Re:Why HP Fell
by tptacek on Monday August 20, 2018 @04:45PM
(#17803793)
In the 90's and 2000s, Sun machines might have been a kind of default for deploying new software, but they certainly weren't the default for developing it. By 1998, you'd be getting a much better machine from Intel than you could get even in the same ballpark cost as from Sun. If you did work on a Sun workstation, you probably did it grudgingly (except that they had a really good C++ compiler for the time).
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The companies I worked with primarily developed on the systems customers used. You really want to see the issues on your tier1 platform as you develop. Linux was not tier1 at that time.
This meant that code written on Sun that performed well performed poorly on HP-UX occasionally -- not because HP-UX was a worse platform, but because corner cases in architecture could bite you. On your tier1 development platform you tend to weed those issues out early.