It was also a messy time where software did make a lot of difference to your experience of performance. I had a few of these apples to oranges comparisons that

It was also a messy time where software did make a lot of difference to your experience of performance. I had a few of these apples to oranges comparisons that frustrated me, as someone who absorbed the 90s counter-culture message that MS and Intel were monopolistic and needed to be displaced. In the mid 90s, I got myself a DEC Multia (small Alpha-based workstation) to run Linux. It was fast at some things, but useless to browse the newly emerging web. Netscape Navigator wasn't available as an Alpha binary, and the emulated x86 was just as slow as an early Python based browser. Running Netscape on a 486DX3-100 was night and day like visiting the future. Some other native programs went the other way, with the Alpha beating the 486 dearly. But the web browser became more and more significant. In college, I was also told I should covet Sun hardware. At my first job, I got issued a Sun Ultra workstation of some sort. I was appalled at how slow it was for my FOSS C programming workflows with autoconf/make/gcc etc. I started bringing in a Dell notebook with a Pentium-MMX running Linux, and it ran circles around the Ultra for actual day to day tasks. On the other hand, when I had to run certain commercial tools like Purify, the Sun was useful again. I also had exposure to supercomputer centers at the time, doing portability work for our HPC codebase. It was often crazy how slow these platforms were for development work. There may have been a little bit of neglect by the vendors or IT groups in terms of what hardware they dedicated as front-end service nodes on these big machines. But, there were also dramatic differneces in the operating system behavior, tuned to get one user-level job running and get out of the way. They were terrible at multitasking, and this showed through in CLI/scripted interactivity too. Sometimes, I wonder if some of those platforms could have survived if they jumped on the Linux bandwagon and kept developing their hardware. But maybe their fate was sealed because they depended on the bundling of their proprietary OS and hardware, neither of which was able to adapt to the new order...