Nice but he states that people were making bridges and buildings with Solaris workstations in 1981. Sun did not exist until 1982 and wasn't a factor in the UNIX world until 1987 or so when they teamed up with AT&T. The first Sun workstations I remember from grad school days at Ga. Tech appeared about 1986.
He meant that Digital VAXen were the gold standard for engineering development, because they were relatively cheap and had excellent development tools that engineers could grok.