A younger person who only knows the comparative merits of Windows, macOS, and Linux in this decade probably cannot imagine the relief felt by people when they were finally able to move their technical applications off unix boxes onto Windows NT workstations. The situation was so bad, the computers cost so much and worked so poorly, a Dell with a Pentium Pro was like a miracle, at the time.
Only some people who were around at that time welcomed Windows NT; others decried the various failings of Microsoft…
I don't have any nostalgia for old machines, I understand the 5- or 6-figure price tags were ridiculous, but I'm curious - in what way did Unix machines back then work poorly?
For the price, these Sun workstations were slow as hell to me. X was horribly laggy. The UI put me off Unix GUIs for a decade. The mouse was meh.
I love the industrial design of these pizza boxes, though. I didn't mind when I was running them headless as IRC servers or web hosts.
There is an irony that Wine is the most stable linux ABI for GUI applications in 2026.
That means nothing when everything it's either RHEL bound, Ubuntu LTS or docker containers among standalone services written in Go which are everywhere.
Serious GUI software will be written in QT5/6 where the jump wasn't as bad as qt4->5. Portability matters and now even more. Software will run in any OS and several times faster than Electron.