Comment by ajross

This was a Swan Song machine. It was instantaneously great but part of a dinosaur architecture with no future. It was released in 1997, just as the modern massively parallel datacenter paradigm was launching. By the time Web 2.0 was firing up on AWS, this kind of thing seemed ridiculous. And the world hasn't looked back, really.

It's sort of a recapitulation of the mid-80's, when the last waves of ECL mainframes (c.f. VAX 9000) launched with jaw dropping performance numbers and price tags, just to be buried beneath the flood of cheap CMOS workstations within the decade.