I remember when I was a senior in undergrad (1993) the profs were quite excited about the price/performance of 486 computers which thoroughly trashed the SPARC-based Sun work stations that we'd transitioned to because Motorola rug-pulled the 68k. Sure we were impressed by the generation of RISC machines that came out around that time like SPARC, PA RISC, POWER PC and such but in retrospect it was not those RISC machines that were fast it was 68k that was dying, but x86 was keeping up.