For the curious:

> It was deeply random. It's very randomness suggested that maybe it was a physics problem: maybe it was alpha particles or cosmic rays. Maybe it was machines close to nuclear power plants. One site experiencing problems was near Fermilab. We actually mapped out failures geographically to see if they correlated to such particle sources. Nope. In desperation, a bright hardware engineer decided to measure the radioactivity of the systems themselves. Bingo! Particles! But from where? Much detailed scanning and it turned out that the packaging of the cache ram chips we were using was noticeably radioactive.

James only has a fraction of the story there. Yes, the alpha emitter (it was radioactive boron) that had contaminated our supplier's SRAM was a serious contributing factor to the (dreaded, infamous, triggering) e-cache parity error on UltraSPARC-II that itself was a major drag on the business. No, it wasn't the only factor (there were many, sadly -- the e-cache parity error represented multiple failures at nearly every level of the system) and no, the e-cache parity error didn't alone change the fundamentals of the business -- but it definitely didn't help!

There are a few details Gosling left out: Sun trusted those chips enough to omit parity or ECC that would have smoked out the problem early, Sun reversed whatever growing trust it had been earning in enterprise space by blaming the customer and for some time making them sign NDAs to work on the problem, and Sun had engineered their sales so that they only did direct for enterprise sized purchases.

They had really good x86 hardware at a time when the post-dot.com crash wave of companies was getting started, but the sales channels were what you could charge on a credit card on their site, and VARs and the like which usually wouldn't sell to startups. Dell got a great deal of that business because they actually wanted to sell, and by the time these companies' hardware fleets got big enough for enterprise sized orders they'd long mastered how to run Dell or whatever systems to provide a reliable service.