually SunOS features.
Sun took a historically important but otherwise obscure academic platform (total VAX BSD deployments as of 1982 were what, in the dozens?) and turned it into an industry-defining software environment that we still use today (albeit in cloned form).
