I remember playing with SGIs as an undergrad and they seemed so "sexy" (from the case, to the window manager, to the demos).
In grad school we had a mix of machines. My professor bought the cheapest Indy's you could buy (minimal RAM and CPU), basically for the OpenGL performance. But next door another group ran a computer graphics lab and they had a bunch of high end SGIs (including an Onyx with InfiniteReality, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InfiniteReality which was quite impressive for its day), as well as DEC Alphas running TruCluster. All these machines were maxxed out on hardware (huge RAM, max cores, large storage) and represented the best of what you could do with UNIX at the time. No Suns, though- the group had a terrible time with NIS and never touched Solaris again.
My wimpy laptop- a 486/100MHz could just barely run OpenGL (in software).
When I finally got budget I spent $15K on 6 PCs to build my first cluster (1997-98). Everybody sort of laughed at the time (compared to their machines, my floating point wasn't so great) but it wasn't too long before nobody was buying "Real UNIX" machines any more.
NeXTSTEP, Solaris and Irix are my all time favourites in UNIX world, as they all tried to be something more than plain old UNIX + X Windows/CDE, there was a kind of soul to the whole experience.
Hence why I don't get those that try to replay the experience of using plain phosphor termimals + CLI, then why bother. I was there when they were new and don't miss the experience.
I did have some dependence, but it passes and I am glad to have that perspective which can come from using distinctive computers.