I watched this happen in a research institution in the early 2000s. Scientists who had been heavy SGI, Sun, or HP customers realized that they could get a lot more bang for their buck with beige-box PCs running Linux (or occasionally FreeBSD). Aside from up-front costs, hardware upgrades and replacements were much cheaper and easier to get for PCs.
The big Unix vendors did not help their reputation when they started selling Windows machines — which all of them except Sun did in that era. It became increasingly clear that commercial Unix for scientific computing no longer had a future.
SGI was able to sputter along while graphics cards caught up. Still large systems had some incredible hardware stuff like interconnections that im afraid got lost to humanity.