[mesrik]

>Unfortunately for HP, its workstations (the ones OP acquired) weren't nearly as popular with universities and developers as Sun Microsystems', so you tended to find HP-UX in commercial production—larger servers, more workload, but smaller numbers

Agreed, the university I worked HP systems cost was the major reason Computing Center Sun was purchased, though we had stray discount price purchased units of almost all vendors too.

We did have one HP 3000/MPE running library VTLS quite long time. I can't remember its exact model any more. But was first 160cm heights rack filling old system and then later replaced with some 9000/E35 matching size smallish (a thick and very heavy PC) size smaller 3000 series box. I did not manage that, but helped its sysadmin with his 9-track autoloader issues couple of times. I would have certainly recycled that tape unit to another use, but it was HP-IB (IEEE 488 / GPIB) connected like whole rack filled with disks all daisy-chained were easy to believe not having been cheap. Too bad it was so hard to get GPIB adapter working with other systems. Those terminals used with MPE having local edit buffer were weird, as was HP Roman character set used. All so well built that was a shame to let the go when VTLS was retired about 30 years ago.

Maths department did have better funding to get few HP-UX running long time. Only HP-UX we had at CC was C160 workstation running OpenView NMS, but that's it.

Yes and commercial side (a telco vendor) I did work customer demanded HP and there were very few Sun servers. It was only used if and when software was not at all available for HP-UX. What I recall Ericsson switching systems tended to come with Sun/Solaris and Lucent 5ESS HP/HP-UX that time.

A friend of mine went SF some conference, I don't recall year. But he came back with HP brand sunglasses which HP gave all visiting their booth and told "Remember, not to look at Sun" :D

[jonathaneunice]

There were many early stories about Scott McNealy and his Sun crew going into competitive situations against Apollo, ComputerVision, DEC, HP, Intergraph, Masscomp, SGI, Symbolics, Tektroincs—whoever, really, and there were a lot of whoevers in those days. Competition would argue: "Ours are clearly superior!!" and give a good showing of that. Better networking, display resolution, realtime responsiveness, app performance, rendering speed—whatever metric.

And then Sun would hit back: "Yeah, maybe a smidge better... Not saying it is, but maybe, in an ideal light. On the other hand, with Sun, we cost a lot less. That means you can get 3 or 4 of your engineers empowered with a world-class workstation for every engineer you could with <competitor>." Boom. Those economics were compelling.

It also helped that in those days, Sun workstations became the object of desire for a lot of young developers and engineers, myself included. Sun styled itself into the "it" product.