Thank you so much for this thoughtful comment — and for bringing up SGI!

Thank you so much for this thoughtful comment — and for bringing up SGI! You're absolutely right, and I appreciate you pointing it out. The 3D graphics story is a huge piece of the puzzle that I simply couldn't fit into this piece. Sun really did miss that boat, and your anecdote about the engineer getting excited about polygons/second is telling — by the time Sun started taking 3D seriously, SGI had already redefined what a workstation could do.

Honestly, one article can't do justice to why Sun fell so quickly. The era around 2000 saw an explosion of new technologies, each giving rise to a giant in its domain — and Sun found itself outflanked on multiple fronts at once. I'm planning a series of follow-up articles to explore this history in more depth, including the rise (and fall) of SGI, and the broader shift that caught DEC, Wang, and Sun all off guard.

And your closing point really resonates with me. Those companies may not have survived, but the culture they fostered — the creativity, the passion, the belief that engineering was a craft worth loving — shaped a generation of extraordinary people. I feel the same way when I look around today. Something has been lost, even as so much has been gained.

Thanks again for reading and for sharing your memories. Comments like yours are what make writing about this history worthwhile.