The 90's desktop market was more interesting. Yet, you must have never met anyone doing applications that require fast CPU's and plenty RAM.
Plenty of RAM? Yes, but on supercomputers. My machines were sgi Origin 2000's and 3800's running a single compute intensive application doing finite element analysis and using 16 GB of RAM, across all the CPU's in the system. A single calculation would usually take a month.
On the desktop, you couldn't be more wrong: I was part of the cracking / demo scene, and we literally counted clock cycles in order to squeeze every last bit of performance in our assembler code, me included.
Im jealous thag you got to play with SGI Origins. I wanted one of them or an Onyx2 but cost too damn much. At this point, though, you're partly supporting my claim: certain workloads necessitate either a desktop, a server, or a bunch of them. These include artists, scientists, designers of various equipment, gamers, well-off laypersons wanting instant response time, privacy nuts needing cores for VM-based browsing, and so on. Not relegated only to "computer people" as you falsely claimed.
One can also look at the numbers. Last year, over 17 million PC's were sold in US. Think the buyers were really all computer people? Even with 3 year refresh cycle, low end, that be estimate of around 50 million computer people in this country that's been buying desktops over 3 years. Think they're really that big a demographic?
Well, I'd argue that all those people you listed are either professionals in diverse fields, or enthusiasts. If you take 17 million PC's sold, just in the United States, that's 17 / 300 * 100 = 5.66% of the population. And I was conservative in using 300 million as the total U.S. population, when I've read it's more like 321 million, so what does that tell you?
But if you look at the number of PC's sold year over year, the number is dwindling at the rate of roughly 15% - 18% per year. Look, for example, under the "Global Computer Sales" column, here:
the average laypeople don't want computers any more, and the sales reflect that. For their needs a tablet or a mobile telephone with a web browser is pretty much all they need, and the web can and does now deliver pretty much any kind of application they could ever need or want. And that's precisely where most of the sales of desktops were. Professionals using computer aided design and people like you and me are few and far in between, in comparison.
On an sgi related note, I myself owned several Octanes and even an sgi Challenge R10000 (with a corresponding electricity bill). I must have torn and rebuilt that Challenge four or five times, just for fun. My primary workstation for years (which I fixed and put together myself) was an sgi Indigo2 R10000, with an hp ScanJet II SCSI scanner, a 21" SONY Trinitron, and a Plextor CD-RW SCSI drive, back in the day when CD-RW was "the thing". With 256 MB of RAM when most PC's had something like 16 or 32 MB, it was a sweet setup. Ah, IRIX 6.5, how much I miss thee...
Plenty of RAM? Yes, but on supercomputers. My machines were sgi Origin 2000's and 3800's running a single compute intensive application doing finite element analysis and using 16 GB of RAM, across all the CPU's in the system. A single calculation would usually take a month.
On the desktop, you couldn't be more wrong: I was part of the cracking / demo scene, and we literally counted clock cycles in order to squeeze every last bit of performance in our assembler code, me included.