The SPARCcenter 2000 had 20 sockets in 1992:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun4d#SPARCcenter_2000

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation

The Cray CS6400 had 64 in 1993:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_CS6400

SunOS 4.1.4 was released in 1994 and SunOS 5.x ("Solaris 2") started in 1992.

The Sparc2k was a beast. I got on in 1998 that (among other tasks) ran the IRC bot for our channel with a 4gb text quotes database to chain off of. ("Shut up, lucy"). It usually ran at a load average of 4 to 12 per CPU. I had just over 1TB of disk array on it; in 4 dozen, full height, 5 inch 23GB SCSI drives.

I sank about $10k into that system in ebay parts. at the time there just wasn't any way to get such bandwidth out of x86, but used gear was cheap. if you could afford the time, sweat and blood to keep it running.

Sun also made some pretty awesome x86 servers. It's sad that so many of the vendors left standing today have such crappy IPMI implementations.

I used to work at a shop that had hundreds of X4100's running x86 Solaris 10. It was a pleasure to work those hosts. Solaris had some really cool stuff like ZFS, dtrace, Zones/Containers, SMF, etc.

And now you read the release notes with dread as you witness more and more functionality being dropped because they choose not to maintain it. Luckily there is FreeBSD

Yeah it’s a shame. If Sun would have made Solaris (both SPARC/x86) free sooner, they might have prevented the mass exodus of companies moving off to save money.

In retrospect, they should have gone down the Sun386I path back in the day, instead of changing gears and spending $$$ building up the SPARC architecture and ecosystem.