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I recall that in about '92 Intel had launched a project called Eclipse which was an x86-based workstation they were developing to compete against Sun. As with many Intel projects, it didn't get anywhere.

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Never heard of that particular product, but in point of fact Sun's original core workstation market had been essentially destroyed by the late 90's by x86 boxes running Windows NT. Intel didn't have the product in the channel in 1992, but by 1996 it was clear SPARC's days were numbered.

Wrecking the workstation market was easy, because workstations had small numbers of CPUs, and small pools of RAM. Intel started fucking up that market in the late 1980s.

x86 wasn't competitive on the server side until K8 (AMD) and Nehalem (Intel).

So you have a real long stretch -- 1987-ish to 2008-ish -- where proprietary UNIX on proprietary architectures owns the server side, even though the workstation market is eroding the whole time.

> x86 wasn't competitive on the server side until K8 (AMD) and Nehalem (Intel).

Google and Amazon launched world-beating datacenters before 2000 on P6's, that's just silly.

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