premise: 
  Sun Microsystems Inc., snapping back to profitability after its first quarterly loss as a public firm, said it earned $5.2 million, or seven cents a share, in the fiscal first quarter.
  Sun, a maker of computer workstations, reported sales of $538.5 million for the quarter ended Sept. 29, up 39% from $388.5 million a year earlier. In the 1988 period, the company earned $20.6 million, or 26 cents a share.
  Sun's results were slightly better than expectations. Earlier this month, the company said it expected to break even for the quarter on sales of $530 million.
  In a statement, Scott McNealy, Sun's chief executive officer, said the company's performance was hampered by problems tied to the introduction of a major new family of computers in April. One of those new computers, called Sparcstation 1, accounted for nearly half of the 28,000 systems Sun shipped in the quarter, he said. More than two-thirds of the systems shipped, meanwhile, were products introduced in April.
   What caused the company's performance to be hampered?
hypothesis: problems tied to the introduction of a major new family of computers