Starting in the mid-1990s you could find amazing deals on SPARC and Alpha “desktop” motherboards. They were both great architectures in many ways, interesting platforms for hacking, and sometimes much faster than Intel boxes of the time for certain workloads.

I think the brief affordability of relatively recent vintage non-Intel hardware was a combination of the sudden growth of Internet 1.0 funding fierce competition between hardware companies (Sun was taking Java to the bank) plus Microsoft and IBM trying hard to get out from under Intel’s desktop hardware monopoly.

I miss those days! It felt like CPU hardware was this amazing frontier that just kept expanding every day. On the other hand, now you can buy a $10 embedded ARM board that’s faster than a high end AlphaStation from the late 1990s, so that’s definitely just 100% pure nostalgia for my misspent youth.

When I got to the Media Lab as a 21 year old grad student in 1996 I had never actually physically seen a Sun or DEC box. Lots of my new colleagues had worked at tech companies between undergrad and grad school, so they sometimes had old workstations and terminals in their apartments. I remember seeing a headless SPARCStation 10 under a coffee table (presumably running running mail, DNS, and Usenet for a few folks) and being blown away. I mean, you could put 512 MB of RAM in that thing.

I remember the Alphas in the computer lab at school. They seemed nice enough but didn't seem that much faster than the Pentium chip in my personal computer and put out a lot of heat. Given the price of them vs. a Pentium 100 with FreeBSD it really was the end of days for the Unix Workstation.

The Pentium was really the Amiga of its time - it was a remarkable technological achievement & the first x86 CPU that could compete with workstation RISC CPUs, which was far from a trivial achievement.

If the 486 was the final nail in the m68k's coffin the pentium's was the same for the high-end RISCs.

It was actually reasonably easy to assemble one yourself. A company I worked for bought a bunch of motherboards with 21164 (EV56) CPU's. I took one home, and was surprised to find at the time it was reasonably easy to get it into an ATX case, install RAM, CPU and Debian on it.

I have fond memories of building Gnome 1.x from sources on it. It felt really fast compared to the Pentium 2 and 3's of the day.