Ok, Diogenes.
I watched this happen in a research institution in the early 2000s. Scientists who had been heavy SGI, Sun, or HP customers realized that they could get a lot more bang for their buck with beige-box PCs running Linux (or occasionally FreeBSD). Aside from up-front costs, hardware upgrades and replacements were much cheaper and easier to get for PCs.
The big Unix vendors did not help their reputation when they started selling Windows machines — which all of them except Sun did in that era. It became increasingly clear that commercial Unix for scientific computing no longer had a future.
SGI was able to sputter along while graphics cards caught up. Still large systems had some incredible hardware stuff like interconnections that im afraid got lost to humanity.
Unix was paid (at least for source code), Linux was free and Mac was easy to use. Any questions?
