We&#x27;ve been told that the 1988 Sun 386i was quite successful due to its ability to run MS-DOS, and that the Sun 486i was canceled in 1990 because it was faster than the in-house SPARC equivalents.  But it took some time for Intel machines to be competitive &quot;big iron&quot;, say starting in the 486 days?  Including running a serious UNIX(TM) or Linux.  ADDED: and serious I&#x2F;O, we needed EISA and then PCI and its descendants.<p>So by 1997 Sun and SGI had first mover advantages, but neither being well run companies they squandered them even before counting Intel&#x27;s general excellence in microarchitectures and fabrication.  (Plus wasn&#x27;t SPARC hard to make fast due to an architectural mistake?)<p>One other problem SGI had, their IRIX was a notorious nightmare, which is part of their not being a well run company.  Sun also lost more than a little momentum when they switched from BSD to ATT UNIX(TM), and did brain dead marketing where they boasted their UNIX(TM) was less buggy than Windows NT at a time when that simply wasn&#x27;t true (and if I recall that was at a time they were too often refusing to fix some bugs).<p>A thesis I&#x27;ve just developed here is that the switch to commodity Intel hardware decoupled hardware and software, they helped you avoid getting locked into a single vendor&#x27;s mistakes (and AMD helped when Intel faltered in several ways).  And open source software provided you many mechanisms to get your critical bugs fixed.