"Described as the "first free software hit" by Salus, the GNU compiler arrived just at the time when Sun Microsystems was unbundling its development tools from its operating system, selling them separately at a higher combined price than the previous bundle, which led many of Sun's users to buy or download GCC instead of the vendor's tools.By 1990, GCC supported thirteen computer architectures, was outperforming several vendor compilers, was shipped by Data General and NeXT with their workstations, and was used by Lotus Development Corporation.