What I find fascinating about Sun is how fast its ride was. They launched their MVP in 1982 which was really just a bare 68000 board with a kluged together software suite. The second generation Sun 2's were like a year and a half later, running virtual memory on 4BSD, the 68020 made the Sun 3's in 1985 faster than a VAX, and suddenly Sun was The Premier Unix that everyone targetted.

The next few years (up through 1991 or so) would see the launch of SPARC[1] and all the Unix goodness we all still work on: shared libraries, NFS, RPC, pervasive IPv4 networking, basically everything about the modern datacenter software environment dates from these few years at Sun.

And then, sort of out of nowhere in the mid 90's, Linux distros running on P6 boards had essentially cloned it all on hardware 1/10th the price and the end had begun. Sun would continue to make a lot of money through the doc com boom, but their status as the thought and innovation center of Unix hit a brick wall.

The story of the end was all about Java and Oracle and datacenter markets. And IMHO it's not that interesting. What the hell happened to Unix?

[1] In hindsight it was just a flash in the pan, but the RISC arrival in the Unix world was shocking at the time. Even though in hindsight the workstation vendors had at most a 3-4 year lead on Intel at the peak and would rapidly fall behind.