The HP PA-RISC chip was a huge disruption when it came out. It led to cheap, fast workstations which killed the mini-super vendors (Convex, Stardent, ...). These vendors had already damaged Cray and the other large-scale vendors. And most importantly, the HP chip could run Windows in SoftPC faster than Intel's 486 could run it in hardware. I think it was 1992 or thereabouts, and it was a mess.

Sh*t changes, and perhaps the most interesting lesson out of all that is that software rules and hardware is merely their complementary product.