[Gene Eric]

I didn’t have h/w exposure to SUN until the mid-90s cross-compiling on SPARC workstation. Years later, had access to SUN servers, but they were eventually e-wasted due to lack of use. The adoption of XEN hypervisors effectively obsoleted the older server platforms and changed how the compute infrastructure was capitalized. I certainly don’t miss having to resurrect h/w components — knock on wood... lol

[Myrddin]

I did most of the C++ code on a project in 1993 that was hosted on SPARCstation deskside machines. I was invited back to work on the project in 2009. This time to port 4 million lines of code in multiple languages to run in Red Hat Enterprise Linux under VMware. Of course, I had to do penance for the C++ code under the Forte compiler with 3rd party Rogue Wave libraries because 1993 C++ lacked many features. I moved it all to g++ and converted all the Rogue Wave stuff to use g++ standard libraries. The code was a mix of Ada, C, C++, FORTRAN, PL/SQL, Bourne shell and PERL scripts. I later added a web interface to the original X/Motif GUI, so plenty of Java and JavaScript was added to the code base. It was a successful port and the Sun hardware went away. The HP servers hosting VMware RHEL OS were better supported than the Solaris running on the SPARC boxes.