Comment Ahh, the Early 1980s (Score 1) 325
When the first SUN workstation came out (the SUN-1, duhh...) in the early 1980s there was this little computer vendor expo they'd have at a Hyatt on El Camino in Palo Alto (across the street from Ricky's Hyatt) and folk like HP and Tektronix and maybe Onyx and Plexus would have some small booths, all maybe the size of a minivan, and the SUN booth was always jammed with people trying to get a look at that 19" monochrome display running Unix tasks in multiple windows.
I always lusted after one of those and just figured that over time Sun would hold the line on quality and reduce the price and eventually I'd be able to afford one. Instead (and here, without any data) I blame McNealy for essentially sleeping, keeping the price of a desktop Sun too high so that now while there is a multi-billion dollar market of Apple and desktop Linux even Win32, there is no Sun shining there.