Now in retrospect some workstation vendors could maybe have survived a little more by switching to x86 PC like hardware except the window for doing the switch was astonishingly small and they would have transformed to either a random OS vendor, or a random PC hardware vendor, or even both
I think this window was non-existent: Moore’s Law at the time was turning white boxes into workstations faster than any time-and-money consuming custom engineering could pay back the investment.
I'm not sure about that, even today. The typical white box PC motherboard then (and now) doesn't support 128gb of memory for example, you have to buy a HP Z400 or a Mac Pro (or an old server). Plus they aren't really designed to be maintained, or have space for dual processors. The Sun/HP/DEC/IBM workstations were not purely bought because they were fast, there was often specific software in mind that the end user wanted.
I have two primary machines I do development on, an Acer gaming laptop (a few years old, intel i7 8750h, 32gb of memory) and a truly ancient HP Proliant server with dual Xeons (x5650 and 96Gb of memory). The Proliant is still consistently faster at compiling an Android app than the laptop, despite the laptop having SSDs and the Proliant being 7 years older. There is a lot more to making a workstation than just raw CPU speed which is as true now as it was in the early 1990s when a Sparcstation was the go-to performance machine to have on your desk.
Same here. The 5yo Lenovo trounces the 2yo top of the line x86 MacBook Pro on pretty much everything. When it was young it easily humiliated every computer in the house.
I think this window was non-existent: Moore’s Law at the time was turning white boxes into workstations faster than any time-and-money consuming custom engineering could pay back the investment.