Late 90s / early 2000s was when Sun workstations changed from very expensive but well constructed proprietary machines to very expensive PCs with cheap internals and unusual processors. However I still got an ex-university Sun workstation around 2002 for free (or a token price?) which served me well as a desktop machine for years and years. It eventually died of the capacitor plague that (to be fair to Sun) affects just about everything from that era.