This year sees the 25th anniversary of the SPARC processor and there's a fair amount of fan fair about it. To commemorate the occasion, Oracle has released two great infographics:

Celebrate 25 Years of SPARC Innovation (partial infographic)   Solaris 20th Anniversary (partial infographic)
25 Years of SPARC Innovation & 20 Years of Solaris Innovation
(click images to view full original - backup imgs here and here)

I think the SPARC infographic in particular highlights several of the places where Sun Microsystems was years ahead of the curve. For example, coining the phrase "The network is the computer" way back in 1984, introducing multi-threading in 1992-1993 and introducing a 64-bit CPU in 1994-1995. The rest of the industry weren't even in the same ballpark at the time and have only just caught up.

The Solaris infographic seems like a bit of an after-thought and seems to only show the features Oracle are promoting. I can think of many other innovations that first appeared in Solaris before being copied by implemented in other operating systems that aren't in the infographic. Oh and OpenSolaris hasn't got a mention either.

It's such a shame Sun couldn't capitalize on this foresight more. Had they done so, I'd probably still be working for Sun Microsystems :-(