It was an incredible time because workstations were 10x faster than PCs with applications built very much to use specific hardware. I didn't have Photoshop on IRIX but I did have Matador and the legendary 3D stuff such as Softimage.

These dinosaur computers were the last ones that impressed mere mortals, just the box and the Trinitron screen with the SGI logo on it made people think they were in the future.

We know how that ended with Fahrenheit and other problems, but since then, very few computers have had that wow factor.

As for office, we mean MS Word and Excel, which worked brilliantly on Windows, with WordPerfect and the like lagging. For me it was no problem not having Word and Excel on IRIX as we had PCs for those things.

If I remember rightly, it was quicker to access files off the IRIX workstation SCSI disk over NFS than it was to access local files on the PC. Everything was 10x.

For Sun workstations there were the great SunPCI cards - a full x86 computer in the form of a PCI-X card. You had some USB and a VGA port if you wanted to hook up an external display, but more often you'd use the video redirection and have it displayed in a window on your desktop.

No connectors for disk drives - it'd emulate an IDE disk from file in your Solaris filesystem. So pretty much the VM experience, just in not bad.

VMWare was around since the late 90s - but at that time you typically had a computer with a single thread. If you were splurging, a system with two CPUs (two threads). Even a moderately load intensive VM would make working on the host system annoying.

Due to power and thermal constraints the hardware on there wasn't the fastest - but it was fast enough, and due to the absence of resource sharing (apart from disk bandwidth, which wasn't an issue) the overall experience was way better than using VMs.

I still have my final workstation around - a dual CPU Blade 2500 with 2 SunPCI 3 cards.

That window of time was very short: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XQRVL11sDY0