At the hight of the workstation era, where Sun generally ruled the roost. You've got to compare what you got with a workstation vs. a PC class of the era. The

At the hight of the workstation era, where Sun generally ruled the roost. You've got to compare what you got with a workstation vs. a PC class of the era. The PCs of now-a-days are light-years ahead of what PCs were available in the Workstation era, so much beyond that time, that nobody can think back to that time. This comparision kind of smears some time frames together.. So, in the early 90's , Sun was starting to ship 4-way MP, and 8-way MP. In 95, they introduced 64-bit CPUs just as PCs were really starting to use 32-bit computing. Typical speeds were from 50MHz - 400MHz in this time frame. At the high end you could get up to 256MB of RAM. Sun Frame buffers at the time were doing 1920x1080 resolutions. (or slightly higher, but granted, a lot of these high-res were black & white in the earlier time frames). They came with multiple fast/wide SCSI drives, tape drives, etc. They all came with the vendor's unix. System uptime was usually quite good, months to over a year. You did have some vendor lock with what software was available, but generally Sun was top of the heap, every vendor had something available for Sun. Contrast this with PCs at the time. State of the art PCs were 486 running 50MHz-75MHz, with 8MB of RAM. Maybe 32MB if you wanted to get Windows 95 going. Video was VGA at 640x480, again not much need for more until after Win95 launched. Hard drives were IDE, a whopping two if you were lucky. While SCSI existed on PC, it wasn't very common. Linux and *BSD didn't come out until 1992-93 Even then, uptime of DOS systems or PC unix at the earliest time frame could be measured in days. You had to get _just the right_ hardware to make things work together. By the end of the '90s. Workstations hadn't progressed very far. PC's grew by leaps and bounds, catching up and surpassing workstations handily. PCs were actually fairly stable and the PC unix could give you really decent uptime. But in the before the explosion of PCs, if you wanted power or uptime, or graphics, or disk speed, etc. etc. compared to what else was there, Workstations were the way to go.