A younger person who only knows the comparative merits of Windows, macOS, and Linux in this decade probably cannot imagine the relief felt by people when they were finally able to move their technical applications off unix boxes onto Windows NT workstations. The situation was so bad, the computers cost so much and worked so poorly, a Dell with a Pentium Pro was like a miracle, at the time.
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?
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.
That means nothing when everything it's either RHEL bound, Ubuntu LTS or docker containers among standalone services written in Go which are everywhere.
Serious GUI software will be written in QT5/6 where the jump wasn't as bad as qt4->5. Portability matters and now even more. Software will run in any OS and several times faster than Electron.
