Your larger point is well made, but a nitpick: between the NeXT workstation (the early 90's) and cheap COTS server hardware (the late 00s) was the era of big he

Your larger point is well made, but a nitpick: between the NeXT workstation (the early 90's) and cheap COTS server hardware (the late 00s) was the era of big heavy servers, not workstations. Sun made some really amazing server hardware and we should not forget the abomination that was the Dell Blade server!