The SparcStations I used in grad school were so much more powerful than anything had access to at work. Sun and the others totally blew it, just like the minicomputer companies had when the Unix workstations arrived.
- People who wanted a Unix workstation could build one cheaply on commodity hardware with Linux
- SGI, HP, Sun, and others didn’t adapt to Linux’s disruption quickly enough. So much fucking about with Itanium.
- NT became good enough such that if you didn’t care whether it was Unix, you could actually use Windows.
- Mac OS X — the only Unix that’s ever managed to be user friendly in the true meaning of the term — ate the rest of the market. (You _could_ build a version of Unix that has a nice GUI and isn’t the Mac, but people are so wedded to X11’s 30 years of misfeatures.)
Unit costs were simply too high. Sparc and mips and PPC couldn’t sell in volume s enough to justify the relentless improvement Intel could. Coupled with Unix style costs. SGI charged me $2500 for its SDK. Sky high prices for motif vs windows
That's the problem right there -- SGI should have given anyone who asked the SDK and a free coffee mug. Apple had a similar attitude (MPW was something like $2500 at one point), and it almost killed them -- CodeWarrior really saved their bacon during the PowerPC transition.
If you really want a modern workstation that's still in the spirit of the old RISC war horses, go buy a Raptor Talos II (or a Raptor Blackbird if you want something smaller). Lots of OS support, generally runs most software you can compile for it, and way more powerful than your Power Mac.
- People who wanted a Unix workstation could build one cheaply on commodity hardware with Linux
- SGI, HP, Sun, and others didn’t adapt to Linux’s disruption quickly enough. So much fucking about with Itanium.
- NT became good enough such that if you didn’t care whether it was Unix, you could actually use Windows.
- Mac OS X — the only Unix that’s ever managed to be user friendly in the true meaning of the term — ate the rest of the market. (You _could_ build a version of Unix that has a nice GUI and isn’t the Mac, but people are so wedded to X11’s 30 years of misfeatures.)
https://system76.com/desktops/thelio-astra-a1-n1/configure