The First name brand computer I ever purchased was a used Sun Microsystems IPX ( What they use to call a “lunchbox” because of its size ).
I was enrolled in computer education school at the time and taking Certification classes in MS-Windows, Novell, Sun Solaris, and UNIX Flavors. Living In Silicon Valley there where lots of computer stores and lots of places to purchase used computers.
My friends showed me this shop that was refurbishing Sun Microsystems computers for resale.
I purchased this IPX which was one of the least expensive Sun computers they had for about $300
I ended maxing it out with Dual frame buffers ( video cards ).
64mb ram
2gb SCSI hard drive.
Network card
I think it had a 40mhz CPU but this thing was really slow because it used slow ram.
At the time about 1994 we where taking classes in UNIX flavors and Sun Solaris.
I just fell in love with the stuff. The workstations where of higher quality than Windows PC’s
And UNIX was the Operating System that ran Silicon Valley.
Just about everyone was using some flavor UNIX and UNIX companies dominated Silicon Valley.
With SGI, HP, Sun Microsystems, Next, IBM, etc.
Even Microsoft was using UNIX computers as there Backbone webservers and database servers. ( 🤣, it’s true and it was funny to see ).
I think even today they use Linux and Oracle database servers.
Any company who was anyone was running UNIX as the backbone of there websites and portals and webservers, email, database clusters, etc.
The UNIX computers where built to run 24/7/365 days a year and did not need much maintenance.
Yes, they where very expensive to be a common home computer for the time. But they where a necessity for a BIG company.
Today, A good UNIX based home computer would be an Apple Mac running OSX.
As you can see even today UNIX computers are just higher quality builds.
I think you can still download Solaris x86 from Oracle who purchased Sun Microsystems.
And Yes, We played Quake on our Sun Microsystems computers. We would play against the MS-Windows PC users.