True! That was my point exactly, that (for the most part) the old workstations weren't special or magical relative to PC hardware, when you pull old DEC and Sun hardware manuals on Bitsavers or whatever they're chalk full of ink from manual corrections and errata. Old Ethernet NICs are especially bad... :D

This isn't to disparage them, either. GP admits they are romanticizing, I'm just offering my own perspective on it. When I call old stuff "hacked together piles of garbage", it was meant with the loving connotation of someone who's home office has a MicroVAX 3400, Sun 4/75, DEC PWS 433a, and a POWER9 workstation piled in the corner, all on a KVM switch. I love tinkering on these old machines, but I think it's healthy to remember they're not beacons of 80s/90s perfection, but products that were made and sold under time/cost constraints, as you said.

... Though, I will say, the MicroVAX was running from the late 80s until about 2018 in a university environment, and its HDDs still report no errors. That is pretty remarkable ;)