MIPS dying is really the end of an era. I think it was the quintessential RISC processor of the early 90's. IIRC, Windows NT was developed on a MIPS machine to ensure that inadvertent x86 dependencies did not sneak into the code.

I remember reading a PCWorld article comparing various processors. This was the time the Pentium came out. If my memory servers, the MIPS won the overall performance crown vs Pentium, PowerPC, and Alpha AXP.