SGI computers had value, so people paid $$ for that value that they couldn't get anywhere else. For those people, it wasn't overpriced. Like many companies that

SGI computers had value, so people paid $$ for that value that they couldn't get anywhere else. For those people, it wasn't overpriced. Like many companies that do really well, they eventually squandered that edge. To answer you question... why did people used Suns for several reasons. These reasons are not in any quantitative order. 1. Religion - many people watched people smarter than them achieve success with Sun. Given their growing market size, they had a bigger religion. So whenever somebody tried something different and failed, it reinforced the religion. This lasted for quite some time (til early 2000's). Once the internet hit (1995,1996), just believing in this religion was a successful move. 2. Educational market. Sun gave educational institutions discounts. Students and Professors liked Suns and that created momentum when they left. Remember, even to this day, some people will stick with a system just because they know it better. 3. Sun systems were typically more data center friendly than SGI, HP, PCs, and especially SGI. They had serial consoles with OpenBOOT for lights-out-management - this was huge. They also stacked up nicely and fit into racks easily. If you knew what you were doing, you could do everything remote. 4. Many solutions had Sun picked as their configuration. For example, if you wanted to run Oracle or Veritas, you must buy Sun. It was not uncommon to see Oracle, Veritas, Sun, and Cisco all over the place in any data center in the valley. That was the template. 5. Much lower risk for hardware integration at scale. The hardware was targeted for Unix and scale. You knew that you could put 8 gigs in that Sun. You knew that the EMC RAID was going to work. So, spend the $, and move on to the problem. This was not the case with PCs. Sometimes that Intel motherboard, or hard-drive, or mis-spec'd RAM burned you on PC hardware. This could cost a lot of time and $$. 6. OS Maturity - they had just enough of an edge on the competition here. With a small amount of work, you could have something that could reboot quickly and stay up. The monitoring and tracing tools were much better. With skilled people, you could really make these systems work really well. This was in a time when many kernels had bugs and couldn't stay up for longer than 24-48 hours under normal load. SGI Irix was a great design, but many skilled people still had issues. I remember HPUX requiring weekly patch sets. The internet really exposed how bad these OSs were for server usage. 7. Java - once Java took off, that created a halo effect for Sun hardware. This combination created an enormous wave of $$$ to go to Sun. Sun had its warts for sure, but SGI, HP, DEC, etc all blew it compared to Sun. BTW, I was always more of a NeXT guy (we all had our religions), but I respected and liked Sun solutions. However, once I saw what a Pentium Pro combined with the maturity of FreeBSD (1997), I knew the workstation guys were in serious trouble.