NASA ate all the sparcv8 hardware to keep their shit running, and sparcv9 wasn't built with the durability to survive (capacitor plague)... after that they didn't build enough for there to be a secondary market, really.
8mb of CPU cache with no ECC turns out to be a problem? we'll just use it as mirrored 4mb pools! no problem!
>‘Staggering’ cost of vintage Sun workstations sees OpenSolaris-fork Illumos drop SPARC support
>Dev team doesn’t have necessary hardware, and even if they could afford it eBay is empty