Sun Microsystems was once the great hope of the computing world, and technically the JVM was first to normalise the use of VM's, albeit from a containerised perspective. It was Docker before docker, in some sense.

This coupled with Solaris and the SPARC systems that were Java-native (whatever that means) enabled this type of containerisation from a hardware level, which again: was a huge thing.

But, Sun turned for the worse once the JVM hit browsers and server stacks. That's when their SaaS model was envisioned, that was the precursor to the acquisition by Oracle.

So it started nicely, but hit the enshitification velocity somewhere in the early 2000s.