Years from now when you gather your grandchildren around your knee and they ask you what you did in the great computer wars you can tell them you were there the day the world turned topsy-turvy.

IBM, Sun's hereditary enemy, is going to sell Solaris x86 on its industry standard X servers and its BladeCenter machines and pay Sun for the privilege.

They said so at a surprise conference call Thursday afternoon with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and IBM senior VP Bill Zeitler, head of IBM's Systems & Technology Group.

Zeitler said the deal, creating Sun's first Tier One OEM, was based on "normal commercial terms."

He also foresaw Solaris on IBM mainframes and perhaps eventually a "stronger, cooperative set of offerings" from the two companies. Maybe even Solaris on IBM's precious Power-based systems, the boxes that run AIX, IBM's competitor to Solaris.

"Pragmatically," Zeitler said, "there are a lot of customers that love Solaris and are loyal to it."

A deal with IBM is something Sun has been angling for for a while now, but darned if it's clear how it's not going to hurt sales of Sun's own machines.

Sales of Sun's x86 machines have stalled lately after a good growth spurt.

Schwartz called it a "the first of an expanded relationship between Sun and IBM" and a "teutonic shift in the market landscape."

Perhaps he's thinking ahead to the earth opening up along the San Andreas Fault and Sun getting swallowed up by IBM. Goodness knows, Schwartz's predecessor Scott McNealy tried often enough to get Lou Gerstner to buy Sun. He just couldn't get top dollar back then before Sun burst along with the dot.com bubble. (If we remember correctly Scooter wanted $125 and Gerstner was only wiling to pay $75. Boy, those were the days.)

Anyway, Schwartz claims IBM selling Solaris means "access to growth and opportunity" for Sun. Sun will get service revenues. IBM will sell premium support.

IBM currently sells the machines with Windows and Linux and adding Solaris will tick off the Linux crowd.

HP, which is running neck-and-neck with IBM in servers at 29% of the worldwide market, is supposed to be scared of the new axis. HP supports Solaris on its ProLiants but doesn't have a deal with Sun and can't sell service subscriptions or offer patches.

Sun and IBM are now supposed to optimize Solaris for the IBM machines. And IBM is supposed to continue investing in AIX. We'll see.

The specific boxes Solaris is going on are the System x3650, x3755 and x3850 and the BladeCenter HS21 and LS41. IBM already supported Solaris on some BladeCenters - but nothing like this.

It'll take them 90 days to optimize the boxes.