As linguae says in his comment, The PC grew in capability during the 1990s until it reached the level of the UNIX workstations around 1995. The big kicker for t

As linguae says in his comment, The PC grew in capability during the 1990s until it reached the level of the UNIX workstations around 1995. The big kicker for the workstations at that time was that the PC of that era was as capable as the workstation but was about a third of the cost. When that happened, the workstation was doomed. In my own case, I found it better and cheaper to use Solaris-x86 on a PC than to use Solaris-SPARC on a SPARCstation. I wasn't the only one. I pensioned off my SPARCstation a few years later and replaced it with a much better PC running Solaris-86 for a year or so, and then replaced the Solaris with Linux which had also improved greatly over the 1990s till that free (as in both cost and liberty) operating system was as good if not better than the commercial UNIXes of the time. Since 2001, I have used Linux exclusively as my everyday operating system. (Because I was using a commercial UNIX during the 1990s when Windows was 'taking over the world', I never ever used Windows as my everyday OS. I consider myself lucky because of that, as I never had to learn Windows and then unlearn Windows.)