It (Solaris) was also the origin of ZFS, if I'm not mistaken.

And DTrace. And NFS/NIS. And SunRPC. And OpenOffice (sort of - they bought the company that made it and then open sourced it). And... you get the idea.

That's what I loved about Sun, really. They strive for a leadership role in the UNIX world by actually leading, instead of just trying to dominate. No company is perfect, but Sun was better than most.

I was sad to see them go, but with Windows NT taking over corporate and Linux taking over networking, they just didn't have a place. They kept pushing "The network is the computer" at a time when PCs were cheap. If only they'd held out until the cloud craze hit...