> Everybody hating on the IPX
Most of that is misguided. The IPX was the high volume, low cost, face-for-the-user Solaris box during exactly the moment in the mid 90's where Intel and Microsoft took over and Sun and the Unix vendors lost the plot.
People remember it as a ridiculous $15k joke that was half the speed of the Pentium 100 you ordered out of the back of Computer Shopper.
But when the IPC and IPX were released, SPARC was still ascendant (Intel's flagship was the 486/33!), "PCs" were still running Windows 3.1 (or just DOS), Linux didn't exist yet, and they were the best computers you could get. Well unless you were a graphic nerd and tilted to SGI instead.
I very specifically remember salivating over these boxes, which were legitimate upgrades over the SPARCstation 1/1+/2 machines which were groundbreaking in the late 80's.
I remember the java station 1 as well which was running byte code natively in an IPX-like box. That thing really was so horrendously slow out was basically a paperweight. I had the chance to play with one when it was just new but it was like a joke or something.
Maybe that gave the form factor a bad name because all their good stuff was in pizza boxes.