>That is the thing, these UNIX workstations had a whole stack experience, not what Linux or BSD ever were or are.

Uh, Irix with 4DWM and limited DE's were not as powerful as a FreeBSD workstation with KDE3. Not even close.

People compiled JWM, IceWM and KDE on Irix and Sparc machines because 4DWM and CDE were horrendously limited and slow.

Also, Urxvt ran circles on dterm on cpu/memory usage. Much, much snapppier and faster.