For reference, I purchased a Micron system with a dual Pentium Pro slot W6-Li motherboard (but -- and this is crucial -- only one 180MHz PPro chip), SCSI intern

For reference, I purchased a Micron system with a dual Pentium Pro slot W6-Li motherboard (but -- and this is crucial -- only one 180MHz PPro chip), SCSI internals, 64MB of RAM and a CD writer, for $5200. This was in 1996. If I recall correctly, adding the second PPro 180MHz chip added around $2k to the price. Call it $7-8k all in. The 200MHz PPro had a SPECInt92 value of 366[0]. You can find a list of other SPECInt92 values here[1]. So it was, indeed, faster than many systems, but not the fastest. Value for money? Yeah, it had it. There were x86 versions of SVR4 UNIX available commercially, so it's quite plausible that you could do an apples-to-apples comparison. I'm sure one is out there, but I don't have the time to find one. It's worth noting that in 1994, Eric S. Raymond discontinued his "PC-clone UNIX buyers guide" because he had switched to Linux, and didn't think that UNIX had a future. [2] I think it's still fair to say that the dedicated UNIX workstations had a certain panache that made "real" engineers want them, badly. [0] https://www.hpcwire.com/1995/11/03/200-mhz-intel-pentium-pro-benchmarks-at-366-specint92/ https://www.hpcwire.com/1995/11/03/200-mhz-intel-pentium-pro... [1] http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/new.spec.cint92.col0.html http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/new.spec.cint... [2] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/clone-unix-guide.txt