Always facinated with the SPARC, NeXT, or SGI machines back in the day. Being a kid in the 90s.. always felt like reaching for something that would I would never see let along touch.
Indeed, these were the machines to have for a long time! My first UNIX account was on a SPARCserver 670MP (Grex, if anyone remembers that) and definitely colored my opinion of what a "real computer" was.
My R&D group at headquarters had our own 670MP pedestal, over against the far wall. That group also had one of those SPARCprinters (which offloaded the compute of printing to a very expensive workstation, sorta like Winmodems of the day).
Before that, opposite coast, the company had a larger and older 4/390. Which historically performed all "server" tasks (NFS, email, even quietly a UUCP node). Eventually, 1GB IPI hard drive for it, arriving in a package the size of a person, wouldn't scale fast enough to storage needs, so we started getting multi-drive SCSI chassis, and hanging them off random Sun workstations in cubicles. Unlike the mainframe-like big fridge in the locked machine room. And some flaky Exabyte drives scattered around, each handling multiple workstation-turned-server nightly network backups, which backups would fail more often than they worked.
