I have 5 E450s, 20 sparcstations 5s, about as many ultra 5s + 10s and a few of those square older boxes. They all still work and i'm waiting for something. Such a nice machines, especially the E450s were dreamy at the time. I gave a demo where we should a 'cluster of EJBs', indestructible(...) software dev on 2 E450s. It was impressive, but stupidly overpriced... We made nice money but for me that era was about the hardware, after that everything because just 'PCs'.

I got my manager at my first job to buy an E450. I think it was around $40,000.

All of our chip design software ran on Solaris and we needed a new faster machine compared to the 200 and 300MHz Ultra 2 machines we had.

I remember it came on a palette and it was 3 inches off the ground. I wondered how we would get it off the palette. Then we started reading the instructions and it came with 2 wooden ramps that fit into slots on the palette and we just wheeled it down the ramps because the server was on caster wheels. We just rolled it into our server room.

I was 22 and it was just so cool.

(Apologise for the terrible grammar: got excited about SPARC but took somewhat too little time to formulate. I think it's readable anyway but definitely not great!)