[kragen]

Right! Some friends of mine spent a lot of time programming a Symmetry in the early 1990s. Also around the same time, 1988, Sun introduced the Sun386i, which could even run multiple MS-DOS programs at once — but it wasn't a huge success, and they stuck with SPARC. I think Sequent and the Sun386i were just too early, say by about six or seven years.

An interesting question is: what are the structural advantages of bigness? When Control Data produced the world's fastest computer, some people at IBM wondered how it could happen that a much smaller company could beat them to the punch that way; others believed that that smallness was precisely the reason.

[AnimalMuppet]

The advantage of smallness is that you can be faster than the big guys. You also can go into smaller niches.

The advantages of bigness are that you can use scale to make the same thing less expensive, and that you can make at least one mistake without it killing you, and that you can chase more than one "next big things" at once.