In my other comment I said that around 1997 we put Linux x86 and 21" monitors running at 1800x1440 on all the engineers desks and used them basically as X terminals to the Suns in the closet. Our Sun graphics cards and monitors were 19" (I think) limited to 1152x900 so everyone thought Linux and the monitors was a big upgrade.

We did use graphical programs like waveform viewers and chip layout programs but they were all simple 2D graphics and worked okay via remote X11 with 10 Mbit ethernet. We upgraded to 100 Mbit ethernet and it was virtually the same as running locally.

By 2002 we were running all the software on Linux x86 directly

We did have some Creator 3D cards in the Ultra 2's but it was mostly overkill for what we were doing. Those cards did have an interesting feature for programs hard coded to X11 8-bit 256 PseudoColor. We had an internally written program like that and we would basically run out of colors if you also tried to run a web browser or evern a second copy of the program. The Creator 3D card had one 24-bit display and then 4 separate 8-bit displays combined together. We could run 4 copies of that poorly written internal program before having colormap issues.

I remember running netscape with the -install option to get a private colormap. The screen would basically look like a rainbow except in the netscape window then move the mouse outside and netscape would turn into a rainbow.

On Linux we could use the extra virtual consoles to start multiple X servers so sometimes I had one 16-bit X server running for normal stuff and two 8-bit X servers for that ol d program. Luckily we didn't need to copy paste between all that much if ever.