One thing missing from the comparison to IBM and Sun is that precisely because those companies made things so expensive people started looking for alternatives.

The ES/9000's were really good machines for the time. Had IBM not raped people on those, companies might have stuck with them for a little longer. The AS/400 was priced more reasonably and people loved those. You couldn't get someone with an AS/400 to move to a Unix workstation if you used a nuclear bomb.

As for Sun in 2001, the problem was that they were so absurdly overpriced and underpowered that commodity x86 simply blew it away. If I didn't have direct knowledge of the dysfunction that was Sun at the time, you would have thought they were taking kickbacks from Oracle, Cadence, Synopsys, etc. to limit performance. (Explanation: Oracle, Cadence, Synopsys, etc. all had very expensive software packages that were licensed per processor core per year and effectively only ran on Sparc. So, the lower the performance of the processor, the more cores you needed and the more expensive your license to Oracle, et al.)

I own two SPARC servers (a 2003ish V245 and a 2007 T5120) and both are rather ridiculous ... idle power draw for a V245 is like 240 W and just 150-180 W of that are the fans. [1] A T5120 draws some 180 W idle as well. Especially the latter was also heavily marketed as green computing / efficient data centres / throughput computing. Completely ridiculous offering at the time.

Needless to say, I didn't even bother to set these up lest build a rack for them (my normal rack is both full and too short). If packaging weren't so annoying with computer servers I would've sold them long ago.

[1] The good stuff. High static pressure, high flow fans from Delta with ball-bearings, and of course only speed monitoring, no regulation. These Sun servers make for excellent magnet boards for holding papers just without using any magnets.

Even the IBM machines were flagging in performance in 1990. That was the beginning of the RISC revolution, and all the benchmark records were being taken by MIPS (and later Alpha) boxes. It was a slower process than the Intel takeover[1] only because ECL logic was still available to expensive machines, allowing clock rates in the mainframe world to stay higher than CMOS chips even as their architectures got eclipsed.

[1] Ironically on the back of a "CISC" architecture. What happened there was that CMOS density had gotten so high that the relative advantage of a RISC ISA (not architecture: every thing form the P6 onward looks like a pipelined RISC box on the inside) was just a pipeline stage or two and a 1% hit in the transistor budget for decode.

> You couldn't get someone with an AS/400 to move to a Unix workstation if you used a nuclear bomb.

Still can’t. The new bottom end model (iSeries) is cheaper (sub 10k) and will last for another 10 years until a new one is needed. The place I work is buying a new one because it is hitting the end of support (damn thing was bought before 2008). No problems that lasted more than a couple of hours in all that time.

Interesting, seems like IBM still has a couple of competent departments surviving the rampant idiocy.

If you don't mind my asking, what tasks do your folks have the AS/400 doing nowadays?

Accounting and HR.

Using 'rape' like that isn't cool.

"raped" is not an appropriate word to use in the context of this discussion. Please try to be more considerate.

"I bought an IBM/Sun server and the salesman ripped my face off". Should adequately describe server pricing strategies.

Another example missing in the article was the graphics workstations with SGI.

I remember considering spending lots of student-budget money in 1993 for an SGI Indy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy), a low-end graphics workstation from SGI. I think this was shortly before peak-SGI.

I'm glad I didn't, because (a) PCs started to see impressive graphics performance improvements not so longer after; (b) I went to industry and ended up working in enterprise software instead.

SGI market cap peaked in 1995, here's a HN discussion of a 1997 article of SGI's "Sad Saga": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8462841 . They shifted focus to scientific/enterprise compute and storage after and dwindled away.

Exactly, and for pretty much the same reason. Once CMOS prices got to the point where 3D graphics acceleration (not SGI's only core competency, but pretty close revenue-wise) was desired at consumer volume, they were toast. NVIDIA had they beat on almost everything that mattered by 1998 or so.

I remember when my scientician friends started switching from SGI to multiple super-beefed-up Dells in the early 2000's. They could get five monster custom Dell machines for the price of one Octane or Indigo or whatever. And they delivered better performance. (Or so they told me.)

There was about two or 3 generations of either PC hardware or software (Windows) not being able to handle what SGI hardware could, no matter what the price.

Don't forget the nail in the coffin: the windows nt-based SGI workstation...