At the time, Sun was the competitor in the engineering workstation market. Later on, Sun was itself eaten. There were other bit players: DEC, HP. It used to

At the time, Sun was the competitor in the engineering workstation market. Later on, Sun was itself eaten. There were other bit players: DEC, HP. It used to be well-accepted to drop $18K on a baseline engineering workstation + monitor (1995-98, say -- I just checked an old quote for a Sparc Ultra that sat on my desk). It must be said that the graphics and floating-point performance of those systems well outpaced high-end PCs running Linux.