Yeah, PCs were cheaper than Unix workstations in 1997, but a Ford Pinto is cheaper than a Ferrari... Linux had serious shortcomings in 1997. It was OK as a web

Yeah, PCs were cheaper than Unix workstations in 1997, but a Ford Pinto is cheaper than a Ferrari... Linux had serious shortcomings in 1997. It was OK as a web server or mail server or for home-grown number crunching software, but the NFS implementation was full of bugs, and none of the industry-specific commercial software had been ported. Windows 95 was really, really bad - it crashed all the time, barely had a functioning network stack and had no multiuser functionality. BMCs and KVMoIP hadn't been invented, so for PC-based servers you needed a keyboard, monitor and set of hands for each rack. SATA hadn't been invented either and with PATA you were limited to two drives per controller, no external drives and it was always a crapshoot whether any particular permutation of drives and mobo would actually work. Expansion slots were ISA or mixed ISA/PCI so you got to have fun with IRQ, DMA and I/O address settings. The mechanical design of PC enclosures was awful to mediocre. Sun mechanical design was a little better (retaining springs, etc) and SGI mechanical design was much better (tool free servicing). ECC and parity RAM were exotic on PCs but ubiquitous on Unix workstations, and the operating system actually did the right thing after a parity error rather than either ignoring it or freezing up. Also, regardless of the raw CPU performance, Suns running SunOS seemed more responsive under heavy load than PCs running Linux. I'm not sure why, and I don't have numbers to back it up, but that's how it seemed at the time. PC BIOS is still worse today than Sun OpenFirmware was in the 90s, but we put up with it because it's good enough and for many applications there's no other reasonable game in town.