A lot of this could be said about specialized machines in general. I remember visiting the local university last century where a guy was demonstrating a US-made Word Processor machine they had bought, and around the same time a local company was developing something similar. And they looked very cool indeed. But in both cases I thought.. "eh, won't that be total overkill now when we can see standard word processing software on standard computers already arriving? Even if a normal PC doesn't look that cool?" And, as predicted (and I most certainly couldn't be the only one predicting that), the US company as well as the local one folded. At least the company I worked for got to hire some good people from there when the inevitable happened.

It's hard to find where to draw the line when it comes to specialized hardware, and the line moves forth and back all the time. From personal experience it went from something like "multiple input boards, but handle the real time Very Fast interrupts on the minicomputer". And spend six months shaving off half a millisecond so that it worked (we're in the eighties here). Next step - shift those boards into a dedicated box, let it handle the interrupts and DMA and all that, and just do the data demuxing on the computer. Next step (and I wasn't involved in that): Do all the demuxing in the box, let the computer sit back and just shove all of that to disk. And that's the step which went too far, the box got slow. Next step: Make the box simpler again, do all of the heavy demuxing and assembling on the computer, computers are fast after all..

And so on and so forth.