[chihuahua]

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?

[foobiekr]

Windows on a 80486 vs. those boxes felt very much like if you were to compare the latest M5 Macs to, say, a ppc 604 Mac.

No comparison at all. Just every single interactive aspect of them was worse in every possible way and that includes I/O performance. At the time, in that era, people would babble about how much faster SCSI was, but the disks sitting in PCs were blazing fast in practice despite being attached by glorified joystick ports.

[qingcharles]

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.

[nineteen999]

They were kind of fast and more fun by the time you got to the Sunblade 1500 running Gnome desktop.

But yeah, complete white elephants at that point. Too little too late.