I worked for a medical device company for almost 20 years and we standardized on SGI (edit: I was wrong, it was Sun Microsystems, curse my feeble brain!) systems so that we had a stable, non-changing platform. We were regulated by the FDA since our product was classified as a medical device (nurse’s central monitoring stations) and when Sun started to falter it became surprisingly difficult to find another, non-frequently changing hardware platform, and a real pain to qualify off the shelf PC parts for “medical” use.
Good times, good times…
