At the time, "real workstations" were not Intel based and Jobs wanted his machine to be considered such. My employer at the time had excellent Sun contacts - we

At the time, "real workstations" were not Intel based and Jobs wanted his machine to be considered such. My employer at the time had excellent Sun contacts - we were told the SparcsStation effort was strongly driven by rumors of what Jobs was planning. It was quite a letdown for Sun that when NeXT was revealed, it was so technologically blah (don't get me started on Jobs' "mainframe on a chip" == DMA controller) vs the quite amazing SparcStation, which was truly revolutionary in price/performance in its market.